DragonFly BSD Digest

09/25/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/09/25

I manage to avoid a topic this week, really. That’s good!

#! /usr/bin/env considered harmful
The #! magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours. (via)
The Future of Procedural Generation. For games.
So many cow jokes. (via)
Munchausen Numbers and How to Find Them. (via)
Showing The Weather In Tmux. (via)
The Festival Floppies. Anything named “Dinosorceror” must be good. (via)
A Very Long Post On How to Become a Creator. The last paragraph in Advice #1 is the important bit.
Dither me this.
Oh shit, git! (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading, Someday you will need this, UNIXish 0 Comments

09/24/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/09/24

It’s the convention time of year!

garbage[38]: #camperchat.
OPNsense 16.7.4 released.
Is ARM-like chips the future and which of the BSDs will have a head start?
g2k16 Hackathon Report: Alexander Bluhm. Last g2k16 item, I think.
Michael W. Lucas’s PAM Mastery is available in ebook and physical form.
Related: Michael W. Lucas’s SemiBUG “PAM is Un-American” talk was live-tweeted.
MeetBSD 2016 is at UC Berkeley November 11-12. (via)
pkgsrc-2016Q3 is now frozen.
Libreboot and BSDs. I couldn’t handle the misplaced apostrophe.
Cray J98 Project – FreeBSD and the Cray Disk. (via)
FreeBSD: Bhyve with UEFI VNC support. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions, OpenBSD, OPNSense, Periodicals, pkgsrc 0 Comments

09/22/2016

BSDNow 160’s title is linked to Allan Jude being at EuroBSDCon, happening right now. (Groff is there too!) Episode 160 is available in any case, and I bet there will be some sort of interview(s) coming out of this.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions 0 Comments

09/21/2016

iwm(4) firmware updates, plus temperature?

For those running DragonFly 4.7, there’s new firmware for all iwm(4) devices. Also, you can get temperature readings off the iwm wireless device now, if I’m reading this correctly.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

09/20/2016

Who wants FUSE on DragonFly?

Tomohiro Kusumi is thinking about porting it. Follow the whole thread for details.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Someday you will need this 2 Comments

09/19/2016

3D printing on DragonFly

3D printing on DragonFly with a Fabrikator? Yep, it works. (from jh32 on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

09/18/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/09/18

Partially assembled while I was in some multi-hour conference calls at work.

This Why Computers.
Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release is the OS News of the Year. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. (via)
html email comments.
Schrödinger? I hardly know her!
The algorithms, they are not subtle.
Dealing with Unix arguments.
“Im a vi guy but consider changing to vim if it cleans the house“
Restoring YC’s Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data. (via)
Recommendations for Vim. (via)
Vim 8.0 released! (Changelog, via)
A tale of an impossible bug: big.LITTLE and caching. Asymmetrical core capabilities, yeesh. (via)
Weirdly broken wifi access points.
Dungeon Generator. (via)
How roguelike is your game? (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading, roguelike 0 Comments

09/17/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/09/17

I’ve never had as many hackathon links as I did for g2k16 over this week and last.

“LiteBSD is variant of 4.4BSD operating system for microcontrollers“. (via)
More g2k16: Florian Obser, Vincent Gross, Antoine Jacoutot, Matthieu Herrb, Martin Pieuchot, and Patrick Wildt.
OpenBSD on HP Stream 7.
“PAM Mastery” print layout done.
Coincidentally, Michael W. Lucas is giving a talk about PAM at next week’s SemiBUG meeting. The 20th, I think.
The Raspberry PI Platform and The Challenges of Developing FreeBSD.
One Floppy NetBSD Distribution. (via)
Beastie tequila.
“I made a fanzine for fun in scribus, first issue is about DragonFly ! :)“
OpenBSD Planet.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, DragonFly, FreeBSD, OpenBSD 0 Comments

09/16/2016

Roguelike Celebration tomorrow

Roguelike Celebration, happening tomorrow (the 17th) in San Francisco. Normally this would be in Lazy Reading, but that’s too late. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Conventions, roguelike 0 Comments

Laptop on fire? Use powerd!

