I’ve tagged a x.x.1 release – DragonFly 5.2.1, available now. It includes the recently-mentioned fix for CVE-2018-8897 and some other minor updates. See my email to users@ for the details.
Lazy Reading for 2018/05/20
A little more on building and less on rights this week.
- Making a Laptop From Scratch. Note the protocol used to fetch the document. (via)
- 25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
- Mutt and HTML Email. (via)
- Software Engineering Takeaways.
- The Game of Everything, Part 10: Civilization and the Limits of Progress.
- Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System. (via)
- Limbo X86 PC Emulator for Android. I want to try multimaster Hammer2 on multiple phones in emulation. No, it’s not a good idea, but it would be a fun idea. (via)
- The fanciest convention badge I’ve ever seen.
In Other BSDs for 2018/05/19
Note the eleventy-jillion hackathon reports.
- OpenBSD 6.3 : why and how. (via)
- Helpful OpenBSD Tutorials. A request for input, not a link to existing.
- A pile of p2k18 hackathon reports. And more.
- “We didn’t chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature.” (via)
- Getting CUPS working under NetBSD?
- What I Learned During My FreeBSD Internship.
- Valuable News – 2018/05/14. Catching links that I didn’t.
- OPNSense 18.1.7 released. No, I mean 18.1.8.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” Sponsorships, and writing schedule changes.
- FreeBSD 11.2 beta is out.
- Calamares “some day, a FreeBSD system installer”. (via)
Your thinkpiece for the week: The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up. There’s a BSD analogy possible there.
ACPICA update to 20180508 in DragonFly
Sascha Wildner has brought in the last 9 months of ACPICA updates to DragonFly. This may mean better power or motherboard support for your hardware in DragonFly. I always have a hard time pointing directly to ACPICA updates and how they benefit, but looking at the changelog update may help.
BSDNow 246: Properly Coordinated Disclosure
BSDNow 246’s title is talking about CVE-2018-8897, which was (unlike the original Spectre/Meltdown) responsibly disclosed to many different operating system vendors, including the BSDs. As a result, fixes arrived a lot faster… seems like a good idea. No interview in this episode, but as always there’s other topics explored.
ipfw3: highspeed lockless in-kernel NAT
This commit from Bill Yuan says “highspeed lockless in-kernel NAT”, and lists a huge number of changes for ipfw3. How much of a change is it? I don’t know; there isn’t a matching documentation update and I don’t have a way to test.
Your OS and international politics
I like pointing out how political world events push their way into computer updates.
SemiBUG, tonight
SemiBUG‘s having a hands-on server workshop tonight. Go, if you are near, and bring something networked to type on.
GCC 8.0 in DragonFly
Thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas, GCC 8.0 has been imported into DragonFly. It’s not built by default, so you’ll need to set WORLD_ALTCOMPILER to get it. Rimvydas mentions this is part of a 3-year upgrade cycle.
Note that he went the extra mile and made sure dports could handle it too.
Lazy Reading for 2018/05/13
I’ve got some real esoteric sources this week.
- The Ultimate Postgres vs MySQL Blog Post. (via)
- 25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2018) (via)
- F-Droid app recommendation thread? I have a bunch of old phones to repurpose, if you can’t tell.
- Just time zones.
- ZSH, tmux, Emacs and SSH: A copy-paste story. (via)
- The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons. (via)
- Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay. (via)
- How we make gods. (also via)
- The Game of Everything, Part 8 and Part 9.
- Telephone World. (via)
- The Bread Code. Okay, maybe Github isn’t the right place for everything. (via)
- Origins of the finger command (1990). (via)
- The Ocelot arcade system. Vector graphics! (via)
Your rights-oriented hardware project of the week: NeTV2, a Bunnie Huang project. A neat device worth funding on its own, and worth having to show what capabilities are being denied us by law.
In Other BSDs for 2018/05/12
This came together very nicely.
- Addendum – MongoDB Cluster Replica Set on FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenPGP Web Key Service and Web Key Directory Implemented on OpenBSD. (via)
- mksh bugfix?—?thank you for the music.
- Valuable News for 2018/04/30 and 2018/05/07. BSD links, which make me happy to see.
