Yes, that is ambiguously phrased for fun. Matthew Dillon committed some benchmarks inside rdrand() code to show the actual performance improvements.
Excessive rdrand harvesting on DragonFly
This recent commit changes how random number provision is seeded on DragonFly. It sounds interesting, but I don’t know if the performance improvement translates to real-world activity.
Lazy Reading for 2020/02/23
Still backlogged, which means one of these weekends I’ll catch up and you’ll have about a zillion links to click.
- vt100.net. (via vttest)
- Another post on open source civility.
- How thick is an hour?
- Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?
- ENIAC, 74 years old and printable in 3D. Yes, the whole room. (via)
- MIDI 2.0, 37 years after the 1.0 release. (via)
- Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers. (via)
- Age of Invention: Where Be Dragons? Why no ancient D&D? (via)
- 42 years ago, the first BBS. (via)
- 136 INTERNET VIDEOS THAT BLEW MY MIND. A Google Doc. (via)
- Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate.
- A curated list of command line apps.
- building a note-taking system with vanilla vim.
- The worst of time64 breakage. (via)
- NEXTSPACE, another NextStep revisit. (via)
- i3wm 4.18 released. Useful to at least a few readers. (via)
- Bunnie Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. PDF. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2020/02/22
No theme this week cause I think I hit everything.
- Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk on March 3rd at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. I’ll post a reminder.
- NetBSD 9.0 is out, in case you missed the late update last week.
- Related: NetBSD 2020 Fundraising Campaign.
- What started as investigating /opt on FreeBSD.
- FixedMisc [MirOS] 20200214 released, for “I ? Free Software” day. Tangentially BSD.
- Approaching the end of work on ptrace(2).
- LLDB now works on i386.
- A day as an OpenBSD developer. How do people discover ports?
- Daily life with the offline laptop. (Running OpenBSD) I like the “What do I like to do?” breakdown approach.
- An emulator for a Sun 2 workstation. I think that dates to the BSD timeframe.(via)
- HamBSD Hardware Wanted. Scotland. (via)
- Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD’s hypervisor. (via)
- Pine64 February Update: Post CNY and FOSDEM Status Report. The Pro runs NetBSD, so it applies, along with fitting my small computer fetish. (via)
- Can You Use FreeBSD for a Developer Machine in 2020? I’d argue that a ‘developer machine’ needs only a text editor and a file transfer program to qualify. (via)
- Stanford 1967 PDP-6 logbook, a PDF. (via)
- “SNMP Mastery” leaking out. BSD-first author, of course.
tmpfs paging speedups
tmpfs on DragonFly now clusters writes better, so performance is improved in high-activity environments… which is probably why you are using tmpfs anyway. The post says 2-4x improvement when paging out.
Writeups of problem solutions are the best
If you post about a problem and later solve it, you will help many people in the future if you summarize the problem and (very important) the fix. In this case, Nelson H. F. Beebe installing DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on his Dell Precision 7920 workstation.
BSD Now 338: iocage in Jail
BSD Now 338 is up, which strangely is listed as the “100th episode” on the site, but I think that means it’s only indexed through #239. Anyway, it has the normal ingredients – a ZFS article, a convention note, and a link into a conversation about OpenBSD, among other things.
DragonFly 5.8 tagged
I tagged version 5.8 a few days ago. Release will be soon, but not before this weekend.
SEMIBUG, tonight
The next scheduled meeting for SEMIBUG is tonight. Go, if you are near.
Lazy Reading for 2020/02/16
Partial overflow this week, which means probably even more next week. We all benefit!
- OUIGO – Let’s Play. Pinball in your browser. Good pinball. (via)
- shlide—a slide deck presentation tool written in pure bash. (via)
- Under Armour Dumped Its App, and Consumers Feel the Heartbreak. As the article mentions, companies will dump cheap services – and your data and invested time – at a moment’s notice. The article might be paywalled.
- How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86? Begs the question, but still interesting to ask. (via)
- Apple 2 connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone. (via)
- Hard Drive Stats for 2019. Backblaze. (via)
- Blackwing Pencils: A Comprehensive Guide.
- Rotary Cellphone. (via)
- noclip.website, game floor plans. (via)
- Genres evolve and so does language. Roguelike arguments.
- The Burroughs Memoirs. I briefly worked at a child company of Burroughs. (via)
- The Missing Semester of Your CS Education. Open source teaches exactly this; most schools do not. Guess which makes you a better programmer? (via)
- A Bit of History Regarding “Tunnels of Armageddon” for the Apple IIgs.
