BSDNow episode 212 is out and I’m going to link it especially because I’ve been at work instead of posting like normal. Not surprisingly, it talks about the demise of Solaris and about vBSDCon and (links to videos from) BSDCan.
Blind at a BUG
Brandon Werner, will be talking at the SEMIBUG meeting tomorrow night at 7 PM. He programs for a living and is blind, so it should be interesting even just to see his preferred tools.
(Mentioned previously for In Other BSDs but I want to make sure people catch this.)
Lazy Reading for 2017/09/17
I start a new job tomorrow!
- Fixing up TS-440s rigs. An interesting hobby.
- TODO Group Open Source Guides. (via)
- What’s So Bad About Posix I/O? (via)
- Xtermcontrol: change colors, title, font and geometry of a running xterm. (via)
- ANES: emulate a classic Mac on a classic Amiga. (via)
- Dwarf Fortress bugs. There’s so much simulated in the game that the bugs sound like broken reality, not programming problems. (via)
- The Universal Aggregator. Everything into maildir! (via)
- Inbox-zero via shell mail. (via)
- The only safe email is text-only email. (via)
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. There’s a lot to read here. (via)
- books chapter twelve
- 30 interesting shell commands for the Linux shell. I link this just because I’m amazed that someone built a ‘tac’ program, not because these commands are all equally useful. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2017/09/16
Not sure why, but there’s been a lot of BSD news the past few weeks. I am OK with that.
Late addition: NetBSD’s New York build cluster will be offline beginning Monday for about two weeks, which means no daily NetBSD or pkgsrc builds.
- FreeBSD package management with Pkg (2/2).
- [Semibug] next meeting: BSD accessibility.
- I3 instances and NVMe: booya! Or how you can build FreeBSD from the source in under 11 minutes vs. 12+ hours on a desktop. Is there something like ‘quickworld’ on FreeBSD? (via)
- iXsystems, Inc. is offering jobs to Sun/Oracle Refugees. (via)
- BSD building/testing machines? (via)
- Solaris to Linux Migration 2017. Some BSD mentions in there. (via)
- openbsd changes of note 628.
- Forward syslogs to a central server using TLS (OpenBSD). (via)
- A return-oriented programming defense from OpenBSD. (via)
- OPNsense 17.7.2 released.
- vBSDCon 2017 Conference Reflection.
- Screencasting with OpenBSD. (via)
- t2k17 Hackathon report: Ken Westerback on dhclient progress, developer herding.
BSDNow 211: It’s HAMMER2 Time!
BSDNow episode 211 is up – you can guess at least one of the topics, I’m sure. There’s also an interview of FreeBSD Foundation co-ops – which is neat, because I didn’t realize the Foundation had co-ops.
Booting, UEFI, and text consoles
I installed a DragonFly snapshot on a Lenovo x220 last night. I went for a EFI install, even though the x220 has a “Legacy” option. When I booted, it looked like this:
It successfully booted, but once it hit the kernel load, it started printing to the top of the screen in that lovely repeating pattern you see.
Matthew Dillon helpfully pointed out that the DRM and i915 modules needed to be loaded. Hitting ‘9’ during the bootloader countdown got me to a prompt where I could type:
drm_load="YES" i915_load="YES"' kern.kms_console=1 menu
Which brought me back to the boot menu, but this time it loaded those additional modules to support the Intel video chipset – and it worked!
These lines can go in /boot/loader.conf for permanent use.
More ipfw work
In addition to the already-mentioned ipfw per-CPU state tracking, Sepherosa Ziehau has added per-CPU state tables to ipfw, and his commit documents the improvement in performance/latency. He’s also added ipfw support to sshlockout(8).
HAMMER2 in the installer
HAMMER2 is now available by default in DragonFly, and can be used in the installation process. (It was possible, but manual, before.) The next DragonFly release should be soon.
Lazy Reading for 2017/09/10
Whee!
- Save 418. (Thanks, Tim Darby)
- this code very fast. (via)
- An early (earliest?) Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
- books chapter eleven
- The Zork CPU. The software engine turned into silicon. Can that be done for SCUMM? Does that even make sense? (via)
- An Introduction to Managing Secrets Safely with Version Control Systems. (also via)
- Every Programmer Should Know. (via)
- Rochester vs. Cupertino. I live in Rochester, and the portrait it paints is accurate. Kodak made a lot of lives better in ways we don’t expect of tech companies today. (also via)
In Other BSDs for 2017/09/09
Already overflowed to next week.
- New story: Savaged by Systemd. Lucas, what hast thou wrought?
- A few questions about BSD
- FreeBSD package management with Pkg (1/2). Applies to DragonFly, too.
- OpenBSD Community goes platinum.
- OPNsense 17.7.1 released.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA3 Available.
