Sepherosa Ziehau has an IPv6 patch for you to try. What’s it do? I think it improves performance under multiple streams of traffic, but that’s from looking at the code and totally guessing.
Matthew Dillon committed the start of a Hammer 2 cluster API. I noticed, while looking at the commit, that there’s a design document, a freemap design document, a changes list, and – most important for anyone interested – a TODO list.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
A lot of this was done early; last week had a lot of interesting stuff turn up. Maybe because we’re coming out of a extreme winter in the northern hemisphere, and people are feeling a bit more energetic?
- How to Eat Your Entropy and Have it Too — Optimal Recovery Strategies for Compromised RNGs. One of the authors, Yevgeniy Dodis, is I think speaking at an upcoming NYCBUG meeting.
- This may not surprise you, but the GNU version of ‘true’ can sometimes return false.
- I still have a weakness for 80s vector graphics.
- Matching one of the links from last week, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game online. (via)
- The History of Information. Mesmerizing, like reading Wikipedia in serial order. (via)
- Drifting into Fragility, a look at complex system failure analysis at WETA. Notable for the offhand comment that they’re rendering on 49,000 cores. That’s… over 9,000! (Old joke but still fun.) (via)
- pleaserun, an attempt to abstract away the systemd vs. everything else argument. Also, a perfectly descriptive name. (also via)
- Unix: Pranks that sysadmins play.
- Token ring: still used. Eh, could be worse; could be frame relay.
- The Mid-Career Crisis of the Perl Programmer. The leading tl;dr segments are dead on, but the essay itself rolls out into a conversation about skills for older programmers and what choices you make. (via)
- Maury, Innovation, and Change. Open data and common APIs – in 1850. (via)
- How to save read-only files in Vim. A step better than the usual advice.
- UNIX Magic. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Conet Project, recordings of numbers stations, at the Internet Archive. (via the Orbital Operations newsletter)
Bonus timewaster: 2048. (via multiple places)
Another week with lots of links.
- DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/03/10.
- PC-BSD Digest 21 – 10.0.1 release.
- FreeBSDNews needs a new maintainer. (am I the old man of BSD blogs? Yeesh.)
- FreeBSDNews also has two FreeNAS videos.
- OpenBSD is starting on USB 3 support. I assume this is separate from USB4BSD?
- OpenBSD has moved to OpenSMTPD by default.
- Hubert Feyrer has a summary of recent ARM developments in NetBSD.
- The 2014Q1 freeze for pkgsrc starts effectively today, lasting two weeks.
- Eric Radman pointed out that non-linear editing is possible on the BSDs using Blender, and here’s a tutorial.
- FreeBSD had an ABI change, so rebuild carefully on master.
- Man pages added by Microsoft to FreeBSD. It makes sense, but it still makes me pause.
- Apache is out of OpenBSD base.
- The window manager cwm has been made portable, meaning it’s not just for OpenBSD now.
- IPX and AppleTalk have been removed from FreeBSD.
In part because I asked him, Sepherosa Ziehau benchmarked 10G ix(4) with 2 ports on DragonFly. The results? Good, both for bandwidth and for CPU usage.
Uh oh, I don’t get the pun this time. Anyway, the newest BSDNow episode is an interview with Eric Turgeon of GhostBSD, and a disk concatenation tutorial for NetBSD and a tutorial that isn’t uploaded yet. (Wait, now I get it.)
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.
DragonFly has moved from the old USB stack to USB4BSD by default. That means:
- If you are already using USB4BSD, you will want to remove WANT_USB4BSD from your kernel config.
- If you have trouble, switch back to the old USB.
- There’s some drivers that are not yet converted; help with them would be appreciated.
- A full kernel/world build and ‘make upgrade’ will be needed in either case.
Sascha Wildner’s announcement email has all the gory details, including the kernel config changes to move back to the old USB setup. This is of course in master; 3.6 users are unaffected.
