Mobile Skylake CPUs appear to have issues with power management and direct video rendering. There’s potential fixes on the horizon, but until then, be aware if you have that specific hardware and software mix.
Reader suggestions always make me happy.
- Is stockpiling AMD Bulldozer-based hardware from 2012 a good idea for those that care about privacy and security, since those CPUs don’t have PSP/Intel ME?
- ECC Memory & AMD’s Ryzen – A Deep Dive. (thanks kerma on #dragonflybsd for this and the previous link)
- Scrum makes you dumb. I don’t know if he’s setting up the right enemy, but it’s a good analysis of organizational silos. (via)
- Memoir of a Homebrew Computer Club Member. Seriously homebrew, from that story. (via)
- New D&D magic spells, designed by neural network. (via)
- Related: same but for heavy metal band names.
- Sexy Emacs. Sexy Vim. (via)
- The Vim Learning Curve is a Myth. (via)
- U.S. frequency allocations, with detail. (PDFs, via)
- Zomg lots more anagram stuff. Lots.
- The early Windows phone devices were liquid-cooled, sort of.
- Zip Files All The Way Down. Oh, so that’s what a quine is? (via)
A good topic range this week.
- Why I love OpenBSD. (via)
- A plan for open source software maintainers. (via)
- Unix Architecture Evolution Diagrams. 1972 Research Unix and FreeBSD, compared. (via)
- Getting Michael W. Lucas to speak at your (possibly BSD) event.
- 4 Things About TrueNAS Replication Your Boss Wants To Know. Sounds clickbaity, but does actually describe TrueNAS usage.
- OPNsense 17.1.6 released.
- Health Tips for Unix Systems.
- OpenBSD and You, the slides. (via)
- gqrx on freebsd.
- I did not know there was a Samba conference.
- OpenBSD Community Goes Gold.
This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but it hops through a banquet of different operating system activities – wireless, routing, changing systems, etc. You will surely find something to pique your interest.
A tip that might be useful for some readers: Mohammad BadieZadegan posted that he had a poor network connection, and so was having a hard time installing packages. If that bites you too, there are some pkg.conf options – starting with FETCH_TIMEOUT and FETCH_RETRY – that may help.
I noted commits about this before, but here’s the instructions: how to use DragonFly on a Macbook Pro with dual GPUs.
There’s an update for Radeon DRM that matches it up (mostly) to what’s in Linux kernel 4.7.10. If it gives you problems, there’s some workarounds. Remember, this is in DragonFly-current, so anyone running 4.8 is unaffected.
Accidental topic this week: text interfaces!
- PuTTY 0.69 has been released. (via)
- Made by the same author: Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. Like Minesweeper times one thousand. (via)
- Random ASCII spaceship generator.
- Telnet MapSCII.
- terminal emulators’ processing of escape sequences. I’ve Ctrl-S’d myself a few times, I’ll admit. (via)
- ZX Spectrum Next. Actually contains a ZX chip. (via)
- BSD author Michael W. Lucas is having a flash sale on his fiction. It may be over by the time you read this.
- The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software. A podcast episode, with some speakers I really like. (via)
- Securing Telnet with SSL. (via)
- Apple ][ clone and lawsuit history, some of which is new to me.
Your unrelated video of the week: DOUBLE KING. (via multiple places)
All the text in the links lined up this week, which is mysteriously satisfying.
- PfSense 2.5 and AES-NI. (via)
- Tab completion in OpenBSD’s ksh. (via)
- Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD.
- Installing V8 UNIX (4.1 BSD) from tape. (via)
- OpenSSH Removes SSHv1 Support.
- Installing Gnome 3 extensions freebsd11
- OpenBSD vmm hypervisor: Part 2. (via)
- pfSense 2.3.4 RELEASE Now Available!
- Official OpenBSD 6.1 CD – There’s only One!
- Related: Errata and (First) Binary Patches Announced.
- New synchronization mechanism – localcount(9). (via)
- Digging into BSD’s choice of Unix group for new directories and files.
- Announcing NetBSD and the Google Summer of Code Projects 2017.
It’s always nice to see this out of nowhere: How to Install DragonFly BSD 4.6 + Xfce Desktop + Apps on VMware.
BSDNow 192 is up, and has the normal news summary, plus an interview of Patrick M. Hausen.
The next NYCBUG meeting is May 3rd, in about 48 hours. Rob Seward will be presenting on random number generators. The same announcement for this meeting also notes the upcoming pkgsrcCon, BSDCan, and EuroBSDCon.
April over already?
- Adventure Games and Eigenvalues. (via)
- The fish shell is awesome. (via)
- How SSH got port number 22. (via)
- The web’s best hidden gems.
- The real reason why UNIX commands are short.
- The History of Computer RPGs. (via)
- The beauty of links on Unix servers. Many don’t understand hard links.
- Programming thought experiment. Anything that works its way up to Forth is definitely starting from scratch.
- Three horrible Internet trends. “Rent-seeking” is the correct phrase. (via)
- How Game Titles Work. Note that it’s part 1 of several. (via)
- Glob Matching Can Be Simple And Fast Too.
- Early Nintendo programmer worked without a keyboard. (via)
- Bug in monitor.
It’s long article title week!
- A PDF of the IPv6 handout, from the April SemiBUG meeting, is available.
- Adventures in Time, part 1: Interfacing an Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator to a Computer Running NetBSD. (via)
- Replace the RC4 algorithm for generating in-kernel secure random numbers with Chacha20. (via)
- 9 lessons from 25 years of Linux kernel development. None of those lessons are specific to Linux; they apply to all the BSDs, for instance. (via)
- pfsense for a small ISP in both router and firewall settings?
- Rate your favorite BSD on…
- (finally) investigating how to get dynamic WDS (DWDS) working in FreeBSD!
- OPNsense 17.1.5 released.
- The many ways of running firefox on OpenBSD.
- Michael W. Lucas’s Penguicon 2017 Schedule.
- iXsystems TrueNAS Certified with Veeam Backup.
- OpenBSD 6.1 Song Released.
Francois Tigeot has brought in the ‘apple_gmux’ driver. If you have a Macbook with both Intel and NVIDIA video hardware installed, this driver lets you switch to the Intel hardware, and I assume take advantage of DragonFly’s accelerated i915 driver.
This week’s BSDNow covers a number of FreeBSD developments, Illumos network work, and an interesting in-depth discussion of the reasoning behind the transition from PC-BSD to TrueOS.
If you are using bhyve, and you want DragonFly on there as a ‘guest’ (not sure if that’s the right term), there’s a template available. (via)
For those of you who build custom kernels, the if_sl, if_ppp, and if_faith devices are now built as modules, not in the kernel. This means you can remove references to them in your custom kernel config – if you have one.
As part of a larger conversation about security measures, NX bit capability was added to DragonFly. You can turn it on or off, and it’s off by default so it doesn’t cause any surprises. As the first link in this post points out, your installed third-party software is more of a security issue than processor features, in any case.