Matthew Dillon has added powerd, a utility that will automatically step down processor speed based on reported temperature. The range is configurable, and there’s some other nice-to-have features. This will save your CPU from melting, and probably also your thighs from being burned.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly 2 Comments

BSDNow 159: Net Scaling Privacy (Flix Style)

This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but some good links, including a meaty one about HTTPS implementation at NetFlix with FreeBSD.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, FreeBSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

09/15/2016

Hybrid graphics, switcheroo, and DragonFly

karu.pruun has been trying to get a Macbook’s hybrid graphics card to work in DragonFly. He’s been working on a gmux driver, but it needs a framework like Linux’s switcheroo. If this topic interests you, help him out.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly, Please test 0 Comments

09/13/2016

Are you near Indianapolis? Or Chicago?

Bryan Everly wants to start a BSD User Group in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the US. If you are anywhere near there and would go (and you should; user groups are great), tell him.

Addendum: Near Chicago works too, as joshua stein pointed out.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG 1 Comment

Restarting pf

I may have mentioned this in part before, but Matthew Dillon has a brief script to reload pf when an interface IP changes. I’m linking it here in case it’s useful in the future.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pf, Someday you will need this 0 Comments

09/12/2016

Changes in release, master

Recent changes for virtual machine support and the new powerd utility have been rolled into the release branch for DragonFly. They’ll probably be in the next point release, or you can rebuild a release machine now for immediate access.

Also mentioned in the update from Matthew Dillon, DragonFly-master users should upgrade carefully as DragonFly migrates to using LibreSSL in base, and dports-based LibreSSL in dports.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Heads Up! 3 Comments

09/11/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/09/11

Happy birthday to my younger daughter.

The Fall of Avalon Hill (1998). The source link comments lead to a lot of neat game material, and a different viewpoint than what’s in this older article.
Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. From a link in those aforementioned comments.
Dolphin Emulator – Booting the Final GameCube Game. (via)
Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues explained visually. “Eigenwhatever” is a fun word to say. (via)
What typing ^D does on Unix. (via)
Xerox Alto Restoration Part 5. I think I missed part 4. (via)
Tcl the misunderstood. (via)
Excellent Dwarf Fortress-Bug.
Next steps for Gmane. (via)
RetroConnector. Mostly Classic Mac forms at Raspberry Pi size. The Fat Macs are so cute. (via)
Why is printing “B” dramatically slower than printing “#”? (via)
How the Bit Was Born (via)
Advanced Compilers Weeks 1 and 2
The Fidget Cube. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Books, Lazy Reading, UNIXish 0 Comments

09/10/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/09/10

Last minute again.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, pfSense 4 Comments

09/09/2016

BSDNow 158: Ham, Radio and Pie (oh my)

BSDNow episode 158 has an interview with Diane Bruce about ham radio and Raspberry Pi hardware, plus the usual news.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

AMD CPU users, try this

The’Errata 793‘ issue is apparently a bug where an AMD CPU can hang under very specific circumstances. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix – please try it if you have the appropriate hardware.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Please test 0 Comments

09/08/2016

Package building statistics

How long does it take to build all 24,000 packages in the DragonFly ports collection? Apparently about 22 hours on a dual Xeon machine (with I think 36 cores) or 48-core Opteron. This is with synth. I used to measure pkgsrc builds in weeks.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DPorts, DragonFly, Goings-on 1 Comment

09/07/2016

LibreSSL now default in DragonFly

DragonFly now has version 2.4.2 of LibreSSL and uses it in base. Ports may still link to OpenSSL, though – it’s still built by default, though make.conf can be configured to prevent that.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DPorts, DragonFly 1 Comment

09/06/2016

NYCBUG Wed Sept 7: Teaching OSs with FreeBSD and DTrace

NYCBUG is meeting tomorrow night, with George Neville-Neil presenting DTrace work used as college-level teaching material, and talking about more places it could be used. Go if you are near New York City, interested in teaching, or you know – BSD. It’s in a different location than the normal monthly meetings.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG, FreeBSD 0 Comments

09/04/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/09/04

This post fleshed out at the last minute, between road trips.

