November 2014 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/11/302014/11/28

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/30

I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week. No simple hacks, these.

Mysteries of the unix kind.
Nerdy trivia about Unix time_t. (via)
PDP-11/04 – Restoration. (via) Very nice pictures.
Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. (all via)
Linux on Obsolete Displays Project Page. (via)
USB Power Issues. That is definitely a hardware problem.
Know Your UNIX System Administrator – A Field Guide. (via)
Fitness machines for big data.
It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source.
Historic Computer Images. Hosted by the U.S. military.
EDSAC, the (only?) computer from the 1940s, is being rebuilt. No keyboard, no monitor.
God’s Lonely Programmer. (via)
Some light reading on lock-free programming.
A Rare Peek into the Massive Scale of AWS. Their capitalization, not mine. (via)
Metastable failure state. (also via)
Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software. (via)
Remote work: an engineering leader’s perspective. These articles never seem to note how open source developers fit this mold. (via)

2014/11/292014/11/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/11/29

Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.

BSD on Mini ITX.
Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/24.
pkgsrc and i386 may have issues on partial rebuild. Or not? Follow the thread.
lang/guile16 is leaving pkgsrc soon.
check-update, a script for finding what packages in pkgsrc need to be updated.
FreeBSD now has libgpio, I think for those general purpose I/O connectors on small ARM boards that are all the rage.
FreeBSD has switched to mandoc.
Your SGI hardware running OpenBSD will now tell you via LCD.
Tools for checking for updated packages on OpenBSD. (read the whole thread)
Conversations about a home PF-based router. “APU units run hot but are OK” seems to be the thread consensus.

2014/11/28

LDAP and DragonFly

Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.

2014/11/27

BSDNow 065: 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops

This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.

2014/11/262014/11/26

XHCI and installing DragonFly

With a recent commit from Sascha Wildner, DragonFly now loads XHCI (meaning USB3) by default. If you had previously tried to install DragonFly via USB stick, and it inexplicably refused to mou t the installer drive… It may work much better now.

2014/11/26

Release followups

There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.

2014/11/252014/11/25

DragonFly 4.0 released!

The 4.0 release of DragonFly is out! Quoting from the release page:

Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.

The more eagle-eyed downloader will notice it’s version 4.0.1, not 4.0.0. That’s because ~~nobody trusts .0 releases~~ I tagged 4.0.0 just before a few useful commits went in, and it’s better to retag to make sure everyone got them. See also my message to kernel@/users@

2014/11/24

Books books books

I’ve placed an image slider over on the right side of the website; it’s all BSD-related books. Each image is linked to a page about the book where you can buy it. It’s not paid advertising, or perhaps advertising at all; there’s no in-kind benefit. It’s specifically books I think people would find interesting to read, and we’d all benefit by the expansion of the BSD ‘ecosystem’.

The most recent edition added is Michael W. Lucas’s FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, which is out in ebook form today, and printed form soon.

2014/11/24

Several DragonFly updates

I’m working on the 4.0 release, but in the meantime, I wanted to point at a slew of updates from Sascha Wildner: ACPICA 20141107, pciconf(8), axge(4), and the kernel part of the netgraph7 Bluetooth stack.

2014/11/232014/11/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/23

Lots to read this week.

The Open Source Financial Developers Association has a very complete calendar of open source events around NYC. (via)
Google Code-in 2014 has announced its mentoring orgs.
Also, Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco. Somewhat free of technical data, but I do like the idea of more software-defined networking. (via)
NSA vs. encryption, 40 years ago. (via)
schmutz. Ah, the joys of Unicode. (via)
Sort of related: this is just mean. (via IRC, I think)
SSHelper. I’m going to buy a new phone just so I can use this. I want my handheld computer to actually be a computer, darnit. This is from the guy who created Apple Writer, of all things. (also via)
List of Physical Visualizations. (via)
After Docker. Docker and similar items appear to be an attempt to change an operating system from a place where you work to a thin wrapping around a program you run. Dunno if I like that. (via)
Barbie, computer engineer, which has created more responses.
A brief history of graphics. Video game graphics, specifically.
The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion. Similar. (via)
I like the concept behind “Let’s Encrypt“, though I quibble with the tools selected. (via)
A video about the Internet in 1995. (via)
“With varying degrees, everyone has this drawer in their house.“
IFComp winners will provide a great deal of reading/playing time.

Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.

2014/11/222014/11/22

In Other BSDs for 2014/11/22

I actually got this started early, for once, instead of completing in a panic on Friday night.

