If you don’t have an Intel CPU, but still want to perform microcode updates, cpucontrol(8) now supports more recent AMD CPUs.
The default kernel config for DragonFly has changed: Sascha Wildner has added the acpi, gpio_acpi, gpio_intel, smbus and smbacp devices. If you are using a custom kernel, you’ll probably want to add these. If you aren’t using a custom kernel – you should have no negative effect.
I’m already filling in next week’s Lazy Reading links, there’s so much.
- An Open Letter to the Perl Community. Getting from Perl 5 to Perl 6. (via)
- chart.business. (via)
- Teaching an Almost 40-year Old UNIX about Backspace. (via)
- khal, a terminal calendar. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- 10 PRINT, a book about a single-line Commodore 64 program. (via swildner)
- Wireguard, a possible IPSec/OpenVPN replacement. (via)
- ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation. “decentralized social network protocol”, and a first step out of the walled garden. A very pleasant-to-read specification, too! (via)
- My favorite games of 2017. This will eat some hours of your time.
- This week in references: echoes, breakbeats, the new sound of music. The “Breakbeat Deconstruction” video is pleasant auditory history.
- Drummer From Another Mother, a Moog Music product. Listen, it’s the sound of analog! (via)
- USB Killer, now with pyrotechnic payload.
- The Screenless Office. (via)
- System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware. (via)
- Meanwhile is now available on Steam! Plus extra DLC comic! Meanwhile is a physical comic built as a maze, or perhaps nonlinear book, and here it is in software.
Done last minute on Friday, mostly.
- grep your way to freedom. (via)
- Guides: Getting Started & Lumina Theme Submissions.
- Exploring permutations and a mystery with BSD and GNU split filenames. (via)
- pfSense home unit. Follow the thread for some interesting hardware suggestions, including this one.
- OpenBSD <-> projectors. In case of future need.
- OPNSense 17.7.12 released.
- Michael W. Lucas podcast interview.
- “Permissive licensing is wrong?” – No it’s not! (2/2).
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/22.
- How To Run Your Own Mail Server. (via)
- T_PAGEFLT – Working with the NetBSD kernel. (via)
- False rumours or not? False.
- A better looking XDM. (via)
- What would be your elevator pitch to a Linux user on why they should try a BSD distribution?
The title really says it all – if you have a Coffee Lake series Intel chipset, your video is accelerated on DragonFly.
This week’s BSDNow has Spectre/Meltdown followups, plus a turning of the tables: questions for the interviewers.
Rimvydas Jasinskas created a loader.conf(5) hint that keeps various nata(4) devices from attaching during boot. This is super useful if it’s a device that screws up your boot process. and I think it’s also great if you get irritated having something in your dmesg every time about the device you never use, like a CDROM.
DragonFly now has support for the Adaptec 1420. “Now” means since last month, cause I am working through my link backlog.
The ls(1) command has a lot of options (Look at the man page synopsis!). So much so, that the most recent option added in DragonFly is “_”. That’s to show nanotime as part of the -l output. This will be most useful when you have multiple files being created within the same second of time, and you want to see which came first.
Almost all of this was done within 24 hours of the last Lazy Reading. No idea why there were so many good candidates for reading, but I’m happy about it.
- Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker. I like the plan he is working towards, though I’m not sure how to implement it for myself. (via)
- acme-colors, using font faces instead of colors for syntax highlighting in Vim. I really like this, more than Solarized. (via previous link)
- There’s a Solarized theme for puTTY? Found by accident looking up Solarized for the previous link.
- Make the 486 Great Again! Not found via previous link, just to break the pattern. (via)
- Gopher: still active.
- Tetris on a business card.
- Life in Unix V7: an attempt at a simple task. (via)
- UnifrakturMaguntia: a Unicode Fraktur Font.
- Xerox Alto’s 3 Mb/s Ethernet: Building a gateway with a BeagleBone.
- Analog Hard Disk. (via)
- Reading disks from 1988 in 2018. I have a linear foot of disks like this.(via)
- “Facebook is done with quality journalism. Deal with it.”
- The Making of Lemmings. (via)
- Monster Manual, but not the one you remember. (via)
- VintageCG on YouTube. (via)
- Amiga.
Done well ahead of time.
- ELI5: In 2018, what are the pros and cons between Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS in terms of kernel technology and user space tools.
- Adding IPv6 to an Nginx website on FreeBSD / FreshPorts.
- Should I use BSD?
- Certifications…are they worth it? Will they be in the future?
- OPNsense 18.1-RC2 released.
- CPU microcode update code for amd64. Hints of a new firmware update from Intel.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2017Q4 release.
- Interview with Abdorrahman Homaei.
- A need for BSD items at freecodecamp. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/15.
- Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown.
I’m still catching up with the pre-2018, pre-Meltdown commits, so here’s one: Changing the staged packet count in DragonFly changes forwarding rate, for the better – up to a point. There’s probably some specific ratio in the change that makes sense, though I don’t know it.
The Meltdown/Spectre talk continues on BSDNow 229, along with an interview of @newnix, GhostBSD, and other recent news.
The commands rcp(1), rlogin(1), rlogind(1), rsh(1) and rshd(1) have been removed from DragonFly. There’s a net/bsdrcmds port if you still need them… though I imagine/hope ssh is filling the void for everyone.
I’m sure this was needed by someone: morse(6) can now encode and decode Morse code, signified by . and – of course.
I say “one more” like I know when this saga will end. If you are using the devcpu-data port to update your processors, you’ll need to add
microcode_update_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out.
This is almost all link overflow from last week – and next week’s edition is almost complete. There’s a lot to read lately!
- drill if you can, dig if you have to, nslookup if you must. (also via)
- Free-Net history. I grew up with Buffalo Free Net.
- Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system. (via)
- An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM mainframe examined: it’s a key debouncer. (via)
- Open source modular synth software lets you create 70s & 80s electronic music. (via)
- The year we wanted the internet to be smaller. (via)
- A Brief History of sed. (via)
- Legends of the Ancient Web. (via)
- 100 Outstanding Pieces of Audio for 2017. (via)
- Here at the End of All Things, fantasy maps. (via, via)
- Survival Research Laboratories: Inconsiderate fantasies of negative acceleration. For SRL, whatever their machinery looks like it could do, it does. Those aren’t movie props. (via)
- RISC-V, getting more attention lately. Not vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre and open. Here’s hardware. Don’t know if any BSDs run on any of them – but I haven’t looked. (via a number of places)
- THE tinySAURUS GENERATOR. (via)
- Tea if by sea, cha if by land. (via)
A full slate of BSDs this week.
- Church of BSD. From 2005, and it is accurate for that timeframe. (via)
- ADOM, newly updated at 3.0.6, but only at 1.1.1_6 in ports/dports, pkgsrc, and two years gone in OpenBSD. But the ADOM download page lists new BSD versions? I may not have investigated far enough.
- OPNsense® 18.1 Release Candidate 1.
- Does anyone run OpenBSD as a desktop (ie not a server)?
- SMB V2+ client on FreeBSD 11.
- Intel microcode updates now available for NetBSD. (via)
- Bitcoin Full Node on FreeBSD.
- July – September 2017 FreeBSD Status Report.
- Hijacking Your Free Beasties. (via)
- Operating System of the Year 2017 : NetBSD Third place. (via)
- A positive look at GhostBSD 11.1. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/08.
- OpenBSD-current now has ‘smtpctl spf walk’.
The regular maintenance scripts for HAMMER1 assume that it’s mounted at the time of cleanup. If you have them unmounted, they won’t go through that regular maintenance, but it’s easy enough to fix.