A while ago I com­mit­ted the lin­ux­u­la­tor D-Trace probes I talked about ear­lier. I waited a lit­tle bit for this announce­ment to make sure I have not bro­ken any­thing. Nobody com­plained so far, so I assume noth­ing obvi­ously bad crept in.

The >500 probes I com­mit­ted do not cover the entire lin­ux­u­la­tor, but are a good start. Adding new ones is straight for­ward, if some­one is inter­ested in a junior–ker­nel–hacker task, this would be one. Just ask me (or ask on emu­la­tion@), and I can guide you through it.

Seems I for­got to announce that the linux_base-c6 is in the Ports Col­lec­tion now. Well, it is not a replace­ment for the cur­rent default linux base, the lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports are miss­ing and we need to check if the ker­nel sup­ports enough of 2.6.18 that noth­ing breaks.

TODO:

• check for updated RPMs for linux_base-c6
• cre­ate lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports
• improve the ker­nel to sup­port more of linux 2.6.18

To my knowl­edge, nobody is work­ing on any­thing of this. Any­one is wel­come to have a look and pro­vide patches.

In case you have not noticed yet, KDTRACE_HOOKS is now in the GENERIC ker­nel in FreeBSD-cur­rent. This means you just need to load the DTrace mod­ules and can use DTrace with the GENERIC ker­nel.

In case you do not know what you can do with DTrace, take the time to have a look at the DTrace blog. It is worth any minute you invest read­ing it.

I just updated to a recent -cur­rent and tried the new nullfs. Sock­ets (e.g. the MySQL one) work now with nullfs. No need to have e.g. jails on the same FS and hardlink the socket to not need to use TCP in MySQL (or an IP at all for the jail).

Great work!

I merged the v4l trans­la­tion layer into the lin­ux­u­la­tor of 8-stable. As in -cur­rent, this just means that linux apps (like Skype) can now use FreeBSD native devices which con­form to the v4l ABI. The port mul­ti­me­dia/webcamd pro­vides access to some web­cams (or DVB hard­ware) via the v4l ABI.

Peo­ple which want to test the lin­ux­u­la­tor part should first make sure a native FreeBSD appli­ca­tion has no prob­lem access­ing the device.