Why Can’t I Run a 100-Node CockroachDB Cluster? Linked here as “A Focus on Stability”. All projects overcomplicate.
Comparison between Windows Terminal Emulators with pros and cons for each. (via)
Ken, Unix and Games (via)
Hardening Your Web Server’s SSL Ciphers. (Thanks, Justin Whyte)
Solutions to Integer Overflow.
Are there any emulators/VMs that can run really old versions of Unix?
Atomic.io, quick prototyping. (via)
New novel, and a new novel bundle.
bucklespring, to simulate that type of keyboard. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Books, Lazy Reading, UNIXish 1 Comment

09/03/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/09/03

A week of travel didn’t get in the way of links! RSS feeds are still fantastic tools for those who know how to use them.

See Michael W. Lucas talk about BSD, several places.
OpenZFS Cheat Sheet.
Ubuntu’s fall from grace. About Ubuntu/FreeBSD. Articles that use the phrase “rock-solid” for an operating system are usually junk. (via)
A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-To. This is a repeat, so if you saw this link here before, just read comments from the source.
PC-BSD becomes TrueOS. Also explained here.Guess I have to change the tag. (via)
Installing PC-BSD as a Primary Operating System. And this page needs to be updated.
backlight battery indicator. Sort of like a terminal beep.
EuroBSDCon 2016, happening later this month in Serbia. Registration is open.
OpenBSD 6.0: why and how. (via)
Setting up a Web Server: OpenBSD or FreeBSD?
DiscoverBSD for 2016/08/29.
OPNSense 16.7.3 released.
Let’s Encrypt client imported into -current. OpenBSD-current.
OpenBSD 6.0 released. Last CD-ROM release.
The Voicemail Scammers Never Got Past Our OpenBSD Greylisting. My favorite thing about his writeups is that they can be duplicated.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Books, BSD, Conventions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD, TrueOS 0 Comments

09/02/2016

BSDNow 157: ZFS, The “Universal” File-system

I’m a day late posting this because of travel, but: BSDNow 157 has an interview with Richard Yao about ZFS (on Linux?), and more story links. I found the “NetFlix and Fill” article link interesting – those are BSD appliances they are talking about that eat so much of the Internet’s traffic.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

Zeroing does nothing

This makes sense once you think about it: copy-on-write filesystems (like Hammer2 and ZFS and probably others) actually do nothing when “zeroing” out filespace.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Hammer 1 Comment

08/31/2016

DSA keys disabled on DragonFly

DragonFly-master (i.e. 4.7) now disables DSA keys by default. If you are using a DSA key for SSH/SFTP/whatever, you should change it anyway. Otherwise, it won’t work without workarounds after your next 4.7 upgrade, or by the time of the next DragonFly release.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, I like alliteration 0 Comments

08/30/2016

GCC update

GCC has been updated by John Marino from 5.3 to 5.4 in DragonFly – the 5.4 closed bug list on the GCC site is a good way to find out the benefits.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 0 Comments

08/29/2016

KnoxBUG: Mark Sumter and “Appreciating ZFS”

KnoxBUG’s next meeting is tomorrow night, and Mark Sumter is presenting on ZFS. Visit if you are near Tennessee.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG 1 Comment

08/28/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/08/28

Enjoy! I am going to have irregular network access over the next week, so this may be the only post for several days.

The Eternal Mainframe. (via)
Compilation and Hyperthreading.
Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool. (via)
Removing the PowerShell curl alias? (via)
Whatever Happened to Wordstar? (via)
Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default. (via)
80’s motion graphics. So very eighties.
Sitting Up: A brief history of chairs. (via)
More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization. (via)
The Amiga Boing Ball Explained. (via)
THE GIF IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE GIF. (via)
The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer. (via)
The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book. I really like what happened there. (via)
Network operating system for a Linux-like file server. “Hey, I’ll write my own operating system” – a common reflex.
The Internet of Poorly Working Things. This is sort of what the OpenBSD project has been about for a long time. The story links to important stuff, which led me to this little genius trick.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading, UNIXish 0 Comments

08/27/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/08/27

I don’t know how I ended up with 3 pfSense items to lead with – it just happened.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, DPorts, DragonFly, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, NetBSD, pfSense 0 Comments

08/25/2016

BSDNow 156: The Fresh BSD Experience

It’s been a very slow news week, but at least there’s a new BSDNow episode: The Fresh BSD Experience. There’s an interview with the FreeBSD Foundation intern, Drew Gurkowski, and a lot of ARM news.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

08/21/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/08/21

Accidental nostalgia theme!

Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. Did I post this before? (via)
A History of Early Versions of Adventure. (via)
Colossal Cave Adventure, linked in comments to the previous.
A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot.
“If you’re a fan of something, tell the creator.“
The One-Second Dash.
Bus1: a new Linux interprocess communication proposal. Here we go again. (via)
Bare-metal writing. Important for the collaboration of Jim Henson and Raymond Scott for IBM.
On the history and justification of the C programming language. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading 1 Comment

08/20/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/08/20

For once, I’m not working on Saturday, so even though this is last minute, at least I’m not in a race with the clock.

ZFS High-Availability NAS. (via)
Steam on FreeBSD. (via)
Reminder: Next SemiBUG meeting is on the 23rd.
Want to help move a cabinet of BSD User Group equipment, in NYC?
“results-oriented and non-ideological“.
BSD, guava. (via)
OpenSSH is/has been deprecating DSA keys. This affects FreeBSD, and probably DragonFly too.
The third “Hosting files using ZFS” class is available.
connect doesn’t restart. OpenBSD pkg_add.
OPNSense is at version 16.7.2 and gained a team member.
DiscoverBSD for 2016/08/15.
Linux kernel, the port. (via)
MidnightBSD 0.8 out. (via)
UEFI multibooting: FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG, DragonFly, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OPNSense 0 Comments

08/19/2016

Pulseaudio removed from dports

There’s been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DPorts, DragonFly, Goings-on 3 Comments

08/18/2016

BSDNow 155: Cabling Up FreeBSD

BSDNow 155: no Allan, but an interview with Myke Geiger about using FreeBSD in an ISP role, and a bunch of news items.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

08/17/2016

Optimizing your kernel

There’s been a number of commits lately around higher optimization levels for your DragonFly kernel. It looks you can even set it systemwide. Boot code remains at -O; any higher level will make it explode. Is this safe? I have no idea!

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 1 Comment

08/15/2016

Buildworld for -current users

If you are on DragonFly-current, AKA DragonFly 4.7, make sure to perform a full buildworld on your next upgrade. Tomohiro Kusumi changed a Hammer ioctl, and the buildworld is needed to keep everything in sync.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Hammer 0 Comments

08/14/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/08/14

A manageable batch of links this week.

Hackers Make the First-Ever Ransomware for Smart Thermostats. IoCrapT.
A Brief History of Email Apps. I like the layout. (via)
Chinese Hunting Chinese Over POP3 In Fjord Country. Long and worth it.
Ring Message Bus on RS-232.
it’s hard work printing nothing.
The lost infrastructure of social media. (via)
Quadrilateral Cowboy’s Code Is Now Open Source.
Simplenote now open source. Except that’s the only client, not the server. Being allowed to repaint someone else’s house is not home ownership.
The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol. (via)
Mental Models. (via)
HPE Acquires SGI For $275 Million. Linking for SGI nostalgia. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Spaceplan. A clicker game, and very pretty. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading 0 Comments

08/13/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/08/13

The Lumina release is the highlight of the week.

Lumina 1.0.0 released. It’s a BSD-first desktop environment, hooray!
OpenBSD Gaming Resource. I’ve wanted this for all BSDs – just hopping through ports/pkgsrc/dports. (via)
OpenBSD binpatches and package updates.
xautobacklight.
FreeBSD Core statement on recent freebsd-update and related vulnerabilities.
OpenBSD removes armish support. (via)
n2k16 hackathon report: guenther@ on RELRO support in binutils and arch specific cleanup.
tmpfs on its last legs. For OpenBSD.
200 packages with the greatest number of patches. In pkgsrc.
Anyone used a TrueNAS system?
Enlightenment on OpenBSD! Dunno about those last steps…
When BSD and Ubuntu meet on the dance floor, magic should happen.
new shadow passwd functions.
FreeBSD on a tiny system; what’s missing. (via)
Ha!

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, pkgsrc 8 Comments

08/11/2016

BSDNow 154: Myths, Pi’s & Features, oh my!

