If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!
- Don’t panic and keep forking Debian. It leads to devuan.org. For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not. (via)
- Advent Planet. Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
- On file formats, very briefly. I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read. (via)
- Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via) 6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
- Bumper Sticker Computer Science. More “epigrams”. Some dated, some excellent. (PDF, via)
- ParkyTowers thin clients. Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
- The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game. See Softalk link below too. (via)
- Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
- Grand St. short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
- A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide. (PDF, via) Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
- The strange world of computer-generated novels. (via)
- Why my book can be downloaded for free.
- Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI. (via)
- The Softalk Apple Project.
- Unix: tricks with history.
- Clip Art is dead. Awww.
- RowHammer. Ugh. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
- Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
- Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
- ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
- How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
- BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
- A week of pkgsrc #5.
- FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
- Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
- BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
- A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
- A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
- New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
- nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
- BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
- Coreboot on the BSDs.
- More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
- Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
- Is it time to give BSDs a try?
- Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.
This page, Varialus et Anisoptera, set up by… I’m not sure of the real name but it’s ‘varialus’ on IRC – has a detailed description of the DragonFly install process and installation of MATE, plus extra notes. I always find these sorts of cheatsheets entertaining.
The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.
The DragonFly boot menu has been cleaned up a bit, and Fred, the dragonfly drawn on DragonFly, is now in better color. In fact, there’s even an option to turn him blue.
Update: I wanted to see what this looked like, and I realized screenshots might help everyone else.
In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:
- The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default. (that’s bit me in the past)
- There’s a new callout*() implementation.
- cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates.
- libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which because of library versioning support, won’t cause compatibility problems for older vs. newer DragonFly versions.
- C++11 support is also now available.
I’m running behind so this is a bit old, but: Matthew Dillon commited svc(8), a service manager program. Take a look at its man page to see the potential uses.
Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.
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)
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.
Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.
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.
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.
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.
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@
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.
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.
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.