This week's BSD Now covers some releases, some history, and the very useful tool sshuttle, a VPN alternative.
This may be of most interest to me, since I'm usually the one building DragonFly releases. nrelease(7), which is used to build each release of DragonFly, now sticks to the default kernel config, and may use binary packages in the future. There's some other changes but these are the ones I can describe most exactly; there might be more on the way.
Do you have a Coffee Lake Intel CPU? Cause corepower(4) in DragonFly now supports it.
I didn't get them put together early, and I won't have time - sorry! It's the first time I've missed it in a long time.
If you were used to kldloading i915kms(4) and radeonkms(4)... they are now named i915 and radeon, respectively.
BSD Now 321 returns to the interview format, talking with Trenton Schulz about things I know about (FreeBSD) and things I did not (Robot OS).
Pluggable Authentication Modules on DragonFly have gone through some changes. pam_ssh has been removed, along with pam_tacplus, and pam_radius, in favor of the more frequently updated versions in dports. ppp(8) still supports radius, though.
As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn't changing much. There's now an 'emergency mode' for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn't space for the normal history activity. It's dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don't leave it on!
There's now (well, for DragonFly 5.7 users) an /etc/os-release file to show the installed DragonFly version. This is similar to the de facto Linux standard, which of course evolved separately from the not-consistently implemented general standard. Evolved cross-platform standards are fine with me.
Lots of variety this week; I'm happy with this link batch.
- Categories: models of models. Pleasingly abstract. (via)
- The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood. Linked so that someone who never read Achewood can now go through its entire archive. (via)
- The End of Oz. Read this if you read any/all of the many, many Land of Oz books when young. (via)
- Modding, Vim, i3, and Efficiency. (via)
- I've made a rotary dial number input, because why not? (via)
- Coffee Is Hard. (via)
- The Best Cast Iron Skillet. Secret tip from someone who has been using them for decades: treat them poorly, don't spend money, they'll be great. It's a chunk of iron.
- The Computer as a Communication Device. I did not realize the role Hawaii played in causing packet communication.
- Computer Files Are Going Extinct. (via)
- Betrayal At Krondor.
- I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too. (via)
- You know, we might as well just run every network service over HTTPS/2 and build another six layers on top of that to appease the OSI 7-layer burrito guys. Linked mostly for that sentence.
- The lines of code that changed everything.
I'm leading with the most complex but perhaps also most unfulfilling link.
- 2020 OS MIGRATION. Or, how to make your project just one Linux distro among many.
- Bell Labs: Celebrating 50 Years of Unix. (via multiple places)
- Related: The UNIX Game. (via)
- FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS. Video from vBSDCon. (via)
- Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL. More convention video. (via)
- The Ubuntu package roulette. For contrast with BSD packages; people usually assume, wrongly, that Linux packaging systems are more complete.
- Valuable News – 2019/10/07, Valuable News – 2019/10/14, and Valuable News – 2019/10/18. Yeah, I'm running behind on my RSS.
- Threading support in LLDB continued
- OPNsense 19.7.5 released.
- OpenBSD 6.6 Released.
- OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits.
- FreeBSD 12.1-RC2 Available.
- A Ghidra loader for the Linear eXecutable format.
If you have a whole lot of I/O on a HAMMER2 system, this change will help. This is I assume an outgrowth of dsynth testing, cause that causes many, many threads to be reading and writing.
This week's BSD Now is double-coloned. Colonned? I don't know the plural possessive of colon, but there's a nice selection of links to follow there.
It's now possible to pick which sort of compression you want to use for dsynth packages - xz is the default, but you can go gzip for speed.
SeMiBUG meets tonight, 7 PM, Altair Engineering. Go, if you are near.
(not sure about capitalization on semibug...)
Thanks to Erik Blomberg and the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, I now know the Digest has reached a whole new operating system: CP/M. This entertains me.
(It's the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can't see the screen well enough.)
(It's the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can't see the screen well enough.)
A mix of complaints, history, and odd technical items. The usual!
- Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets. (via)
- Managing passwords using ed and gpg2. Because: no tempfile.
- Adding redirection to the gopher protocol.
- How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last? Readers of a certain age will remember how PGP was briefly export controlled; also remember that history rhymes. (via)
- How my application ran away and called home from Redmond. (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
- Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about audio. (via)
- The tiniest FatMac. (really a console and an emulator, but that's fine.)
- Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. (via)
- 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs. This is not the throwaway joke it sounds like. (via)
- ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision. Chessboards are natural placemarkers. (via)
- Wackaging, a trend I hope will end. (via)
- The Fantasy of Opting Out. (via)
- Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019. (via)
- James Mickens’ Tenure Announcement. It is exactly as wonderful as you would think. (via)
I'm sure there's some recent stuff I missed; I will catch it in next week's roundup.
- SeMiBUG meets Tuesday the 15th.
- FreeNAS datasets and snapshots.
- Defense at Scale. There's a BSD system in there. (via)
- History of UNIX Design and Interfaces. BSD history mixed in. (via)
- 1 day / 1 game: solene@ playing Unexplored on OpenBSD. Links to FLV.
- OpenSSH 8.1 released. (via)
- Care and Feeding of OpenBSD Porters. (via)
- By the numbers: ZFS Performance Results from Six Operating Systems and Their Derivatives. This and following are vBSDCon 2019 videos. (via)
- Transitioning from FreeNAS to FreeBSD. (via)
- In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encryption for FreeBSD. (via)
- 20 Years of FreeBSD Jails. Last video. (via)
- Ken Thompson's Unix password. He doesn't need it. (via)
- OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits. (via)
- Porting NetBSD to the AMD x86-64: a case study in OS portability. Old news but why not. (via)
- Resurrecting Ancient Operating Systems on Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Docker. Very early BSD. (via)
- FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook. (via)
- Causing ZFS corruption for fun, profit, and quality assurance. Can't tell if they are doing this on FreeBSD or not. (via)
Posting this now cause tomorrow's too late: the 2019 Bay Area FreeBSD Vendor and Developer Summit is happening today and tomorrow. Go, if you are near.