Please welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Johannes Hofmann. He earned this by coming up with a significant chunk of DragonFly's upcoming KMS/915 support, and it's now easier to just have him work directly than to be constantly committing for him.
It's week 6, I think, and the midterms are coming up. Here's the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Since there's a newer set of dports binary packages uploaded, I thought I'd spend my weekend upgrading, to catch up.
'pkg upgrade'
And that was it. Well, not really. I had to dump and restore my Postgres databases, cause of the switch from 9.0 to 9.2 as default. I had to build php5 from source to get the Apache module. Those two things together took longer than the entire download and upgrade of the rest of my system - some ~200 packages?
Michael W. Lucas wrote a blog post about pkgng and Ansible on FreeBSD. Will it work on DragonFly? We already have pkgng on DragonFly in the form of dports, and Ansible... might work? Please, someone try.
So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week's entry when last week's Lazy Reading was posted.
- The FatMac cooler. Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
- I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
- Note the embroidered dragonflies.
- Early mobile and video phones. Decades early. Look at the slideshow.
- Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
- Best Open Source games. Dunno how many work on any BSD. (via)
- The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
- The GREP test, an excellent standard for code. (via)
- What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky? (also via)
- Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
- People are really starting to pile on Microsoft. (I already started) Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market. Maybe ubiquity is a better word?
In part of a long thread about dports packages on the users@ list, Matthew Dillon notes that a new set of packages for i386 and x86_64, for 3.4 and for "3.6" (meaning bleeding-edge DragonFly, even though that's numbered 3.5) is mostly uploaded. He also notes that a Haswell-processor-based blade server for DragonFly is in the works, so much of the dragonflybsd.org infrastructure is going to move from his house to a datacenter, with the benefits that provides. It'll also help automate binary package building.
Sepherosa Ziehau added SO_REUSEPORT to DragonFly. I don't know how the mechanism works, because he didn't include a description, but he did include a explanation of just how much it reduces CPU usage during as-high-as-physically-possible network load. He even wrote tools to test it more heavily.
Here's what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
- pkgsrc now has Ruby 2.0.
- NetBSD now has wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and dhcpcd 6.0.3.
- NetBSD supports Nanjing QinHeng Electronics devices via puc(4). No idea what that is.
- NetBSD also supports Intel 8 Series SMBus devices, which I mention just because finding the right drivers for SMBus devices always frustrated me on Windows.
- NetBSD's hostname has some new options.
- FreeBSD supports Coleto Creek devices: SATA, SMBus, and Watchdog. Not sure if that's a brand name or a special type of construction. Also, AR934x and the Qualcomm Atheros DB120 development board, and the Broadcom BCM5725 network controller.
- OpenBSD now has sshd supporting encrypted host keys. I can't find an open mail archive with OpenBSD source-changes as an archived list, so I don't seem to be able to link to it directly.
The Observe, Hack, Make 2013 festival is coming up at the end of the month in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, it's already sold out, but there's going to be at least one DragonFly developer there. (credit to Matthias Schmidt for letting me know about the festival)
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is "Security and Cryptography", but there's plenty else.
I'm late for this, even though the students weren't. Mea culpa! There's been a lot of discussion on IRC, in EFNet #dragonflybsd, between the students and various DragonFly developers.
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Last week was relatively light, but somehow this week I read a zillion interesting things. It's been too dang hot to do much else, other than flop in a chair and point a fan at my head.
- Chopping up CSV files. Tabular format will never die, and for good reason.
- Reanimated: The story of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. I like this idea that someone can just keep working on a project long after the originating company disappeared, just to improve it for their own benefit - no mention of open source or even a plan for it. See also Oblivion Lost or Complete for some of my personal game fix/improvement modification favorites. (via)
- I don't think this systemd/Debian news is accurate in its reasoning, and they don't say what's going to happen with non-Linux Debian. However, it's still crappy, any way you slice it. (via)
- The paranoid #! Security Guide. Lots of details that won't necessarily apply to your BSD system, but the descriptions of various attacks are neat. (via)
- Another reminder of how easy it is to deal with a lot of text data at a Unix-ish command line. (via)
- Those ssh password attempts are still going, and have been for a decade. (via)
- Don't care about the story, but I like the dragonfly illustration.
- Linus Torvalds swears a lot. The problem is not 'office politics' as he sees it, but that if you swear all the time as the leader of a project, it becomes commonplace. Linus really has to really freak out for people to notice something new. There's other issues, like how other people emulate the behavior, but I'm pointing out the 'verbal base sweariness' of a project affects the entire tone.
- Quine Relay, where programming languages write each other. The Ouroboros illustration is appropriate. (via many places)
- History of emacs and vi keys. I like how this shows that the command styles in both editors was shaped by the available hardware. (via)
- Fear and Loathing in Debian^H^H^H^H^H^H/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd). A wonderful rant about the creeping complication of operating systems. Let's place bets on when people start complaining about Linux bloat. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly. This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.
Do you have a Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC? Well good news! Sascha Wildner brought in updated the oce(4) driver from FreeBSD to support Skyhawk models in DragonFly.
(My bad; looked at the wrong oce(4) commit originally and re-reported the import instead of the update.)
I made a hesitant attempt to keep an eye on other BSD source changes over the last week. I complain about needing coverage for the other BSDs, so I'll see what I can do:
- (Parts of?) full-disk encryption support in NetBSD.
- esp (the SCSI board) support for NetBSD/acorn.
- SipHash support in FreeBSD
- SYN Cookie support in FreeBSD.
We've never had a group of student post progress this regularly. It's great!
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Busy, busy week.
- An in-depth programming language comparison. These can be fun for reinforcing your language choices, but also interesting just for the depth of comparison. Spoiler: Java can be crazy slow; Perl can be crazy fast. The page has lots of charts which always make me happy. The quotes at the end per-language are enjoyable. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- PC-BSD is using a content delivery network for their image delivery - that's a good idea. It's very hard to get people to consistently use mirrors, even if they are consistent and local.
- A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts. Nerf guns are fun, charts are great, so that whole article is the bestest. (I think via)
- 1,200 computer interfaces from the movies. See this link for the story, and this link for more details and some new interfaces to that huge quantity of visual information, about visual information.
- 80's childhood. It's linkbait, but I like the sort of burst of how personal electronics looked at that point in time.
Something new and odd: A port of the Hammer (1) filesystem into Go, for go-fuse. As the author has said, it's more for the practice of learning Go and Hammer than for producing anything useful. Still, an interesting way to learn.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
Michael W. Lucas auctioned off his first copy of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition some time ago, with the proceeds going to the OpenBSD Foundation. It was to be signed by OpenBSD developers - which is neat enough, but apparently it was annotated by the developers, too.