This week blew up with links fast.
- An 8-bit integer overflow turns Mahatma Gandhi into “255 points of pure nuclear rage“. That’s one of the more entertaining sentences I’ve ever typed here.
- “DevOps” is one of the new buzzwords lately. The most shallow approaches seem to equate it with automated deployment, but it really seems to be about project management within IT. It’s probably of most use within larger companies that have enough staff to build up department-internal silos. I don’t know if it’s a new strategy or a way to deal with the rigidity of larger corporate IT groups. (via)
- mosh: the answer to ssh annoyances. (via)
- Why I use Emacs. I like “retrogrouch.” (via)
- The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks. You know your system/program has really made it when it starts it own plugin/theme/library/mod/extension/app store collection. (via)
- Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. “DHTML was the Twitter Bootstrap of the time.” (via)
- What is a web framework? A temperate description. (via)
- Reflections on Eric Raymond’s “Myth of the Fall”. Makes a good point: open source is the best when it’s for architectural, interoperational reasons.
- Bitrot and atomic COWs. Will make you worried about your already-RAIDed data. (via #dragonflybsd)
- Thoughts on style, the TLS, and errors. I agree with the note about ‘affirmative
conformationconfirmation’. - Technology has changed. Tech items from a decade ago. Everything was silvery and round back then. (via)
- A little farther back in time, Thomas Dolby Explains How Synthesis Works To Kids & Ghosts. 1989, and yes, he plays that song. (via a mailing list for yetis)
- Related to nothing: it’s odd to see your great-grandfather mentioned in a random place on the web.
- The 2014 7-Day Roguelike Challenge has started. (via)
- Ow my eyes.
Your unrelated video of the week: This trailer for Crawl. This is a roguelike multiplayer cross-platform game, though I don’t know if it would work on BSD. The important thing: the voiceover narration is fantastic.
Links everywhere this week!
- ZFS 101. This might be the same material presented at NYCBSDCon; I’m not sure.
- Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script.
- The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/03.
- PC-BSD Weekly Digest 20.
- Theo De Raadt questions for a Slashdot interview.
- OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 is released.
- Introduction to FreeNAS development.
- GhostBSD activity. (via)
- FreeNAS is now 64-bit only. (via)
- OpenBSD package building on larger machines.
- pkgsrcCon 2014 is happening June 21-22 in London, UK.
- The schedule for BSDCan 2014 is out.
- Merkletrees. Don’t know what it’s for; just like the name.
- NetBSD has a versioning system called ‘bikeshed’. It appears to mostly be plans at this point.
- OpenBSD has added qlw(4), a driver for QLogic ISP SCSI HBAs.
- Apparently some quirks from decades ago still survive.
- Random is more random on BSD than on Linux. (see last paragraph) (via)
- If you keep an emergency towel, you may get this joke.
Hammer’s ability to stream to remote disks is great, but what if you have storage that uses some other file system? Antonio Huete Jimenez put together a shell script that will dump out the contents of a Hammer PFS, for upload to whatever. Read the README for the details.
If you are upgrading packages on your DragonFly 3.6 system, and you have docbook installed, there’s an extra step needed because of the moving around of several docbook packages. If you don’t have docbook installed – nothing to see here.
Episode 27 of BSDNow is an interview with Will Backman of BSDTalk. It is unfortunately a straight-ahead interview, and not an Epic Rap Battle.
Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
I followed up with Google on why DragonFly isn’t in Summer of Code this year. It is exactly as I suspected: they want to get new organizations in. DragonFly’s been doing it for 6 years, so they are picking new orgs over returning ones. This is apparently the same reason NetBSD isn’t in this year, either.
(Honestly, I can use the break.)
Sascha Wildner has updated arcmsr(4), which brings in support for the Areca ARC1214, ARC1224, ARC1264, ARC1284, and ARC1883 models, from FreeBSD. Please test if you have the appropriate hardware.