If you are using gpt(8) to format a disk, Matthew Dillon's added a "init" option. It's similar to 'fdisk -Ib', though don't ask me how to use it because I have always been bad at manual disk formatting.
The default options on the math/py-numpy port slowed it down. Francois Tigeot noticed, and committed a change that takes advantage of all processors. Read his note to users@ for details.
For your Monday entertainment: the boot log from DragonFly on a system with 11 sockets, 10 cores per socket, for 110 CPUs. Plus 8 TB of RAM.
(Skip past the control codes at the start)
10 months until Christmas!
- Five ways to instantly improve blah blah your productivity blah. Useful techniques, described with humor. I need to use the "Analogue Day" one.
- Be Newsletters, the archived index.
- What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death. It used to be Moore's Law that drove replacement, not the choices of the manufacturer.
- Vim Anywhere. (via)
- We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms.
- Ex Libris, about the New York Public Library. (via)
- Fall of Voodoo. So that's what happened to 3dfx.
- Custom game system hardware.
- An Introduction to Digital Computers, a film. Digital as in "not analog", 1969. (via)
- https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/ - I am entertained by the URL, and I understand why this applies to most package managers... but it doesn't take into account the metadata leakage that https would prevent. (via)
- Aaaand here's the counterpoint, which I agree with: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories. (via)
- Futures of distributions. (also via)
- Predictive command line usage, a PDF. That seems odd. (via)
Another across-the-BSDs week.
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- What’s Next for Feature Development in FreeNAS/TrueNAS?
- Description of the 1969 proto-Unix system based on a 2812 line PDP-7 assembly kernel. (via)
- The Known Costs of Security Embargoes.
- Military Grade Data Wiping In FreeBSD With BCWipe.
- “Has Linux lost its way?” comments prompt Debian developer to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years. (via)
- Christos Zoulas's recent NYCBUG talk on reproducible builds in NetBSD is now available as video.
- How do I make quiet build/compile server for home ?
- Libreoffice failing to start after upgrade to 5.4.4.2 40m0(Build:2) (on NetBSD).
- Question about a distro.
- Every Journey Starts with a FAIL. (via)
- Meltdown fix committed by guenther@. Note the DragonFly cross-pollination.
BSDNow 234 is up, and has an interview with Benno Rice of FreeBSD. There's also chatter about jails, Summer of Code, FreeBSD's new Code of Conduct, libhijack, and so on.
Here's everything I know about it.
A new DragonFly user found setting keybell="visual" in rc.conf caused a crash on the next terminal beep. In this case, the user is Deaf and so prefers something other than an auditory bell. The issue is fixed in development and release, but I always like seeing variations on "many eyes make bugs shallow".
Nick Holland is giving a talk tonight on "Scripting Tips & Hacks" at SemiBUG. "Nick has been scripting roughly since scripts were hard-coded into
plugboards." Go, see, if you are near Michigan.
Oh, hey, that's a nice thing to say. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Remember: there's a separate document about porting FreeBSD drivers to DragonFly. I note it cause it's useful and because Rimvydas Jasinskas just updated it.
The links this week aren't necessarily long, but they are definitely "make-you-think" material.
- The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing. Paul Ford. The story abounds with good quotes, and good summaries of the strangeness that was LISP, or Plan 9, or etc. (via)
- That led me to the Squeak website, cause I always had a vague desire to learn Smalltalk, someday.
- Best Practices for Cache Management.
- Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch.
- WinAmp, recreated in Javascript. Feature-filled. (via)
- Paradise OS. (also via)
- Linux'izing your Windows PC into a dev machine. I don't like this trend of running Windows and pretending it's not. (via)
- Tough love, or stultifying ossification? I don't know.
- The Bandcamp 2017 Year in Review. Bandcamp is a good idea even if all it does is avoid streaming audio monoculture.
- Spectre Mitigations in Microsoft's C/C++ Compiler. I link to this to show that the mitigation methods users rely on are secret, cause it's not open source. So this researcher has to rely on evaluating the output rather than the code itself.
- Edible Games. Exactly what the name implies. (via)
- Can't get UNIX v7/x86 to work in virtual machine.
- How to redesign a tech logo. Monoculture, like I said.
Reached overflow again! That secretly makes me happy.
- Discord channels for BSD's?
- SemiBUG's speaker schedule for the next few months is published. Note next meeting is on the 20th.
- SVS to mitigate meltdown. (NetBSD)
- Unix Architecture Evolution from the 1970 PDP-7 to the 2018 FreeBSD. Another FOSDEM video, which I note because it shows code history imported back for multiple decades.
- Show HN: OpenBSD Email Service – A free-email alternative. (via)
- FreeBSD/EC2 history.
- Under which circumstances is NetBSD a better option than the other BSDs?
- Citrix ICA Receiver Support in BSDs.
- SSH Mastery 2/e out. Technically not a BSD-specific book, but you know the author was using BSD as the base, and includes it in the material.
- Which BSD distro is suitable as a Linux QEMU host if someone is curious about BSD?
- Trying iocage to get an old version of FreeBSD.
- Google Summer of Code and FreeBSD, NetBSD.
This week's BSDNow has a ZFS explainer about what the theoretical maximums on storage could be, plus a whole lotta DTrace. (Needed a Sun reference in their title this week.)
This isn't really a dramatic event, but Rimvydas Jasinskas has added support for DWARF-4 line number tables in binutils 2.27. I am linking it to remind everyone that a little bit of Tolkien, in the form of elves (elfs?) and dwarfs (dwarves?) lives in your computer. We need a ORC standard. Oh. Hobbit? Hobbit.
Tomohiro Kusumi has brought in exFAT support to DragonFly from FreeBSD. Useful for cross-platform drives when FAT32 isn't enough, and NTFS brings its own problems.
Some really fun things this week.
- A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files. A fun, crazy read. (via)
- Miniature Macintosh Plus. Also crazy. (via)
- Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, going on now.
- Centralise Your Bash History. (via)
- Computer Role-Playing Games Book released. (via multiple)
- The Case for Automatic Updates. (via)
- X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure . (via)
- How Facebook Is Killing Comedy. And why I keep this all on my own blog. (via)
- OpenSC2K – An Open Source Remake of SimCity 2000. (via)
- From the same source, openra.net, a Red Alert remake.
- Backblaze 2017 Q4 and 2017 yearly report. (via)
- spectre and the end of langsec. (via)
- Plan 9 Public Grid. (via)
Very much last-minute; compiled 20 minutes before bed Friday night.
- a2k18 Hackathon preview: Syncookies coming to PF. (via)
- An Empirical Study on the Reliability of UNIX Utilities (1989). Some of it is early BSD. How much still applies? (via)
- The Origin of the word Daemon. (via)
- "SSH Mastery 2/e" copyedits back. BSD-based.
- Sponsoring a Scam. New BSD book on the way, I think, and you can sponsor it.
- OPNsense 18.1.1 released. No, wait, 18.1.2.
- Overriding pkgrsc's default Framework path (on macOS).
- BSD from scratch - from source to OS with ease on NetBSD. Also as video. (via)
- AT&T copyrighting 3 blank lines. Sorta relevant to the BSD split. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/02/05.
- Remi Locherer's EuroBSDcon 2017 Talk.
- NetBSD - A modern operating system for your retro battlestation. Video. In fact, all the FOSDEM 2018 videos are up, I think.
BSDNow 232 this week covers FOSDEM 2018, cause both hosts were there. There's other news items, too.