The max number of CPUs on DragonFly just went from 63 to 64. This is really just a side effect of preparation to move up that limit, but I am entertained by the single-digit bump.
Are you running a Hammer filesystem on a low-memory system? You may get some warnings. It’s possible to tweak some settings to accommodate it, or just deal.
I bring the audio and the visual today.
- The History of Mana. (via)
- Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from. (via)
- Futuristic User Interface 16. (video)
- Floppy table. The storage space is clever.
- As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software. This time, it’s Rust. (via)
- Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!” It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere. (via)
- Best of Vim Tips. (via) Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
- vimawesome.com. Pretty! (via)
- The Internet of Newsletters. A reaction (and a good one) to social media. (via)
- Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
- “I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
- Awww, it’s cute.
- Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars. And a counter-argument. (both via)
- Modern tech in 1977 Atari style. (via) Did I link this before? I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
- Sorta related: Betamaxx. (via)
- “Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
- Lisp implementation in sed. (via)
- Unix: having fun with diff.
- Visualizing Algorithms. Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap. (via)
You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis. I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.
This week seems relatively quiet; possibly because school is out and the weather in the northern hemisphere is nice?
- PC-BSD 10.0.0.2, the release, is out.
- The PC-BSD text installer now supports full-disk encryption.
- Where KDE is Going, part 1. (via)
- Another OpenBSD GSoC project summary.
- procfs in OpenBSD is probably going to be removed.
- Hooray for more cross–pollination.
- Thanks to Emulex for supporting BSD.
- csup is gone from FreeBSD; mentioned for nostalgia purposes.
- FreeBSD now has fine-grained CTL locking.
- The EuroBSDCon 2014 schedule is up. (hey, there’s DragonFly in there!)
Predrag Punosevac noticed that turning on pf was slowing his machine down. Rearranging the rules fixed a lot of it for him. However, Matthew Dillon decided it was time to make pf work concurrently instead of in a single thread, and 24 hours later, it does. Quick, someone benchmark this!
BSDNow 043 talks with Marc Espie of OpenBSD about packaging, goes through updating your BSD system (all of them? I haven’t watched yet), and discusses a number of other links.
If you are upgrading a DragonFly 3.6 system to 3.8, make sure you have the absolute latest version of 3.6 first. A few people have had a crash during install of the new initrd, which leaves the system in an unbootable state.
There’s a fix now in 3.6 from Joris Giovannangeli, so updating 3.6 and then moving to 3.8 will ensure this doesn’t happen. He posted a heads-up notice too.
(Why, yes, that is why shiningsilence.com was down for some hours today… With Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner’s help, I was able to copy bits of /boot and /usr from a live CD back on disk and get online again.)
Did you try to install DragonFly relatively recently and it never made it past the bootloader? Apparently there’s a bug in some BIOS when using a smaller USB drive to install. The loader checks multiple places for information, and if it checks somewhere that’s ‘farther’ than the end of the disk (i.e. 6G on a 4G USB key), the machine locks up.
Matthew Dillon and Kyle Davis spent a good number of hours figuring this out today, and Matt committed a fix. So, if you were bit by this problem, try a -LATEST image about 24 hours from now and see if it works.
O’Reilly is running a 50% off special on a variety of books on electronics, with coupon code WKECTRC. I’m posting it now because it only lasts for this week.
Update: another offer just popped up in my email – 50% off various “web performance and operations” books with the code CFVLTY4.
BSDDay 2014 is happening August 9th in Argentina, and the call for talks is out – there’s been DragonFly speakers and visitors there before.
Again, a backlog from last week means this week is fat.
- Non-classical processor behavior: How doing something can be faster than not doing it. Confusing but interesting.
- Rudd Canaday’s blog. One of the people behind UNIX, though not as well known. His stories have some very interesting glimpses into early computing. (via)
- Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine. Lisp machines get talked about as if they were the last remnants of a superior, extinct precursor race. Maybe they are? I’ve never touched one. (via)
- Mapping the decentralization movement. I can get behind this idea. (via)
- KnightOS, an operating system for z80 calculators. (via)
- The SSD Endurance Experiment. (via)
- The first Photoshopped image. (via)
- Does your capacitive load purr?
- The very worst subject lines.
- Facebook has built its own switch – and it looks a lot like a server. Not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Open Compute idea, but the source article for the link has some useful references to equipment that you can actually get, unlike the Facebook doodad.
- UNIX: $42,000. (this and other links via this thread.) (update: that link was to a FTP server at Bell Labs, which appears to be down… darnit.)
