August 2016 – DragonFly BSD Digest

DragonFly-master (i.e. 4.7) now disables DSA keys by default. If you are using a DSA key for SSH/SFTP/whatever, you should change it anyway. Otherwise, it won't work without workarounds after your next 4.7 upgrade, or by the time of the next DragonFly release.

GCC has been updated by John Marino from 5.3 to 5.4 in DragonFly - the 5.4 closed bug list on the GCC site is a good way to find out the benefits.

KnoxBUG's next meeting is tomorrow night, and Mark Sumter is presenting on ZFS. Visit if you are near Tennessee.

Enjoy! I am going to have irregular network access over the next week, so this may be the only post for several days.

The Eternal Mainframe. (via)
Compilation and Hyperthreading.
Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool. (via)
Removing the PowerShell curl alias? (via)
Whatever Happened to Wordstar? (via)
Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default. (via)
80's motion graphics. So very eighties.
Sitting Up: A brief history of chairs. (via)
More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization. (via)
The Amiga Boing Ball Explained. (via)
THE GIF IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE GIF. (via)
The IBM System/360: the first modular, general-purpose computer. (via)
The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book. I really like what happened there. (via)
Network operating system for a Linux-like file server. "Hey, I'll write my own operating system" - a common reflex.
The Internet of Poorly Working Things. This is sort of what the OpenBSD project has been about for a long time. The story links to important stuff, which led me to this little genius trick.

I don't know how I ended up with 3 pfSense items to lead with - it just happened.

It's been a very slow news week, but at least there's a new BSDNow episode: The Fresh BSD Experience. There's an interview with the FreeBSD Foundation intern, Drew Gurkowski, and a lot of ARM news.

Accidental nostalgia theme!

Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. Did I post this before? (via)
A History of Early Versions of Adventure. (via)
Colossal Cave Adventure, linked in comments to the previous.
A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot.
"If you’re a fan of something, tell the creator."
The One-Second Dash.
Bus1: a new Linux interprocess communication proposal. Here we go again. (via)
Bare-metal writing. Important for the collaboration of Jim Henson and Raymond Scott for IBM.
On the history and justification of the C programming language. (via)

For once, I'm not working on Saturday, so even though this is last minute, at least I'm not in a race with the clock.

ZFS High-Availability NAS. (via)
Steam on FreeBSD. (via)
Reminder: Next SemiBUG meeting is on the 23rd.
Want to help move a cabinet of BSD User Group equipment, in NYC?
"results-oriented and non-ideological".
BSD, guava. (via)
OpenSSH is/has been deprecating DSA keys. This affects FreeBSD, and probably DragonFly too.
The third "Hosting files using ZFS" class is available.
connect doesn’t restart. OpenBSD pkg_add.
OPNSense is at version 16.7.2 and gained a team member.
DiscoverBSD for 2016/08/15.
Linux kernel, the port. (via)
MidnightBSD 0.8 out. (via)
UEFI multibooting: FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.

There's been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.

BSDNow 155: no Allan, but an interview with Myke Geiger about using FreeBSD in an ISP role, and a bunch of news items.

There's been a number of commits lately around higher optimization levels for your DragonFly kernel. It looks you can even set it systemwide. Boot code remains at -O; any higher level will make it explode. Is this safe? I have no idea!

If you are on DragonFly-current, AKA DragonFly 4.7, make sure to perform a full buildworld on your next upgrade. Tomohiro Kusumi changed a Hammer ioctl, and the buildworld is needed to keep everything in sync.

A manageable batch of links this week.

Hackers Make the First-Ever Ransomware for Smart Thermostats. IoCrapT.
A Brief History of Email Apps. I like the layout. (via)
Chinese Hunting Chinese Over POP3 In Fjord Country. Long and worth it.
Ring Message Bus on RS-232.
it’s hard work printing nothing.
The lost infrastructure of social media. (via)
Quadrilateral Cowboy’s Code Is Now Open Source.
Simplenote now open source. Except that's the only client, not the server. Being allowed to repaint someone else's house is not home ownership.
The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol. (via)
Mental Models. (via)
HPE Acquires SGI For $275 Million. Linking for SGI nostalgia. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Spaceplan. A clicker game, and very pretty. (via)

The Lumina release is the highlight of the week.

Lumina 1.0.0 released. It's a BSD-first desktop environment, hooray!
OpenBSD Gaming Resource. I've wanted this for all BSDs - just hopping through ports/pkgsrc/dports. (via)
OpenBSD binpatches and package updates.
xautobacklight.
FreeBSD Core statement on recent freebsd-update and related vulnerabilities.
OpenBSD removes armish support. (via)
n2k16 hackathon report: guenther@ on RELRO support in binutils and arch specific cleanup.
tmpfs on its last legs. For OpenBSD.
200 packages with the greatest number of patches. In pkgsrc.
Anyone used a TrueNAS system?
Enlightenment on OpenBSD! Dunno about those last steps...
When BSD and Ubuntu meet on the dance floor, magic should happen.
new shadow passwd functions.
FreeBSD on a tiny system; what's missing. (via)
Ha!

It's a good week to learn: BSDNow 154 has no interview, but a lot of tutorials, including ones on GhostBSD, Enlightenment, Steam on FreeBSD, and so on.

The last bits of Linux emulation have been removed from DragonFly. It's 32-bit, so it's been unsupported since DragonFly went to 64-bit only with the 4.0 release. Also, some other 32-bit only items are gone, including the cs, ep, ex, fe, and vx network drivers. It's almost impossible that anyone was using it, but it's notable because that's some... 15-20k lines of code gone? Removal of unused code is also positive.

Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was "improved IPI signalling". He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.

Because this always happens just after I create a DragonFly release, there's a new version of OpenSSL. However, this is for version 1.0.2. 1.0.1 is what's in the release, and it's supported through the end of the year. OpenSSH has a major version bump in DragonFly, to 7.3p1. This means some features - specifically patches for High Performance Networking - are no longer there, and you'll get an error if your config file requires them. Either remove the options from your config, or install OpenSSH from dports.

Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal 'coding language', called AML? I did not, but it's in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.

If you're one of the people who can easily read 'systat -vm' output, the data presented there has been modified. If you're not one of those people, it's a good way to monitor system health.