It’s a good week to learn: BSDNow 154 has no interview, but a lot of tutorials, including ones on GhostBSD, Enlightenment, Steam on FreeBSD, and so on.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Goings-on, Periodicals 4 Comments

You probably didn’t use this anyway

The last bits of Linux emulation have been removed from DragonFly. It’s 32-bit, so it’s been unsupported since DragonFly went to 64-bit only with the 4.0 release. Also, some other 32-bit only items are gone, including the cs, ep, ex, fe, and vx network drivers. It’s almost impossible that anyone was using it, but it’s notable because that’s some… 15-20k lines of code gone? Removal of unused code is also positive.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 4 Comments

08/10/2016

IPI benchmarks in DragonFly

Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was “improved IPI signalling”. He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on 0 Comments

08/09/2016

OpenSSH, OpenSSL updates

Because this always happens just after I create a DragonFly release, there’s a new version of OpenSSL. However, this is for version 1.0.2. 1.0.1 is what’s in the release, and it’s supported through the end of the year.

OpenSSH has a major version bump in DragonFly, to 7.3p1. This means some features – specifically patches for High Performance Networking – are no longer there, and you’ll get an error if your config file requires them. Either remove the options from your config, or install OpenSSH from dports.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Committed Code, DPorts, DragonFly, Heads Up! 0 Comments

08/08/2016

ACPICA and a program inside

Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal ‘coding language’, called AML? I did not, but it’s in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

Changes for vmstats

If you’re one of the people who can easily read ‘systat -vm’ output, the data presented there has been modified. If you’re not one of those people, it’s a good way to monitor system health.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 0 Comments

08/07/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/08/07

Getting esoteric this week.

Oh… That’s why the servers are down every night! (via)
Terminals Are Weird. (via)
Making industrial controls network highly available/redundant. An often untouched area of system administration.
The Inner JSON Effect. (via)
Notes on Post-Post-Modern-Modern Programming. (also via)
GCHQ: Boiling Frogs.
How not to fix Government IT. (this and previous via I think?)
Restoring Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto, day 4: What’s running on the system. (via)
Surprises of the Faraday Cage.
51nb’s Thinkpad X62 with Broadwell i7 available as complete laptop. (via)
Protecting Networks with SATAN. I remember this! (via)
Ops School Curriculum. (via)
Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices. Computer on a swappable card. (via)
random failures. Entertaining links to RNG usage failures.
Typefaces for Source Code Beautification. (via)
The Blog That Disappeared. Why I self-host. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Mea Culpa. (via)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading 0 Comments

08/06/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/08/06

Slightly calmer this week.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OPNSense, pfSense 0 Comments

08/05/2016

Garbage[37]: Throttling

Garbage 37 is out, with talk about their format and timing, OpenBSD material, and more Chromebook discussion.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

DragonFly notes elsewhere

Here is some coverage of the DragonFly 4.6 release, which may be interesting to read because of the comments: Hacker News, Hacker News again, and lobste.rs.

A reaction to the initial creation of DragonFly I never saw before, and Matthew Dillon’s followup. (via)

I like the summary in the very first comment of this story on DragonFly removing page-zeroing.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on 0 Comments

08/04/2016

BSDNow 153: Big Int Trouble

It’s Thursday, so that means BSDNow 153, with a title inspired by the lead news item, “my int is too big”. (No, not spoon, int.) No interview this week, but lots of links.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Goings-on, Periodicals 0 Comments

For VPS users, an ISO

Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Someday you will need this 1 Comment

No more page zeroing

After some testing of different ways to pre-zero out memory pages, Matthew Dillon came to the conclusion: page zeroing doesn’t matter any more. The idea dates all the way back to CSRG, and he’s removed it from DragonFly.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Committed Code, DragonFly 0 Comments

08/02/2016

DragonFlyBSD 4.6 released

DragonFly 4.6 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, or update your source files and build – my users@ email describes the steps.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Heads Up! 2 Comments

NYCBUG InstallFest tomorrow

If you are near New York City, NYCBUG’s InstallFest is happening just before 7 PM Wednesday at the usual Stone Creek bar meeting location. Go, see what strange hardware turns up.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG, Conventions 0 Comments

07/31/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/07/31

A mix of hard thinking and jokes today.