- Building a Note-taking System with Vanilla Vim. (via)
- Vintage Computer Festival East 2020. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2020/02/15
UNIX history as an accidental theme this week.
Update: NetBSD 9.0 is released.
- Are there analogues to libxo out there?
- Unix Heritage Wiki. (via)
- Rigs of rods: physic vehicles simulator. (OpenBSD gaming)
- PF dynamic IP lists. I have the same question.
- Six FreeBSD terminal games. Probably other BSDs too. (via)
- UNIX Review Early 80’s Ad.
- Cycling / bike trips and opensource.
- Rob Landley about the /usr split. (via)
- awesome cli apps: A curated list of command line apps. Look for them in ports. (via)
- Using PKGSRC on Manjaro Linux aarch64 Pinebook-pro. (via)
- FreeNAS versus Unraid – Grudge Match. (via)
- Dependencies and maintainers. Tehcnically BSD related.
Cross-cross pollination
I like seeing cross-pollination, as I’ve said before. I really like it turning into informal cross-BSD standards.
BSD Now 337: Kubernetes on bhyve
This week’s BSD Now covers user groups and convention talks and releases and really the full gamut.
Chicago, Polish, Hamilton, and Dusseldorf BUG meetings tonight
ChiBUG is having their monthly meeting at the normal place, Giordano’s, tonight. Next month is a new location.
Hamilton, Ontario, is having what I think is the inaugural meeting for their BUG, tonight. That’s I think the closest one to me so far.
Also, the Polish BUG is meeting tonight. I say “tonight” for both of these, but they are very different time zones.
The Dusseldorf BSD.nrw BUG is also also meeting tonight. Second Tuesdays are popular!
Setting UTF-8 in the shell
Linked cause I always forget the right shell command for UTF-8, to reduce the amount of ???? ??? ??? ??????? ??.
Lazy Reading for 2020/02/09
Apple ][ minitheme, this week.
-
- The Public Domain Review, an Interview With Editor Adam Green. Worth looking at just for the images. Public Domain! (via)
- Related: Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualisation Society. I would like to have a card stating I was a member, just to feel smug in a good way.
- Legible News, culled from Wikipedia. Readability is the draw. (via multiple)
- Pervane, a plain text private note taking tool. (via)
- Org-mode features You May Not Know. (via)
- “…this is my initial experience of a website…” Get a newsletter, click a link, get a “subscribe to our newsletter!” popup. That’s just laziness. (via)
- Common LISP awk macro for easy text file operations. I like reading LISP even if I never write it.
- OK Doomer. (via)
- Firing Up the Apple //c for “Not x86 Week”. (via)
- Vintage Apple. (via)
- The Importance of Being E.R.N.I.E. (via)
- Intro to the Haiku review series: the BeOS reborn. (via)
- Geometry: A minimalistic, fully customizable ZSH theme. Linked cause I never thought of shells as themeable before. (via)
- ThinkPad Mods, Done Right. Dangit dangit dangit! This mod uses the one corner I smashed on my x220. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the day: A Beginner’s Guide to Venetian Snares’ Breakcore Madness. Oh Bandcamp RSS feed, how did I live without you?
In Other BSDs for 2020/02/08
Another overflow week.
- Travel Grant Application for BSDCan is now open.
- Bram Moolenaar Uses This. I am curious about what specifically stopped him using BSD.
- Tildeverse. Several BSD communities in there.
- What files installed by this package have been modified post-install?
- Some effects of the ZFS DVA format on data layout and growing ZFS pools. Linked cause much ZFS discussion is about tools, not format.
- Open world games! OpenBSD.
- SerenityOS desktop running on an OpenBSD kernel. (via)
- Creating a ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail.
- FixedMisc [MirOS] 20200202 and MirKeyboardLayout 9x released!
- Finding out what directories exist with only basic shell builtins (a Unix shell trick). Tangentially BSD.
- Second (final) release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available!
- Related: Help NetBSD test 9.0 Release Candidate 2.
- [packages] PostgreSQL major update.
- Valuable News – 2020/02/03.
- ThinkPad T480 is my new main laptop which runs FreeBSD. (via)
- FOSDEM BSD room video recordings. (via)
- [How-To] Running syslog-ng in BastilleBSD. (via)
- FreeNAS Plugins Development.
DragonFly on other platforms
BSD Now 336: Archived Knowledge
This week’s BSD Now has links to a number of about-BSD articles, as usual. Take note – there’s links to two European BUG meetings I didn’t have noted, under Beastie Bits.
RNG rejiggering
Random number generation on DragonFly now runs per–CPU, and a bit faster. No real user effect, but randomness is one of those endlessly complex topics that are fun to read about.