I stole Sepherosa Ziehau’s email subject for the title of this post, because that’s exactly what has happened. Gigabit networking cards under DragonFly will perform very well under extreme load – all of them.
As a followup to news that the git feed of pkgsrc through dragonflybsd.org is not being updated, Max Herrgard wrote out how to fetch pkgsrc via CVS, or tarball, or another git feed. CVS is still the ‘official’ way.
Matthew Dillon’s been working to make huge parallel software builds (i.e. dports) go a bit faster, so watch out. This only affects you if you are running DragonFly 3.5, of course.
I’m a bit slow in posting this, but: BSDNow episode 6 is out. Theo de Raadt is interviewed, and a lot of other topics (including DragonFly) are visited. The page listing shows all the areas covered, plus the embedded video itself.
This week just built up and built up.
- UNIXStickers.com. Not really UNIXish. More vaguely free software cause-ish. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hail Mary Cloud and the Lessons Learned. Peter Hansteen’s talk from BSDCan 2013. I linked to some of his earlier comments on this botnet before, but this is the comprehensive summary.
- Dwarf Fortress NYC. A good exploration of how the symbolic representations in Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes in general are not that far from ‘accepted’ artwork and design. (via)
- Killscreen on Salty Bet. Describing Salty Bet out loud sounds like a cyberpunk novel idea from 1998. (via)
- The top 100 inventions of the past 100 years. I’d argue that some of them are not that important, but the photographs are neat. (via)
- Resurrecting APL/360. People go to extremes to recreate not-very-pleasant historical computing environments. (via)
- Facebook and Open Networking Plan. Facebook doesn’t exactly do good, but I do like the idea of separating hardware from software in networking equipment, a la pfSense. (via)
- Polemic: how readers will discover books in future. Sounds awful, and unfortunately a bit feasible. (via, with a great illustration)
- Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance. A lot of the stupid mistakes tech companies make happen because they are uniformly run by inexperienced people. Worse, this is the sort of perspective you only gain with age. (via)
- How was Hangul Invented? I don’t know any Korean, spoken or written, but I find the planned creation of a language interesting. (via)
- History of the Telegraph. I like the physical design of the old models. Also, Western Union was once the largest telecom company in the world.
- A list of free programming books. (via)
- Connecting a payphone to Asterisk. I did a similar thing with a Model 500. Hmm… and this guy has the same initials as me. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.
I got some PC-BSD items this week, too.
- Open Source Snapshot: GhostBSD.
- (Free)BSD and Dropbox.
- FreeBSD finally dumped rcs.
- FreeBSD’s igb(4) driver is updated to 2.4.0.
- FreeBSD’s binutils now has “support for assembling and disassembling Intel Random Number Generator extensions“.
- You can now use ‘athsurvey’ on AR5212 chipset ath(4) devices in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD branched version 11.
- FreeBSD has changes contributed by… Microsoft?
- PC-BSD has added a GUI version of their Life Preserver application.
- PC-BSD has a new ‘pc-zmanager’ program for managing ZFS and disks.
- PC-BSD has branched version 10, I think.
- NetBSD runs on the iMX233/OLinuXino.
- OpenBSD replaced rc4 with ChaCha20. No, I’m not sure what that means. (via)
- OpenBSD now has the vmwpvs(4) driver, for VMWare paravirtualized SCSI.
- OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.1 and Freetype 2.5.0.1.
- OpenBSD supports the AM335x EDMA3 controller.
- OpenBSD supports the RTL8106E and RTL8168G/8111G networking chipsets.
- Diffe-Hellman key size increased in OpenBSD. It’s from NIST Special Publication 800-57, which is unavailable as of this typing because of the stupid U.S. government shutdown.
The pkgsrc repository in git for DragonFly is currently frozen. This is because many people have switched over to dports, and also because it’s a lot of work to keep it functional. If you do want to pull newer pkgsrc material, use cvs and grab it from a NetBSD server.
As the message notes, don’t go switching to DragonFly-current right now, cause there’s a lot of new material in there and it may not be quite safe. (There’s an ABI change that will require all new builds of your ports, for instance.)
If you’re watching for a certain event, dmesg(8) on DragonFly now has a -f flag that will display new output as it’s logged, sort of like ‘tail -f’.
The Radeon KMS driver from FreeBSD has been imported to DragonFly by Francois Tigeot. It still has problems with ttm, but don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of it.
While looking for a different bug, Matthew Dillon made some changes in the way memory usage is totaled in DragonFly. You’ll see this most when using ‘systat -vm 1’ or ‘vmstat’, probably.
Google has a post up about the 10th anniversary of Summer of Code, with next year’s version of the event getting some changes – an increase in the students allocated and in the student stipend, and more events. I’m planning to apply for DragonFly, for 2014.