Notes on notation and thought. (via)
How has BitKeeper changed since it was used for the Linux kernel. (also via)
McBullseye and the Hidden Network.
I found six late 80’s Sysadmin posters in Imgur. Not really 80s.
Comic-Con and FOSS Comic Book Solutions.
A set of custom unix-like utilities that any developer could benefit from.
How NOT to get help in open source. (via)
The Delphi Method Techniques and Applications. (via)
Wot I Think: Quadrilateral Cowboy. Aggressively retro-styled.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Duelin’ Firemen.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading 0 Comments

07/30/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/07/30

I did all of this in a hour, because I had so many tabs saved from during the week. Don’t get overwhelmed!

EuroBSDCon 2016 schedule has been released.
OPNsense 16.7 released.
2016Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
SemiBUG has a Twitter. Here’s their last meeting, and the next is 8/23.
August 3rd: NYCBUG Installfest. Go just to see what weird hardware shows up.
Attacks against FreeBSD Update components. (via)
How do I dual boot FreeBSD 10.3 with Windows 10?
Steam on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. (via)
ZFS and RAID.
OpenBSD 6.0 pre-orders up.
OpenBSD 6.0 to be released September 1, 2016. (via)
EuroBSDCon 2016 talks and tutorials. (via and via)
DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/25.
Why FreeBSD? by Hamza Sheikh.
pfSense 2.3.2 is out.
AWS VPN config supports pfSense 2.2.5+.
FreeBSD 11 Beta2 is available.
n2k16 hackathon report: Stefan Sperling on dhclient bugs, iwm(4) issues.
Will switching to FreeBSD give me an advantage over Linux when it comes to gaming?
Translation Status for 1.0.0. (Lumina)
one reason to hate openbsd.
Status of wireless support for MacBook Pro (late 2011)
Am I doing it wrong?
VirtualBox 5.x finally on FreeBSD.
Some notes on our new generation of ZFS-based file servers.
A Grand Experiment by Leo Laporte. Shifting to BSD. (via)
Announcing PacBSD (Formerly named ArchBSD). (via)
OpenBSD: Release Songs: 6.0: “Another Smash of the Stack”. (via)

Bonus DragonFly items, sent by Rolinh on IRC:

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG, Conventions, DragonFly, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, pfSense 0 Comments

07/29/2016

Media: Laporte Has Landed and ACPI Pals

Recently published: BSDNow 152, “The Laporte has landed!“, with an interview of Leo Laporte and his move to BSD, and also garbage[36], with some OpenBSD release conversation scattered in there.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 2 Comments

HEADS UP: world needs rebuilding

I’m a bit late on this, but: If you are using DragonFly-current, you will need to rebuild world. If you are on 4.4, this won’t matter until you go to 4.6, and you’d be rebuilding world and kernel for that anyway.

(4.6 will probably be tagged this weekend.)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Heads Up! 0 Comments

07/25/2016

DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 available

DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 has been tagged. You can pull it directly from the master site in img or iso form (check your local mirror instead if possible), or shift to the new tag.

“Where is RC1?” you may ask? I tagged the first release candidate some days ago, and this bug was immediately found right after. It was easier to go right to RC2 once a fix was found.

This candidate will probably lead directly to a release version, so if you want to run the release version exactly, wait a few days.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on 5 Comments

07/24/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/07/24

Off-the-beaten-path links this week. Strap in!

The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99. (via)
Magnetic core memory reborn. (via)
Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Bunnie Huang.
Why I’m Suing the US Government – also Bunnie Huang.
Old, special phone numbers. I’ve used 800-444-4444 a lot when tracing lines.
The Wanton Role-Playing (WaRP) and Mini-Six game systems. (via)
Brief interviews with very small publishers. (via)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. (via)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers. (via previous and here)
A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute. A PDF, and infinitely useful. (via)
I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But I Miss My CDs. (via I lost it, sorry)
This used to be Ethernet. (via)
turn up the hope (report from the HOPE convention from Ted Unangst)
VimGIFs. (via)
HyperTerm, an open-source in-browser terminal emulator. (via)

Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: Permanent Wink.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Conventions, Lazy Reading, Someday you will need this 0 Comments

