This weeks' BSDNow has an interview with Edicarla Andrade & Vinícius Zavam about FreeBSD-powered robots. Yep, robots. There's other news there too, but it's not as interesting unless it is about lasers.
There's a new digital library in Kisumu, Kenya - and it's running DragonFly for file storage.
Hammer2 now has inode indexing, which Matthew Dillon was avoiding while trying to create more efficient hardlink support. The result is now with that problem solved, more updates can come in: NFS support, mtime updates, output changes, code removal, and lots of other changes, not all of which I'm even linking.
If you have a NVMe chipset under DragonFly, you now can use a special utility to retrieve status information: nvmectl. Right now, only 'info' is implemented.
I was traveling and completely missed this, even though it's on a regular schedule: garbage[31]: Pirates of the Corebootean.
If you are running DragonFly 4.5 (i.e. bleeding edge), Sepherosa Ziehau made an ifnet change that will require a full buildkernel/world if you want things like netstat to keep working.
Did this early too, but ended up with lots of links.
- The cost of things is getting out of control.
- We’re pretty happy with SQLite. (via)
- A Research Unix Reader, by Douglas McIlroy. (via)
- Twenty years of free software, part 1: Ikiwiki. (via)
- Spaceship Generator: A blender script that procedurally generates 3D spaceships. (via)
- Evolution of C programming practices – Unix 1973–2015. (via)
- The Rise of New Operations. This all seems oriented towards a very specific type of company. (via)
- The Forrest Gump of the Internet. Open internet vs. closed. (via)
- The RC2014 Retro Computer. (via)
- Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer. (via)
- The Greek clock.
- Episode 3: A New Breed of Intellectual Property.
- Dennis Ritchie's cousin.
- vmtouch - the Virtual Memory Toucher. (via)
- Why determining location by IP is often wrong.
- Comet photos + GIFs.
A good amount of user group material this week.
- Installfest, Spread the word at HOPE! BSD Installfest, July 22-24, New York City.
- Vote up if... Dragonfly should be on the Desktop!
- My BSDCan “OpenPAM & BSD” talk
- SNIA DSI Recap. Big numbers!
- NetBSD Introduction by Siju Oommen George.
- HardenedBSD vs OpenBSD. (via)
- Distrowatch reviews four more live upgrade methods, including PC-BSD and OpenBSD. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/06/20.
- BSD Magazine for May. (A little late, but this is the newest issue.)
- June meeting minutes from SemiBUG.
- If you want to install RetroBSD or LiteBSD at the July NYCBUG meeting, Brian Callahan has a list of hardware sources for you. (I did not know of Olimex before...)
This is limited to some users of specific Intel video chipsets, but: if you get odd screen artifacts in X, the 'vesa' driver may work just fine for you. Or turn acceleration off. Or set 'drm.i915.enable_execlists=0' according to zrj on #dragonflybsd.
(Updated to reflect all the answers in the thread and elsewhere.)
BSDNow 147 is available, with an interview of Glen Barber and Peter Wemm. They're talking about release engineering, as you may have guessed from the title.
If you didn't already know about it, you will find this useful: DragonFly has a tuning(7) man page, about getting the best performance from your system. Matthew Dillon recently updated the man page with some tips about SSD setup.
Tomohiro Kasumi wrote a lengthy explanation of what "@@" means, in the context of the Hammer file system. It acts as a sort of signifier for each actual Hammer pseudo-file-system, since it's possible to null-mount these anywhere in DragonFly, under all sorts of names. Don't trust my summary, though - read his.
I got me a retro Teasmade, so as you read this, I'm probably waking up to a fresh cup. It's not very practical, but it is fun.
- Mastering Programming. (via)
- Should you be scared of Unix signals? (via)
- The earliest versions of the very first C compiler. (via)
- Typosquatting programming language package managers. Well, there's a new worry I never had before. (via)
- Programmable hardware: Barefoot Networks, PISA, and P4. (via)
- Episode 2: Shenzhen and the Maker Movement.
- Choo-choo-choosing a new every day machine.
- Unix Auth against AD or LDAP Suggestions.
- Why the hype for docker?
- “Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4”. Two tracks, one stable, one breaking API every 6 months. (via Rolinh on IRC)
- David Li code-based animations. Prettier than I make it sound. (via)
- IF Only: Text Adventures For People Who Hate Guessing The Verb.
If you didn't already look at it, BSDNow's summary of BSDCan events is worth going to; it's complete enough I deliberately left BSDCan links out of here. Undeadly has an OpenBSD-specific summary too.
- ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t. Sorta-BSD. (via)
- The Ultimate NetBSD Router. (Thanks, Tobias)
- Shawn Webb Tells You All About HardenedBSD Project.
- Using FreeBSD as a File Server With ZFS. Online course.
- Latest issue of the FreeBSD Journal now available.
- 2016 FreeBSD Community Survey.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/06/13.
- OPNsense 16.1.17 released.
- BSDCan 2016 Recap. From iXSystems.
- Lightly Experienced OS X and GNU/Linux User Looking to Learn [Free]BSD.
- Unik - The Unikernel Compilation and Deployment Platform (uses NetBSD's Rump) (via)
- First image of someone trying to sell a commercial version of BSD 4.1 in 1982 (Fortune Systems 32:16)
- ART single thread performances. (via)
garbage[30] has BSDCan trip reports, OpenBSD news, and complaints about CVS, among other things. CVS is an easy target but I want to hear it.
There are USB devices out there that are sort of like a mouse, as in they work as a pointing device, but they don't show up as a mouse device. For example, the PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller. It's possible to pipe the events from this or similar 'weird' devices to sysmouse, and use it the way you'd expect, with this fix from user tautology.
BSDNow episode 146 is available, with an interview of Hans Petter Selasky about USB and FreeBSD. There's also a nice collection of links to BSDCan material, including video from the event.
As part of his NVMe work, Matthew Dillon found I/O speed so fast that CRC checking actually got in the way of disk activity. He's brought in a new CRC algorithm called xxHash. He also brought in Mark Adler's hardware iscsi_crc32 implementation, but did not add it to Hammer2. There's some work on read-ahead operations too, to deal with the NVMe throughput.
(Posting earlier than the usual 'In Other BSDs' content, because it's happening tomorrow.)
NYCBUG is meeting tomorrow, June 15 at 18:45 Eastern time. It'll be at Stone Creek Bar & Lounge, 140 E 27th St. in New York City. The speaker is Shawn Webb, and he'll be talking about his HardenedBSD work in "Adventures in HardenedBSD".