tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
No interview this week in BSDNow 261, but links to a recent 1999 convention video, details about TrueOS/Project Trident, and the usual.
If you like pizza and BSD, and you are near Portland, Oregon, there’s an event you will enjoy tomorrow night. At least 2 of those 3 characteristics should match you. (via)
Following up on the DragonFly/Threadripper benchmarks, DragonFly now has some NUMA work to accommodate the non-uniform CPU and RAM layout on those boards.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.
There’s several deep dives in the links today; enjoy reading!
- NIST publication SP800-177r1-draft2: Trustworthy Email. NIST publishes suprisingly comprehensive documents on technology practices; I am surprised they are not referenced more often.
- Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models. More Mickens. (via)
- 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email, part one and part two. I feel but cannot prove that this is related to why people say, “DragonFly feels so responsive!” (via)
- Why
ed(1)is not a good editor today. There are people that like ed(1), unironically? - Why I’m mostly not interest in exploring new fonts (on Unix). It helps if you do everything in English, though.
- The Distracted State of the Union. A sort of “these kids today” article, but linked simply because it points out that when you read the news, the news now reads you. (via)
- Programmatically generated books, read out loud. I was going to say “by the author”, but I’m not sure that’s technically correct.
- Badness, Enumerated by Robots. There’s about a zillion links in this for more technical information; worth reading.
Your unrelated music link of the week: A Brief Primer on the Contemporary Glitch-Hop Scene. I liked Tipper more than I expected.
Still haven’t cleared my backlog of links…
- “DISABLE HYPERTHREADING ON ALL YOUR INTEL MACHINES IN THE BIOS.” You should not be surprised by this. (via)
- X11 on really small devices. There’s video, though it’s a .mov file and so could also be on YouTube.
- mandoc-1.14.4 released.
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2018 Kyoto. (via)
- Modern-day package requirements. I could have sworn I linked to this before.
- Michael MacInnis: Oh a new Unix shell – BSDCan 2018. Video, also probably mentioned indirectly before, but now there’s comments.
- unbound-adblock. “The ultimate network adblocker!” (via)
- OpenBSD on an iBook G4. (via)
- Netgate SG-1000. Runs pfSense; haven’t tried it but I like it just cause it’s tiny.
- PICO-8 works on OpenBSD using iridium browser. (via)
- People who run BSD: A series of BSD user interviews. I wish this kept going. (via)
- Valuable News for 2018/08/11 and 2018/08/18.
- Michael W. Lucas on IT the to D.
- End of life for NetBSD 6.x.
This episode has one of the more intriguing titles for BSDNow, and it’s because they are covering a recent hackathon and “BSDCam” (not BSDCan), which I did not know about. The tiny network terminal server mentioned this week may be of use to people, too.
If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems. It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process. I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.
DragonFly will now run on a Threadripper 2990wx. What’s more, Matthew Dillon has published some testing results showing how power, CPU use, and memory speed all interact with these things. There’s a followup, too. I imagine these are interesting CPUs to most people, since they perform well and don’t have recent Intel-specific security problems.
There’s a SemiBUG meeting scheduled for tomorrow; Michael W. Lucas talks about ed.
Update: might be a slightly late start.
Done well ahead of time, knowing I’d be on the road this past week.
- A little bump in the wire that makes your Internet faster.
- A timesyncd total failure and systemd’s complete lack of debugability and Systemd’s
DynamicUserfeature is (currently) dangerous. Yeesh. - Pure Bash Bible: A collection of pure bash alternatives to external binaries. (via)
- unabridged history of unix / linux? Lots of reading suggestions.
- One simple general pattern for making sure things are alive.
- As Michael W. Lucas points out in his site redesign, Let’s Encrypt is great.
- Dislikes the Sea, but Will Venture Upon It If Necessary. An adult looking back on his D&D papers from childhood. (via)
- Polyhedra Viewer. Sorta related, in a dice sort of way. (also via)
- 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one). (via)
- Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? New James Mickens! (via many places)
Overflow from two weeks running, cause of travel.
- Next SemiBUG meeting is on the 21st. I’ll post a reminder.
- Solene’s percent % : Easy encrypted backups on OpenBSD with base tools. (via)
- installing Postgresql on NetBSD, need help.
- Why do you use (or contribute to) BSD, rather than Linux?
- The Battle of the Schedulers: FreeBSD ULE vs. Linux CFS (USENIX).
- EuroBSDCon 2018 registration is open. Early Bird until the 24th. (via)
- And now your “bsd.network is a goldmine of BSD information links” section:
- VMware vs bhyve Performance Comparison. (via)
- BSD Pizza Night in Portland, Oregon, on the 30th. I’ll post a reminder. (via)
- BSD Users Stockholm Meetup #3, September 5th. I’ll post a reminder for that too.
- “Wrote a dynamic inventory provider for FreeBSD jails.“
- Divelog programs: subsurface, divecmd. Things I didn’t know existed, and they are ports.
- Also now in OpenBSD ports: spacetrader. My favorite game genre.
- Godeps support in pkgsrc.
- Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition, off to the publisher.
- MidnightBSD: an Introduction, available as a free ebook from Amazon.
Intel’s ACPICA 20180810 is now in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner. Nothing really user-affecting, but it does fix some memory leaks. You can tell it’s very new just by the version number.
Michael W. Lucas is reading from his ‘git commit murder‘ book tonight at 7 PM, in Clawson, Michigan.
BSDNow 259 is out, and I happen to have just come off a 10-hour drive, so I will do nothing other than point you at the episode.
Aaron LI has added interface group support in DragonFly, which is mostly to replace having to name individual interfaces in your pf config. There’s more work done than just that commit, incidentally, and he has a better explanation and writeup than my measly post.
If you have a mangled HAMMER2 disk, and you have inodes that are clearly mangled (the built-in CRCs don’t match), you can now remove them manually. This seems like Hole Hawg territory…
The TRIM operation has been in DragonFly for some time, and it looks like most SSDs support it reliably, now – so it’s on by default.
I have been meaning to post this for a while: gridgenerator.com, a painting web app, is running on DragonFly. I was told this on IRC and of course lost all details since then, but that’s fine – go draw something!