07/23/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/07/23

Adding a new “BUG” category, cause there’s enough ongoing BSD user group activity these days that it’s a reoccurring theme. That makes me happy.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, BUG, Conventions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OPNSense, pkgsrc 0 Comments

07/22/2016

NVMe and IOPS

Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

garbage[35]: Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

Garbage 35 is up, with news about ChiBUG, an OpenBSD hackathon, and the ritual shaming of computer equipment.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions, Periodicals 0 Comments

HOPE starts today

HOPE starts today in New York City, and if you are going, there’s at least one BSD presence at the show that could use volunteers.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Conventions 0 Comments

07/21/2016

BSD Now 151: Fuzzy Auditing

Fuzzing sounds cute, but it’s about finding security problems, not checking for adorable guinea pigs or llamas or something like that. It’s also episode 151 of BSDNow. It looks like there’s no specific interview this week, but plenty of interesting topics and links listed.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

i915 update to 4.4

the i915 support in DragonFly now matches the Linux 4.4 kernel, which is good news if you have a Broxton, Skylake, or Cherryview processor, plus it adds a variety of fixes.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 0 Comments

07/20/2016

Looking at your battery

If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

07/19/2016

UEFI install story

I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly 0 Comments

07/17/2016

Lazy Reading for 2016/07/17

It’s a nerdy Lazy Reading today. Well, nerdier than usual, I think.

Favorite Networking Links? Help a TA! Multiple good links there.
UNIX Helps Put Out Fires.
How to Write a History of Writing Software. (via)
Canonical’s Snap: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. PC-BSD already did similar packaging – and stopped. (via)
Acorn and Amstrad. (via)
Dudley Buck’s Forgotten Cryotron Computer. (via)
Unix for Poets. (PDF, via)
Remembering Roger Faulkner, UNIX Legend. (via)
The Megaprocessor. That’s the biggest CPU ever I seen. (also via)
Biohacking for Newbies: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Getting an NFC Chip Implant.
bug.n. For those who like wmii, i3, Xmonad, and so on, but are stuck on Windows.
Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Lazy Reading, UNIXish 0 Comments

07/16/2016

In Other BSDs for 2016/07/16

I’m meeeeellllllltttinng!

About Devio.us
Let’s Encrypt client from BSD in C. (via)
ZFS Deadlock: ‘Directory of Death’. (via)
BSD vs. Linux (2005) Old, but new comments at the source link.
DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/11.
“PAM Mastery” tech reviewers wanted.
pkgsrc-2016Q2 is out.
Errata and patches released! OpenBSD.
my int is too big Related to previous link, I think.
TXLF 2016 Recap.
mandoc-1.13.4 released.
usermount being removed from OpenBSD.
Are you in Scottsdale, AZ, and want to talk about I assume fiction or BSD?
(late update) LibertyBSD 5.9 is out.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Books, BSD, OpenBSD, pkgsrc 0 Comments

07/15/2016

Reminder: move your Hammer cleanup

A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: DragonFly, Hammer, Someday you will need this 0 Comments

garbage[34]: Bursting with excitement

Among other things, garbage[34] brings up joshua stein’s desire to form a BSD user group near Chicago – contact him if you’re near.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, OpenBSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

07/14/2016

150th BSDNow, with a sprinkler

BSDNow has reached their I think semicentennial episode, “Sprinkle A Little BSD Into Your Life“. For this episode, they interview Jim Brown about BSD Certification and his FreeBSD-running sprinkler system, plus more news.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: BSD, FreeBSD, Periodicals 0 Comments

07/13/2016

UEFI booting and manual installation

karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly, Someday you will need this 1 Comment

07/12/2016

Two tips for video and audio

That’s one tip per subject, really. If you need to set up a ‘video’ group for xorg, here’s the one-liner to do so. If PulseAudio annoys you, which is not uncommon, ‘chmod -x /usr/local/bin/pulseaudio’ and it’ll go away.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Device support, DragonFly, Someday you will need this 0 Comments

07/11/2016

ipfw3: lockless in-kernel NAT

It’s exactly what the title is: ipfw3 now does NAT in-kernel, without locking. I have no benchmarks to point at, unfortunately. The commit has usage examples.

Posted by Justin Sherrill Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly 2 Comments