Google is also doing the Code-In, for 13 to 17-year-old students, again. DragonFly participated in the first year (the only BSD to do so), but sat out last year. I’m not currently anticipating DragonFly being involved for 2013, cause of reasons. (It’s a lot of work!)
John Marino has accomplished the major task of updating gdb/kgdb, to version 7.6.1 for DragonFly.
Hiroki Sato posted to the users@ list about AsiaBSDCon 2014. It’s happening the 13th to 16th of March in 2014. Material from 2013’s convention should be going up soon, and the Call for Papers is already out.
BSDTalk 232 is 15 minutes of conversation with Thomas Cort about “Minix, NetBSD, and Summer of Code”.
Franco Fichtner recently received commit rights for DragonFly. This is so he could import mdocml, a OpenBSD-originating replacement for groff and man page display. Mdocml has been mentioned before on the Digest, and there’s a downloadable book. (See the more-interesting-than-it-sounds History of UNIX Manpages there too, but I digress.)
One advantage of using mdocml, as I understand it, is that groff is no longer required to view man pages. The only thing left in DragonFly that required a C++ compiler was groff. So, rebuilding could be a bit faster, and a bit less complicated.
Here’s the part that makes me happy: Changes made in DragonFly promptly made it back into NetBSD’s mdocml. Other changes rolled from DragonFly back into OpenBSD, too, and mdocml is in FreeBSD 10, though I don’t have a src change to point at right now. It all circled back around to DragonFly, too. It’s really neat to have a BSD-grown cross-BSD product.
(Incidentally, if you have a Thinkpad and keyboard issues, Franco has a patch for you to try.)
I’m going for pull quotes and dedicated paragraphs this week, just to mix it up.
The Slow Winter. It’s about the history and trends of chip design, if you can believe it. “Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.” I love it so much. (via)
Richard Stallman on 30 years of GNU. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the basic point is correct. “If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. ” (via multiple places)
When Pipes Get Names. For some reason, I’ve never had to deal with named pipes – directly. I’ve used them via other programs, of course.
The person who invented Whack-A-Mole also created dedicated email terminals in the 80s/90s called Anti Gravity Freedom Machines. All those smaller ‘Maker‘ projects seem unenthusiastic compared to this guy. Anyway, his warehouse full of robots blew up. I haven’t found pictures yet.
Joblint, a job description checker. This has more value than I thought. I’m curious about statistical results over a large number of jobs. Take a look at those warnings, too – they’re mentioning the possible dark side of a lot of job ‘benefits’. (via)
This XOXO presentation by Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, makes some good points about work, going against countervailing wisdom to some extent. “You can work on a lot of projects, but you will only get a couple of opportunities to work on something long-term.” Pinboard is one of those businesses that remains relatively successful without having to get bought by Google to return any profit. That’s a sort of success I find fascinating. (via)
CERN has created an in-browser version of… the first web browser. It accurately displays like a green-screen terminal, including key clicks. Watching the screen draw gives me flashbacks to playing MUDs.
Adding Vi To Your Zsh. Can you add vi-like keybindings to tcsh? (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Art comics links. It’s a link to more links, but it’s all worthwhile stuff. Be prepared for difficult but rewarding reading.
Less straight source links this week.
- FreeBSD 9.2 is out.
- FreeBSD no longer has GNU ar or GNU ranlib, or BIND.
- FreeBSD has an Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution update. (OFED info) (helps DragonFly)
- NetBSD has initial support for the OMAP1-183 board.
- NetBSD has updated terminfo to 20130607.
- NetBSD has imported FreeBSD’s new implementation of NFS – does not run yet.
- NetBSD 6.1.2 and 6.0.3 are out.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is over, and here’s the branch announcement.
- There’s some discussion of long-term support in pkgsrc, an idea I like.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 presentations for OpenBSD are online.
- OpenBSD now has a built-in snmp client. Undeadly has a description.
- OpenBSD now has ntpctl(8), for querying ntpd.
- There’s a new MaheshaBSD video on YouTube. (it’s a custom FreeBSD setup, though DragonFly versions exist too.)
Related to DragonFly: Patrick Welche updated glib2 in pkgsrc, and is interested in hearing how it works for DragonFly users. If you have pkgsrc on your system and it’s not a quarterly release, try building t.
There’s 30 days left to register for vBSDCon… except that 30 day mark was a week ago, but I didn’t get it posted. So now there’s 19 days. If you were thinking of going, go for it. This is I think the only east coast BSD convention in the US other than NYCBSDCon.
The BSDNow video series put out another episode already: Stacks of Cache. I didn’t realize this before, but they broadcast their episodes live as they are done on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC.
I had this to post, and managed to miss it: Daniel Flores, whose Summer of Code project was Hammer compression, posted a final report.