Probably because of the C-state changes, Sepherosa Ziehau wants people to use a new set of sysctls instead of the hw.cpu_mwait* ones – at least on x86_64. This won’t affect you if you aren’t already familiar with them, probably.
It’s now possible to reach deeper power-saving C-states with DragonFly, thanks to work from Sepherosa Ziehau. It’s possible to have it auto-adjusted by setting two sysctls.
I put in the application for Google Summer of Code 2014, for DragonFly. Will we get in for a 7th year? I hope so!
(I still want more mentors; contact me if you’re interested.)
I managed to miss this because of reasons: BSDNow is running a contest. Come up with a tutorial that can be used ‘on-air’, and you can win a custom-made pillow showing the boot screen of the BSD of your choice. It’s bizarre but cool.
Edit: the body text of the contest notes that the contest ends January 31st. Hmm… might be too late for a winning entry.
I already asked this question on kernel@, but I’ll repeat it here. Who is interested in mentoring for DragonFly, for Google Summer of Code 2014? The org application period is starting today, and it would be neat to do this for a seventh year in a row.
Lots of randomness this week. That’s great!
- Facial animation, then and now, and now. (via)
- accessmaincomputerfile.net. Some of these are real, or at least made with ‘real’ parts. (via)
- Writing more maintainable shell scripts. (again, Bash-specific.)
- Nancy Householder Hauge’s stories about working HR for Sun Microsystems relatively early in the life of the company: parts one, two, three, four, five, six. (via)
- The Descent to C. C programming for people not used to C. Written by the fellow responsible for PuTTY. (via)
- Access Windows through SSH. It’s confusing.
- It’s not a bug, it’s a… (found via)
- The Magic of Strace. (via)
- SSD Reliability. Not really a statistics-based study.
- The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art. It goes far deeper than you’d expect.
- Related: ‘ascii art’ tagged on Tumblr. (via)
- Amiga nostalgia, via the Apple app store.
- Why I like Java. This is perhaps the best description of the language I’ve seen.
Your unrelated link of the week: it’s two links, for the two very rare German episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
For once, I got this mostly done before late Friday night!
- OpenBSD on the Beaglebone Black.
- DiscoverBSD’s January 28th roundup.
- Automated FreeBSD Panic Reporting. More people need to do this.
- A report from the n2k14 OpenBSD hackathon.
- New to me: CHERIBSD. Capsicum, implemented in hardware, is a rough summary.
- Python is going to 3.x by default in pkgsrc.
- OpenSSH 6.5 is out.
- PC-BSD 10 is out. (release announcement)
- FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Final.
- Sendmail is moved to 8.14.8, and bmake to 20140101 in FreeBSD.
- NetBSD has announced several 5.x and 6.x patch level changes.
- Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower, 2014 Edition.
The latest BSDNow video is up, with the normal array of recent events and an interview of George Neville-Neil. The interview is about the new FreeBSD Journal, which should be out… today? The site says “Coming in January”, so it must be soon.
If you have an Intel-based system, and are running DragonFly master, there’s new c-states (power-saving modes) for you to try. Sepherosa Ziehau posted a note about testing and feedback.
There’s been periodic commits updating the USB4BSD support in DragonFly; I haven’t been linking to them because they are generally incremental. However, it’s good to (re?)mention just how you can build DragonFly with that new USB support.
xf86-video-intel-2.21.15 should now work on your DragonFly system. I don’t see it in dports, yet, though.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
There’s a (rescheduled) BSD installfest happening in an impromptu fashion at Suspenders Bar in New York City, tonight at 6:45. You can also buy tickets for NYCBSDCon there, for less than the online price since it’s direct. There’s another chance to buy them for less on Wednesday at Ear Inn, nearby. (See first link for details.)
Finally, a relatively quiet week.
Writing more efficient shell scripts.
The Occultation of Relations and Logic: Exposing the Hidden Meaning from within Shadows and Unix Command Lines. Piped shell commands seen as a set of relations. This is the most analysis I’ve ever seen of a command line. (via) Also related.
Perl Secret Operators. (via)
As a followup on last week’s Curse of the Leading Zero link, Thomas Klausner points out Python 3.0 explicitly stopped reading leading zeros as the prefix for octals.
The current Humble Weekly Sale (through the 31st) is all roguelikes. Dunno how many of them run on non-Windows. though.
Mastering Vim in Vim. Lots more ‘learning Vim’ suggestions where I found this link.
Not possible to have happen; I don’t believe it. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: 50 years of tape. Cassette audio tapes, that is. (via)
Back to relatively normal volume, this week.
- FreeBSD 10 is out.
- OpenBSD got electrical funding, and is now holding a funding drive.
- new openssh key format and bcrypt pbkdf. A new key format for OpenSSH, and how to switch to it – only available in OpenBSD as of this writing.
- I did not know this: There’s a pfSense store, with shirts, preloaded USB sticks, and various appliances – I have one of the Netgate FW-7541 models, notable in that I’ve never had to do anything with it after initial setup; it just runs and runs. There’s a pfSense hangout/webcast for paid support customers this Friday the 24th, too.
- Open Source FreeBSD 10 Takes on Virtualization. From a saved Google search.
- Undeadly has an explanation of the new signed packages setup for OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/01/14 roundup.
- FreeBSD now has OpenSSL 1.0.1f.
- NetBSD now has a wscons/Intel GMA driver.
- PC-BSD 10 is almost out, and here’s their weekly digest talking about it. Also, apparently PC-BSd and GhostBSD share some installer code? I’m not clear on this.
- CBSD – FreeBSD jail management. (via)
- Slides and audio from Brian Callahan’s recent OpenBSD presentation at NYCBUG are up.
- OpenBSD has a qla(4) driver, for Qlogic fiber channel HBAs, and ubcmtp(4), a Macbook touchpad driver.
Episode 21 of BSDNow is up, with the usual variety of material. There’s an interview with Colin Percival, known for work on FreeBSD and Tarsnap, along with other content.
There’s a new ACPI version in DragonFly, and Sascha Wildner wants you to update your BIOS, just to be sure.
Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.
Brad Fitzpatrick showed up on the users@ list and mentioned that for DragonFly to be supported in Go, it needed to show up in the Go Dashboard with building reports. I now have the Go builder running on pkgbox32/pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org. Check the builder page to see status.
Note: Installing the port of Go from Dports works just fine; this is the mechanism for testing Go on a per-commit basis for the people who work on Go – so a ‘fail’ notice on the builder page doesn’t necessarily mean anything, unless you are developing Go itself. This may already be clear to you.
Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)