April 2012 – DragonFly BSD Digest

A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you're running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you'll want to update.

I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week. Not too much! Enjoy.

Best ad for a front-end designer ever. (via) It will make sense if you used the Web in 1995.
A while back I linked to a article about Valve's development process. Now, here's the Handbook. (PDF, via) As I said before, they've arguably taken the best parts of open source development work and used then to create a workspace. These best parts are not the ones usually talk about when they say, "open source company", though. There's a Harvard Business School paper that talks about the carrot or stick approach to motivation, and I think Valve nailed it. Read the PDF, cause it's more fun than this.
Animated Engines. (via) Animations that show how different engine types work. I find them oddly soothing. Also, I finally know more about a Wankel Rotary Engine outside of its existence as a punchline in a Monty Python sketch.
The best reaction to space mining. (via)
LOL memory, to the moon.
A BSD-specific fork of ekg2. Never used it; just saw the BSD part of the name.
"Imagine that you're crazy enough to think about building a search engine." (via)
"Before you write a patch, write an email".
If you're going to fund open source work, you should fund the boring stuff for maximum effectiveness.
Volatile Software (via) You may or may not agree with the strategy, but I can agree with the sentiment. For better or worse, BSD is generally a more sane/stable platform.
Twitter CLI. (via) Ruby-based, and seems like an actual good idea, not just a hack to see if it can be done.
"FreeBSD Device Drivers" for a pre-release 40% off. Some of the contents may apply to DragonFly. Or perhaps you enjoy device driver documentation?
Go Right (via), for anyone who played a game console more than 10 years ago.
VIM Adventures. (via) Surprisingly fun.

Your unrelated link of the week. Youtube Poop. As far as I can tell, 'Youtube Poop' are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames. Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude. Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before. Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan. I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn't I? (Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL, though this version is apparently a bugfix, not a security fix. Still need it anyway, since it disabled TLS 1.1 in an unexpected way. See the OpenSSL changelog entry at "[26 Apr 2012]" for details.

Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects. Here's direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:

Vishesh Yadav - Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
Mihai Carabas - Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
Loganaden Velvindron - Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
Ivan Sichmann Freitas - 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels

(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)

Sepherosa Ziehau added "Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm" in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy. It's on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.

There's a few pkgsrc packages that might be going the way of the dodo, soon. There's a few more that need love, so speak up if you use them. Maybe you can be the Somebody™ that fixes them?

Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer. He's 'profmakx' on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD's USB infrastructure - which I am looking forward to, tremendously.

Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:

Vishesh Yadav - Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
Mihai Carabas - Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
Loganaden Velvindron - Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
Ivan Sichmann Freitas - 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels

(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately. So if you didn't get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there's some great ideas out there that I'd like to see happen.

Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org. If you're doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help. (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)

I'm still working on building them. I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon. Sorry!

Enjoy!

I like the sentiments here about Instagram. (via) I can see why it was popular, but not how it represented anything but a cosmetic tool, dependent on other services.
Waxy.org turns 10. I relink (reblog? I don't know) material from the links page on waxy.org, because Andy Baio has a keen eye. That article has links to various high points over the last 10 years, so it's worth setting aside some of your time and looking at previous features. Come to think of it, he started that only a year before I started this Digest.
Supercomputers installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All the way back to UNIVAC. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) This picture is one of the more realistic I've ever seen about rack installation.
RFC6540: IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes. (via) YES.
The Story of BSD and Open-Source Linux, unfortunately incorrect, starting with the headline.
40 years on: Why Unix standards still matter. A brief note about the Single Unix Specification. There's some implication that Unix was involved in the moon landings; was that the case? I didn't think so, since at least a chunk of the moon landings predate Unix existing. (i.e. before the Epoch.)
A photo followup on the one PHP article from last week. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
From the same site as the PHP article, tmux is sweet as heck. It's nice to see the positive points of tmux defined outside of licensing. Also, it serves as a good tmux configuration checklist.

Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well. The BSD tag might be the most useful.

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!

Michael Lucas's worthwhile book, SSH Mastery, is currently having one of those sudden price cuts on Amazon - for the paperback version, about 25%. Now it a good time to nab it before the price bounces back up.

Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There's also the vquota(8) man page.

Because of several recent commits, quotas can be set. They aren't persistent yet, so they'll vanish on reboot. The standard disclaimer applies, as this is new.

Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here's a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.

It's a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week's summary.

There's a 'flickr doomsday clock'. The concept is entertaining, even though the result it warns about is pretty bad. (via) There's a sort of assumption that external sites hosting huge amounts of our personal data will never go away, or that there's always an easy way to deal with it if they do.
Dragonfly - the knife.
Jack Tramiel died this past week. He's responsible for Commodore, and the Amiga, and later owned Atari. There's a DragonFly connection; Matthew Dillon was known for his DICE Amiga C compiler, among other things.
Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers on the Internet. (pdf, from sephe on EFNet #dragonflybsd) Hopefully I'm summing this up correctly: too many devices buffer network data when there's congestion (and even when there isn't congestion) instead of saying "It's congested" through the normal TCP mechanisms, with the end result of much higher latency for everything. bufferbloat.net talks about it more, and Matthew Dillon found a good paper about it.
"PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat." (via) I'm just enjoying the metaphors in the third paragraph.
And that led me to this: PHP: A fractal of bad design. The list of problems is larger than I thought. As in, it went from comedy to tragedy in the same document.
Peter Hansteen talks about port knocking. (via) As a side effect, the article provides a good checklist of how to make your system more secure. "No root login" is already implemented on DragonFly.
Computers Brochures, 50s-70s. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There's a whole bunch of desktop wallpapers in a zip file down at the end. The scans are a bit noisy, but fun to see. I like the layout of the PDP issues.
Whatever happened to UNIX? We're soaking in it.
I mentioned RetroBSD on PIC32 last week, and now here's a picture.
Valve's internal structure sounds astonishingly like an open source project. Everyone has access to the code, project direction is determined by interest, and it's up to you to coordinate with others.
Google as a 1980s BBS. (via, via) It totally works.

Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley's Cabinet Followups. There's about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.

DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What's that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations. (Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)

Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.

If you're curious about Hammer2 development, it's been ongoing, but there haven't been any more juicy commits to point at. Here's one - the start of the messaging system.