- BSD routing table -> ASCIIgraph. (via)
- LibreSSL 2.7.3 is out. (via)
- Overview of TrueOS 18.03. (via)
- HowTo Modern (2018) KDE on FreeBSD. (via)
- Recent BSD-runnable game sales. Summarizing this is a decent public service to provide.
- “Do One Thing“, the UNIX idea. (via)
BSDNow 248: ZFS User Conf 2018
Hey, another terse title, and I didn’t even write it! This BSDNow episode talks about the recent ZFS conference. It’s interesting to think there can be a meetup about a file system that isn’t really held to a vendor at this point. There ‘s a number of other articles, too – I’m just a bit late noting it.
CVE-2018-8897 fix in, more Spectre fixes for DragonFly
A recent and new CPU bug, CVE-2018-8897, is fixed in DragonFly. THis applies to both Intel and AMD processors. I’m happy to see that the CERT page lists equal notification timing for a whole lot of operating systems, rather than the few that heard about Spectre/Meltdown early.
Following that topic, Matthew Dillon has “fleshed out” Spectre mitigations, and his commit message details the current state. The sysctl ‘machdep.spectre_mitigation’ will tell you what’s set at any given point.
Update: update.
WOL igb BSD
You can now use Wake On LAN functionality with igb(4) cards in DragonFly.
(I like acronymic titles a little too much, I know.)
BSDNow 244: C is a Lie
I managed to miss posting about BSDNow 244, “C is a Lie”. That provocative title is about how C isn’t a low-level language, not that it doesn’t work. Among other things, this week has new-to-me history about the Larrabee architecture, which I only have heard about indirectly.
Lazy Reading for 2018/05/06
A theme of rebellion this week.
- The NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1. They’re going to start using ANSI C. (via)
- Real accounts on Instagram are still run by bots. Guess what the next spam/SEO target is.
- “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – noting that quote found in this newsletter, as a reason to have your own operating system tools.
- A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture, an IEEE event for those worried about the end of Moore’s Law. (via)
- I love the idea of reprogramming semi-disposable hardware into something better.
- Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web. Video. Don’t give your data to other platforms; you will never get it back.
- You Know How GET Requests are Meant to be Idempotent? (via)
- LISA18 CFP now open.
- Using only open-source software on Android. (via)
- Making a Window Manager (part 1). Not what you think it is. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/05/05
BUGs BUGs BUGs!
- The May 15th SemiBUG meeting will be a hands-on web server workshop. Bring equipment.
- The June 19th SemiBUG meeting will be on BCHS.
- The May 2 NYCBUG meeting has no official presentation, but it’s happening.
- BSD licensed bc in NetBSD. The GNU version was removed in other BSDs. (Thanks, Bill Sorenson)
- SMTP client added to -current.
- OPNSense 18.1.6 image refresh.
- New talks, and the F-bomb. Michael W. Lucas convention talk mostly on ZFS.
- Writing FreeBSD Malware. (via)
- Introduction to email (pt. 2): Mail dialog / the “mail” command.
- Spectre Variant 2 mitigation for kernel committed to -current.
- p2k18 Hackathon report: Solene Rapenne (solene@) on joining the project, packages progress. I like hearing background on how people get brought into a community project.
- Bareos Backup Server on FreeBSD.
- A crapload of p2k18 hackathon reports.
- Getting my new laptop to work. (via)
- sndio party.
- NetBSD GSoC projects for 2018. (via)
systat improvements in DragonFly
systat in DragonFly has gained some new fields when using -pv. Read up on the tool if you have not used it before.
How nice is nice?
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to the scheduler, with the result that nice(1) is really vigorous now about enforcing priority.
dfly drm irq
Here’s something that doesn’t have an immediate impact now, but will be useful down the road: Francois Tigeot has been working on DRM support in DragonFly, and has been quite successful with Intel video support. His strategy has been to adopt Linux methods where possible, to reduce the amount of support work. The payoff has been excellent, and prompt, accelerated video support in DragonFly. The most recent work is “git: drm: Implement parts of the Linux irq subsystem“, which is going to come in handy for someone, I’m sure.