- The end of Freshmeat, and a surprise link to the origins. (via)
- Aggregate hardware and software use patterns from The Setup. A sort of crowdsourced ‘effective tools’ report. Not necessarily perfect – Aeron chairs are popular, for instance, but I’d pick something else.. In an odd coincidence, a former teacher/coworker of mine is #3 on The Setup right now. (via)
- Happy World Productivity Day.
- A three-sided die, which I didn’t think was possible.
- 8088 Domination, part 1 and part 2. Full-motion video on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 chip from 1981.
- The Early History of Smalltalk. It’s a long read, but a good one. (via)
Your unrelated links of the week: My side hobby I never mention here is baking. I looked up a word I didn’t know, found out about an ice cream type I’ve never seen, started reading about odd things to do with eggs and pressure cookers, and now I’m confused by the possibilities. No narrative point here; I just need to get in the kitchen.
I have a backlog from stuff I missed last week while traveling, so we all benefit!
- PC-BSD 10.0.2-RC2 is out.
- PC-BSD will be at SouthEast LinuxFest.
- Here’s the roadmap for Lumina, PC-BSD’s new desktop environment.
- DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/06/16.
- FreeNAS vs. NAS4Free. Didn’t need to be 8 pages. (via)
- Peter’s pf tutorial is very popular.
- The freeze for pkgsrc-2014Q2 has started. (I’m a bit late on this one.)
- pkgsrc has a new Pkgsrc Management Committee.
- This thread, “Best pdf viewer in pkgsrc?” may be useful even if you aren’t on pkgsrc.
- NetBSD gained vmx(4) from OpenBSD.
- NetBSD now has pigz 2.3.1, which apparently stands for ‘parallel gzip‘.
- Here’s one OpenBSD/GSoC project status update; I haven’t seen others.
- Another OpenBSD desktop project started.
- BoringSSL. (via) Already, benefits.
- Ways to test pf.
- FreeBSD/gnats has gone away, and none too soon.
- Again, I love to see cross–pollination.
- The July and August NYCBUG meetings: timekeeping and OpenBSD ports. Here’s some notes on what to expect for the August meeting.
Sepherosa Ziehau implemented a UDP echo response tool, which not surprisingly meant he also had some UDP performance improvements. As he points out in the commit, it makes lockless firewall state tables possible.
BSDNow’s 42nd video is up, with an interview of Bryce Chidester and a tutorial on chaining SSH connections.
The dports binary packages built for DragonFly 3.4 are removed. If you have a 3.4 system, you can build from source, or preferably just upgrade. Note that the 3.4 release images are still out there if needed.
I tagged DragonFly 3.6.3, at Sascha Wildner’s suggestion. Why do that when there’s a 3.8.1 out? This way there’s a version of 3.6 that has all the fixes included, including the recent OpenSSL updates. This ‘final versioning’ should probably be done for every release. I’ll work on final images.
The 3.8.1 tag was planned for tonight; I’m waiting to find out if there needs to be a new set of binary ports for 3.8.1 before I tag.
I tagged DragonFly 3.8.1; you can see a list of the changes in the tag message. New images are built. If you are already running 3.8.0, a normal make src-update and rebuild will get you everything.
Sascha Wildner has added the mrsas(4) driver, which works on a variety of LSI Thunderbolt devices – a variety of RAID cards, names for which are listed in the commit message. Note that as of right now, these devices by default get taken by the mfi(4) driver, so you need to take extra steps to get mrsas(4) used.
The obvious joke should be “how can you tell?” Anyway, the csprng in DragonFly has been updated and IBAA is being used more often, and there’s more updates on the way.
I’ve been short on this week (worked 19 hour day Tues/Wed, ug), so the list is short.
- All Is Lost, the results of feeding the worst possible player stats into the NBA Y2K game. I don’t watch basketball or play sports games, but the forced scrambling of the game is entertaining. The author did a similar thing to Madden NFL. The animated GIFs are the best. (via)
- UNIX Uniforms. (via)
- UNIX: Root Cause Analysis. Always makes you sound fancy to say that.
- jwz says: stop centralizing things.
- The Burroughs B6500 Status Report. That’s some oooooold computing there. (via)
- textql: SQL queries on CSV/TSV, which is something I’ve silently wished for before. (via)
- Not sure what this is or the source, but it’s neat looking.
Your unrelated link of the week: Another Cyriak music video, this time for Bonobo. (via)