September 2012 – DragonFly BSD Digest

It's been an extremely busy week for me, but I still have a batch of links here.

Thomas Klausner sent a link to some very pretty images of real dragonflies.
Datacenter details, from Metafilter. I've been in places like that, and so has my brother.
Bug report humor. (related to Ubuntu ads, previously linked here.)
Sometimes this site/my domain gets weird spam. I got different versions of this SEO spam recently. No story here, just a thing that I've seen others fall for.
Honoring Bill Moggridge. He designed the first laptop, pictured in that article. It looks like my memory of the Apple ][c, which is probably not an accident.
It's always nice to see mentions of DragonFly show up in Linuxish places.
No, really. Use zsh. That's the article's title, not necessarily my recommendation. (via)
Michael W. Lucas talks about logging only sudo failures. It's mentioned in a throwaway paragraph, but he also makes the excellent security point of having a separate, inaccessible-to-most logging host.

Your unrelated link of the week: Did you know one of the original ideas was to name DragonFly ~~"TortoiseBSD"~~ "TurtleBSD"? Probably not the best name.

Sepherosa Ziehau has some suggestions for anyone looking for some kernel hacking. They're mostly based around busdma(9). dragonflybsd.org appears to be down right now so I'm linking to the MARC kernel@ post.

There's a post on the mailing list tech-pkg@netbsd.org of currently broken packages for the next quarterly release. It's not a lot of stuff, but if something you need is on there, don't worry too much. If you follow the thread through its replies, there's a lot of fixing going on.

Sascha Wildner's added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.

Remember how I pointed at BSDEvent's collection of slides from 3 different BSD conventions? Well, now's it is a lot more conventions. As in multiple years of convention slides.

MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It's not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It's worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn't know existed.

Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I'm not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year... anyone want to step up?

This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you're running DragonFly 3.1, of course.

The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.

I don't think I've seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation. (via)
Where the red-black tree name came from. A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1's data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2. (also via)
Someone with a HP passport login want to help this guy? He just needs to reinstall Windows in IDE mode, or perhaps find the right sysctl to toggle.
The acme editor, from Plan 9. I didn't realize it's 20 years old.
Speaking of editors, Replace in Multiple Files with Vim. I haven't seen the argdo command before, or the Vim Ninjas site. Their color schemes article is useful just for the screenshots. (via)
Adbuntu. It's not as bad or as inconsequential as most reactions would lead you to believe, but advertising within an OS seems heavy-handed. The BSD model has been to use the operating system as a vehicle for selling hardware, and that's been much more successful. (see iOS, PC-BSD.)
Where Did the Internet Come From?
The map for Adventure. (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Victorian Sci-Fi. It's not just a reference list, it's a link to a lot of the original material, since copyright no longer applies.

I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman. As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems. There's some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I'll be cleaning those up manually.

The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted. The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address in the config page for that mailing list. This won't affect a lot of people, since most people want list output in their mailbox, but there's at least a few I've fixed that way.

BSD Events linked to the presentations for FOSDEM 2012, BSD-Day Europe 2012, and BSDCan 2012. There's a lot of reading there for you - and even some video.

The combination of Mihai Carabas's successful Summer of Code work on the scheduler and the recent Postgres benchmarking got Matthew Dillon to start thinking about making UNIX domain sockets work better, a shortcut around the buffer cache, scheduler improvements and then a new default scheduler, along with a change in idle CPU behavior. The best place to understand all the changes is in his long post to users@. We should have benchmarks soon to show the performance improvements from all this.

Smartmontools will catch impending disk failures about 2/3 of the time, so it's useful to run it and interpret the results. The results can be somewhat complex, though. However, it can be useful to look at other people talking about the output and glean knowledge from the context.

A discussion of why root automatically lists dotfiles with ls and all other users do not led to a long thread that includes some UNIX history. There's some useful and some not-so-useful parts in the thread, but it did indirectly produce a way to reverse the listing effect itself.

Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release. Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences. (view the PDF in his post.) Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I'll document in a future post. I haven't found a reference to the exact decision Postgres made on how to handle memory; please post a link in comments if you know a good source.

See the note on pkgsrc-users@. The next quarterly release, pkgsrc-2012Q3, should be fully baked by the end of the month, if all goes well.

Yay!

What will you have: tea or chai? Mapping out all the names for tea around the world. I love etymology and tea, and I know there's some tea drinkers reading... (via)
Speaking of tea, this London universal tea device sounds awesome. (via)
Uncle Miod's machineroom. There's some pictures of some old hardware buried in there that was incredibly expensive when it first came out... (via)
This security issue is interesting because it's a new kind of problem, but also depressing because it's a new kind of problem. (via)
Apparently a packaging system is always a good idea. (explanation)
A patient explanation of /usr/local and a bit of UNIX file system history, too. (via)
The history of Unix from where it happened, Bell Labs. I'm pretty sure I haven't linked to that before. Interesting trivia note: playing the original Space Travel game in 1969 cost $75 for the computer time.(via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf is having their annual $3+ comics sale. There's some really good books for cheap, there. Of special note: From Hell, about Jack the Ripper, drawn by my favorite artist. Wizzywig, mentioned here before as a fictional mishmash of real stories and rumors about hackers and BBSes and other things people need to be a certain age to remember. The Ticking, drawn by Renée French, whose art should be familiar to fans of Plan 9 or Go.

Probably not for a few weeks, at least.

As seen in this pkgsrc-users@ post from Thomas Klausner, the freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q3 starts on Sunday and continues for (probably) two weeks before the release.