Here’s something I haven’t see before: at the time of me typing this, there are commits in DragonFly, FreeBSD, and I assume NetBSD (haven’t found the commit), but the 2019-5612 CVE entry is still shown as reserved and not public. This may change by the time you read this article, of course.
AM4 fix, Corsair fix
If you have an AM4 motherboard and also can’t EFI boot DragonFly on it, this recent change may fix that for you.
Also, if you are using a Corsair keyboard, this commit may be useful to you.
Colo upgrade for dragonflybsd.org, plus future
Matthew Dillon posted an extensive writeup about the hardware changes for dragonflybsd.org; price to performance ratio has been improving so much for multiprocessor machines that we can jump forward both for hosting hardware and for a testbed.
He also mentions his immediate thoughts on what to tackle next, since SMP has been so relentless improved in DragonFly. It resulted in a very long conversational chain as people weighed in with opinions, so I’ve held off posting it until the conversation finished. (I chimed in too.)
Lazy Reading for 2019/08/18
Again, way behind cause of being online only irregularly over the last week. There’s still plenty to look at – August is made for Lazy Reading.
- Never fast enough. (Scroll way down) There’s a nonlinear payoff for software speed … for tools.
- Related: Fast Software, the Best Software.
- Also related: Performance Matters.
- On the flip side of that, limiting and slowing social software is a good idea. (via)
- freemium.cc, free tools for makers.
- https://thehistoryofweb.design/. The URL is perfectly descriptive. (via)
- Typography Terms. Gadzook! (via)
- Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1. (via)
- Why Checklists Fail. Linked cause checklists are usually super-effective. (via)
- The Roguelike Toolkit (RLTK), implemented for Rust. The comments in the source page have some interesting further links.
- Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity – Episode 22: Goatbusters.
- The Last Working Olivetti Mainframe Sits In a Tuscan High School. Comments led me to this neat-looking Olivetti calculator from the year before I was born. (via)
- There are even bots crawling gopherspace.
- We all spend half our day using a keyboard. Do you use any specific keyboard? Which one? Why? Far more suggestions than you need.
- USB-C Easy Bake Oven. Interesting for how power is handled. And cookies. (via)
- Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019. (via)
- I chanced upon an ancient cache of code… (also via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/08/17
This is a somewhat pre-made post coming off a week on the road, so I packed it chock-full.
- The UNIX Philosophy in 2019. (via)
- Converse to previous: Brian Will – Replacing the Unix tradition.
- Summer Sun and microsystems.
- How does a “real” Unix system feel compared to *BSDs and Linux?
- GSoC 2019 Report Update: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/08/05.
- Removal of route-collector mode in bgpd(8).
- tpmr(4) driver added to -current.
- OPNsense 19.7.2 released.
- Linux kernel’s inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure. Linked cause you know what performs well under memory restriction? Any BSD. (via)
- Devine Lu Linvega’s Uses This entry. Interesting to see his workstation details because his workstation is 2 machines, with Plan 9 variations, and segregated on work vs. distraction. (and sometimes FreeBSD.)
- NetBSD light weight theme.
- Wanting to install Trident to boot from my USB stick…
- LibreSSL 3.0.0 Released. (via)
- Play Windows Games On FreeBSD. Encapsulating setup. (via)
dhcpcd and DragonFly, continued
Roy Marples, the ‘upstream‘ for dhcpcd(8), noticed that DragonFly was working with it as a dhclient/rtsold replacement, but the process wasn’t complete. So … welcome new committer!
tap/tun device changes
DragonFly’s tap(4)/tun(4) devices have been historically precreated – tap0, tap1, tap2, tap3. They are now auto-cloned, which might surprise any software counting on the prior behavior. I don’t know of any specific packages that are affected by this, though. DragonFly version 5.6 is unaffected by this; it’s in -current only.
pkg and pkg-static
If you upgrade DragonFly and one of the shared libraries used by pkg gets updated, you can’t run pkg until you get files, but pkg is the program you use to bring in new files. This chicken-and-egg problem is solved with pkg-static, a version of pkg built without shared libraries.
You may have noticed some format flip-flopping between pkg and pkg-static if you had to run it after the most recent DragonFly upgrade; that is fixed. There’s a larger issue of certificate installation identified there; I don’t know a solution to it, but I do want to mention this for next time pkg breaks for someone – pkg-static will work as backup, including to bring in a new version of pkg.
BSD Now 310: My New Free NAS
I’m posting this late cause I was traveling when it went up: BSD Now 310 is a nice cross-BSD roundup this week. I might miss the next BSD Now too, so don’t wait for me to link to it.
ChiBUG meeting tomorrow
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow, at the usual place. RSVP to the mailing list if you are going. And you should go, just to find out what hardware Joshua Stein is working on right now.