- A Brief History of Solaris (SunOS) Ports. Technically a BSD. (via)
- My first patch to OpenBSD. (via)
- Getting acme.sh to renew certs via cronjob on FreeBSD
- GSoC 2017 Reports: Add SUBPACKAGES support to pkgsrc, part 1. (via)
- Best BSD for Kaby Lake w/ Integrated Graphics.
- FreeBSD – what processes in what jails are using swap?
- LLVM libFuzzer and SafeStack ported to NetBSD. (via)
- OpenBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5th Gen). There’s a cost-saving tip in there for anyone planning a purchase.
- Solaris reported dead again. Illumos is working fine, though.
Kabylake NUC and DragonFly
Matthew Dillon’s been using a Kabylake NUC for a DragonFly workstation and it’s generally working out well. It’s tiny enough to lose on a desk, in my opinion. He added performance details and a screenshot. The Specific Configs page has his notes, recorded, too.
Related laptop tip: If you have a Lenovo Yoga and can’t mount the drive after install, various sdhci modules may be the answer. Update: definitely the answer.
BSDNow 210: Your Questions, part 1
BSDNow 210 turns the tables and interviews the moderators, along with the normal news summary.
ipfw improvements
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some improvements to ipfw in DragonFly, moving it to per-CPU state tracking among other things. (I haven’t mentioned just ipfw in foreeeever.)
His commit message describes the improvements. Of most interest: it reduces the performance impact of running ipfw in his tests to almost nothing. Does this translate to ipfw on other BSDs? I don’t know.
New system: Ravenports
John Marino has assembled a new packaging and building system. It’s called Ravenports, and he wrote a short intro, and has a filled-out site to go look at.
This is big news, in part because he knows what he’s doing (John worked on dports and created synth) and because it’s cross-platform. The prior work on synth is part of the reason DragonFly works so well under pressure – the “build everything as fast as possible as complete as possible” strategy makes a great stress test.
There’s no need to change software management strategies yet. It can be used at the same time as dports, so it doesn’t necessarily change anything for the next DragonFly release.
DragonFly at EuroBSDCon 2017
Francois Tigeot is going to be giving a talk about the DragonFly graphics stack at EuroBSDCon 2017. (14:00 September 21st in Paris) Registration is already closed because I didn’t realize how soon it was happening – sorry!
Lazy Reading for 2017/09/03
Seventies/Eighties computing, this week.
- books chapter ten
- Eclipses and decibels.
- Twenty-plus years on, SMTP callbacks are still pointless and need to die.
- Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons. First comment in the source link is great.
- The Icewind Dale Problem. Related to previous link. (via)
- The Enduring Legacy of Zork. (via)
- Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading. (via)
- Noticed in the same place, in an article about VERB and NOUN buttons: People are patching the code for the Apollo 11 guidance computer. People apparently can’t help patching code.
- Interface, a decent non-serif, non-monospaced font. (via)
- So You Want to Read… A Guide to Sci-Fi and Fantasy Subgenres. (via I lost it, sorry!)
- The Return of the Cray files (2013-2016) (via)
- Arithmetic for Beginners. (via via)
- 1976 word processor error messages. They sound exactly right. (via)
- Having Played Every Adventure From the 1970s, Some Thoughts. (via)
- 6502cloud – Bringing the 80’s to the cloud. (via)
- Software development 450 words per minute. (via)
- The Light Phone. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2017/09/02
Lots of links this week – so many I’ve already started next week’s post.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA available. I’m prewriting this part of the post so there may be a new beta by the time this publishes.
- Introducing sandboxfs.
- “TIL GhostBSD has a patreon” (via)
- OpenBSD rtables and rdomains. (via)
- Setting up OpenBSD’s LDAP Server (ldapd) with StartTLS and SASL. (via)
- Ansible OpenBSD Cookbooks. (via)
- This crazy hardware porting example thread led me to some new hardware, some of which may run a BSD? The Pinebook is apparently bootable but I don’t know if that means usable.
- Also: using the audio port for serial? First time I heard of that. (referring to previous crazy hardware links above)
- Eventually all packaging systems eat an operating system. And then they aren’t packaging systems any more. (via)
- DFS with Freenas for data replication between multiple sites?
- openbsd changes of note 627
- yet another introduction to yacc
- OpenBSD 6.1, a an overview.
BSDNow 209 and garbage 42
For your audiovisual pleasure: BSDNow 209: “Signals: gotta catch ‘em all“, and garbage[42]: Interview with Purism’s Todd Weaver are both available now. Watch/download and listen on your (in the US) extended weekend.
DragonFly and IPv6, getting online
Here’s a detailed writeup from Aaron LI on how to get a DragonFly system onto an IPv6 network.
Update: He also supplied an example pf ruleset that solved some IPv6 throughput problems for his VPS.
4.8.0. to 4.8.1 update instructions
Pulled from a longer thread: x.x.1 update instructions for DragonFly.
Probably old hat to most readers, but I like to see this documented, and the hw.ncpu ‘trick’ is nice.