The Move from Linux to FreeBSD. (via)
BSDTalk247 – FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years with Jordan Hubbard. I meant to post this before; lost track.
/var/tmp now links to /tmp on OpenBSD.
OpenBSD now has perl 5.20.1 in base.
Making FireFox less insecure on OpenBSD.
You can peek at what ‘roles’ are being put together for PC-BSD installs. Or just watch this video.
PC-BSD and TrueOS version 10.1 released, Lumina 0.7.2 tagged.
Linux Top 3: PC-BSD 10.1 Linux Mint 17.1 and Mageia 5.
FreeBSD now supports the Trendnet TEW-646UBH wireless adapter.
BSD Router Project (bsdrp) version 1.53 is out.
NetBSD has updated tcpdump/libpcap.
retiring crypt
shtk 1.6 now available.
NYCBSDCon made about $1k for each of the BSDs.
WhatsApp donate $1MM to the FreeBSD Foundation.
DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/17.
Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop?
Book Review: Book of PF, 3rd Edition.

2014/11/20

BSDNow 064: Rump Kernels Revisited

BSDNow 064 (somehow, 64 seems a nicer milestone than 50) links to a huge pile of EuroBSDCon 2014 videos, including 2 DragonFly presentations. There’s also an interview with Justin Cormack, who must be cool; I can tell from his name. There’s a lot more material just written on the page after the video, so I’ll point you at the actual content instead of repeating.

2014/11/19

BSDTalk 248: Matthew Dillon and DragonFly

I hadn’t caught this yet cause I am working extra hours, but Matthias did: Matthew Dillon talks about DragonFly and the 4.0 release for a good 43 minutes on BSDTalk.

2014/11/19

IPFW…3? work

A fellow whom I’ve only seen named as Bill is working on what he calls ipfw2, though technically what’s already in DragonFly is ipfw2, since it’s the second version of ipfw. Either way, he has a project page up describing what he’s done so far, and what he plans.

2014/11/17

Old USB out, new USB in

Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.

2014/11/17

For USB debugging

Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.

2014/11/162014/11/16

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/16

Snow snow snow!

DoomRL, a Doom roguelike. From Hasso Tepper, who correctly pointed out I haven’t been linking enough roguelike material lately.
Unix: Catching up with Unix errors.
True Stuff: Build Your Own Propeller Car. Not so much about the car as about the building part.
Making Internet Local. A deep dive into what everyone calls ‘mesh networking’ and what that really means.
“The alternative Windows Store” I guess sounds better than win64 package manager. Anyway, the idea of a ports collection is becoming universal.
Command-line Unix-style note taker.
Sample the Amen Break. Hey, a Squarepusher video gets in there. (via)
Receiving NOAA Weather Images with SDR. Sounds fun to build, though I know I won’t get to it. (via)
What is the URL to your technical blog? More things to read there.
New Found Sounds, early synthesizers. (also via)
XScreenSaver 5.31. “To make this work I had to add a UTF8 parser to my VT100 implementation”
100-year-old mechanical computer. It does Fourier analysis. (via)
A bread-slicing machine. Looks dangerous and useful. (via)
Stupid Hackathon. (via)

Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics) Watch to the end. “just like a dragonfly” (via)

2014/11/152014/11/14

In Other BSDs for 2014/11/15

Totally last minute.

People still add things to telnet?
FreeBSD has removed faith(4) and faithd(8).
FreeBSD ports now has stack smashing protection on by default.
FreeBSD 10.1 is out. (And PC-BSD follows)
PC-BSd is looking at ‘roles‘.
Printing device trees in OpenBSD.
Munin and pf queues.
Contributing. (Applies to any BSD, really.)
pkgsrc-2014Q3 packages for illumos available.
DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/10.
from the annals of uvm, OpenBSD virtual memory.
BSD Magazine: Hardened BSD.
BSDFan, for Thinkpad fans on any? BSD.
FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is less than a month away. The author’s giving a sudo talk soon, too.

2014/11/142014/11/14

DragonFly 4.0.0RC3 images

If you look at your local DragonFly mirror, you’ll see ISO and IMG versions of DragonFly 4.0.0RC3. Please run, break, and report.

(Check the iso-images directory.)

2014/11/13

A DRM speedup

Imre Vadaz’s recent change to dev/drm, adding kqueue support, has (from anecdotal reports in IRC) made video performance much better. It’s committed to DragonFly 4.0, so it’ll be in the next release.