DragonFly 5.6.2 released
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
Lazy Reading for 2019/08/11
I have some neat history items mixed in this week.
- ASCII table and history (or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?) (via)
- As Flash dies a little more.
- Beginner Problems With TCP & The socket Module in Python. Linked cause it shows why MTU size matters. (via)
- My Top 20 Interactive Fiction, 2019 Edition. With links to play.
- Monsters and Manuals’ 1500th Anniversary: Half Time After the Time? Linked for the best-of links in the article; that’ll give you some reading.
- ‘A Humument’ is a completely novel project. A meaningless book, extrapolated into 300+ works of art. (via)
- Scanimate News. This was TV/computer graphics in the early 80s. (via)
- Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research. Linking to the summary; continue on if the thread is interesting.
- The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online. One of the reasons I don’t use Cloudflare.
- Level Design Patterns in 2D Games.
- disquiet.com. Lots and lots to listen to. (via)
- Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses.
- ASCII art RPG Stone Story launches into early access. I’m stretching it with the ‘roguelike’ tag here.
- Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Blarf: Cease and Desist. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/08/10
A reminder: if you have a BSD user group and I’m not posting about your meetings, please make sure I know about it.
- The OpenBSD Ada Library. (via)
- BSD Link Roundup 7.29.
- Project Trident 19.07-U1 now available. No, wait, 12-U1 now available.
- Valuable News – 2019/07/29.
- Nvidia optimus drivers for FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenBGPD 6.5p1 released.
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019).
- Installing Owntracks recorder on FreeBSD.
- Mod-able voxel engine written in common lisp. (via)
- Thief-like FOSS stealth game “The Dark Mod” running on OpenBSD. (via)
- Obviously related: Let’s Try on OpenBSD: The Dark Mod (Thief-inspired stealth game).
- Upcoming changes to LISA and SREcon.
Disk encryption and non-QWERTY keyboard layouts
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.
A new upgrade method
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
DragonFly kcollect(8) improvements
DragonFly has a utility called kcollect(8), for gathering about the last day’s worth of kernel statistics. It recently gained some extra flags and details, and should work well if you want to collect stats in a low-impact way.
NYCBUG tomorrow: Video on OpenBSD
Andre Buskvekster is presenting at NYCBUG about video on OpenBSD, tomorrow. Go, if you are near.
Zen 2 and DragonFly
It’s supported, and given how well DragonFly supports SMP and the number of processors Zen 2 supports, it’s a no-brainer if you’re in the market for a new server.
Lazy Reading for 2019/08/04
This week’s material filled up fast. It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, so let’s see what next week brings…
- “Anyway my point here is that all of crypto should be run entirely by tweens.” Look for the Utility Token section, though it’s all fun.
- How to calculate leap second variation for the year 3000. (via)
- Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now. (via)
- Text size control in st.
- DLX400 typewriter as a Keyboard. Neat but it must be annoying; those aren’t great keyboards.
- Fast Software, the Best Software.
- “Don’t put it on GitHub“, something we all should know. (scroll down to last third)
- Creepy pumpkin. It doesn’t have to be a pumpkin; this could apply to all sorts of things!
- Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural? You’ve played both, I’m sure.
- An xargs lesson. (via)
- The Legacy of the Unix Wars is still around us. (also via)
- What I want out of my window manager.
- Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors. (via)
- Slacking on security. I don’t think Slack is a healthy product to use.
- Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I’m sure that won’t backfire.
- Astronauts Falling on the Moon. No achievement so amazing you can’t trip and fall in the middle of it. (via)
- LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance. I think the computer in The Story of Mel, mentioned here before. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/08/03
A bumper crop this week!
- Video on OpenBSD, a presentation at NYCBUG by Andre Buskvekster, happening on the 7th. I’ll post a reminder on the 6th.
- OpenBSD ttyplot examples.
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019).
- NetBSD 9.0 release process has started. Aarch64 support sounds good.
- TrueNAS 11.2 out.
- PHP and OpenBSD talk by Mario Campos on August 12th at ChiPHPUG lightning talks.
- OpenBGPD: The OpenBSD BGP internet routing daemon. The link source comments are the useful part.
- FreeBSD-SA-19:12.telnet: Were these claims even properly investigated, or did Juniper bully an advisory through? This is a spectator sport item, really, if you can’t tell from the title.
- Exploiting a No-Name FreeBSD Kernel Vulnerability. (via)
- Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, second evaluation report.
- Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD, Part 2.
- Enchancing Syzkaller Support for NetBSD, Part 2. Enhancing, I think it should be.
- Work-in-progress threading support in LLDB.
- Touchpad, Interrupted.