Michael W. Lucas will be presenting at SemiBUG tomorrow, talking about the OpenBSD web stack.
Technical details week for Lazy Reading.
- Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
- mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencastis a shell wrapper forffmpegthat allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)- 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
- CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
- How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
- Today in OBEY.
- Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
- A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
- Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
- Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
- Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.
Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)
Much better than last week, but there wasn’t any hurricane-force winds this week – which helps.
- Complexity and Strategy. Talks about Microsoft products, but think about this in terms of any long-lived operating system code base – e.g. any BSD, or specifically OpenBSD given their correctness goals. (via)
- Freenas 10 (now called Freenas Corral) released – the press release.
- pfSense OpenVPN unattended deploy options?
- Intel’s ACPICA is now available under a BSD license. Doing the right thing.
- New mandoc -mdoc -T markdown converter
- time scrolling. Remapping keyboard/mouse events in X.
- /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know. Linked here because the example is from a BSD environment. (via)
- NetBSD 7.1 released.
- iXsystems Attends AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- “What exactly is BSD?“
- openbsd changes of note 6, openbsd changes of note 7
- EuroBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- vBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- Relayd and the Next Tech Book. Related to the next link,
- Get your name in “Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition”
BSDNow 185 has existing host Kris Moore performing his last episode (because $dayjob) and Benedict Reuschling coming in to replace him. Allan Jude is unchanged, of course. As they correctly point out, 185 weeks of on-time video content is a tremendous achievement so far. This week’s episode is 55 minutes of talking with the old and the new staff.
Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking. He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.
Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk. The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.
Matthew Dillon picked up a number of different NVMe SSD drives, and tested them. He wrote up the entire test, but the immediate summary is: buy Samsung.
I always attributed speed issues to writing transaction history, but: Matthew Dillon discovered HAMMER was repeating itself when writing to disk. Fixing that issue doubled write speed. This fix is in 4.6 and the upcoming release.
I tagged the release candidate for DragonFly 4.8 – slightly delayed because of my involuntary time offline – and here’s the resulting automatic changelist. There’s ISO/IMG files uploaded now to the main DragonFly archive, which means they should be available at a mirror near you soon.
I had overflow from last week, so I have a good list for you, despite being offline for days.
- Your Code is Junky. I haven’t thought about FrontPage in years, and that’s on purpose. It was a trainwreck.
- Raiders of the Lost OS: Reclaiming a piece of Polish IT history. I have never heard of CROOK. (via)
- meaningful short names.
- missing features as features
- The Collapse of the UNIX Philosophy. Drinking game: drink every time the author or commenters at the source link conflate bash and UNIX, or Linux and UNIX, or assume a quirk solved in 1985 is a relevant worry today, etc. You’ll be drunk very soon.
- Adobe Illustrator is 30 years old. Linking mostly for the side-by-side image of the tool palettes over the years.
- USG is a firewall for your USB ports. firmware firewall – you can still have malicious software in the data portion of the USB drive. (via)
- Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2. gettimeofday() – about as simple as it gets, and used constantly. (via)
- selfie – compiler, emulator, and hypervisor (C and MIPS) all bundled together. (via)
- Computers and art meet face-to-face.
- (related comics link)
Your unrelated tea link of the day: defining what it means when you read “mug of tea” vs “cup of tea”. You’d think it was interchangeable, but the meanings diverge. (PDF, via)
Way short this week because we had high winds in my area, knocking out power for most people. I didn’t lose power, but I lost my data link.
Michael W. Lucas will be showing up tomorrow with physical copies of his books at the Grosse Pointe Library. (I’m assuming it will be both his fiction and non-fiction BSD books.) If you are near, I bet you can get a signed copy.
Even though the hosts are currently off to AsiaBSDCon, BSDNow is once again a bit early with lots of BSD news, plus an interview of Konrad Witaszczyk, apparently about encrypted crash dumps.
In what can be described as perfect timing, Sepherosa Ziehau has produced a document comparing FreeBSD, several different Linux kernels, and DragonFly, for networking. He’s presenting it in the afternoon track of Day 3 for AsiaBSDCon 2017, starting later this week.
He’s published a snippet as a PDF (via), which includes some graphs. The one place Linux outperforms DragonFly seems to be linked to the Linux version of the network card driver being able to access more hardware – so DragonFly should be comparable or better there too, once the powers-of-2 problem is solved. (This already came up in comments to a post last week.)
Those graphs are available standalone, too, which means it’s easier to see the fantastic performance for latency – see the thin blue line – that seems exclusive to DragonFly. That, if anything, is the real takeaway; that DragonFly’s model has benefits not just to plain speed but to the system’s responsiveness under load. “My CPU is maxed out cause I’m doing a lot of work but I hardly notice” is a common comment over the past few years – and now we can see that for network performance, too.
A little meta, this week.
- Why Nothing Works Anymore. Occam’s Razor applies; most people undervalue design vs. cost. (via)
- I miss Delphi
- There’s more than one way to kill a Unix process
- Sniffing out Unix processes using pgrep
- cloudbleed hero graphics. You know what Cloudbleed is, correct? It’s hard to illustrate, is what it is.
- 1000 links later. The Digest is generally a links site, and my experience matches what he’s saying.
- The PDP-10 group on GitHub. (via, via)
- Doing Presentations. I have an employee who can’t stop reading text verbatim off his slides, facing the screen… which means I can’t stop falling asleep at about slide 20 or so. (via)
- An annotated digest of the top “Hacker” “News” posts. Accurate. (via)
- ./code –poetry. (via)
- Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces. (via)
- comment free codex. Comment quantity is starting to matter even more than quality.
- There’s no IPv4 ranges left to allocate, but there’s some ranges that aren’t being used by their owners, and are given back. Here’s where the remaining scraps of recovered IPv4 space are tracked. It at least delays the inevitable. (via)
- Eli5: What is POSIX?
- A time-proven zsh prompt.
- About the Newton MessagePad 2xxx ROM card. (via)
Your unrelated tea link of the week: In Sri Lanka’s Tea Paradise, A Social Enterprise Is Brewing. I actually heard about the quality of the tea (very good) before I heard about the way the company was formed. Consider where your next tea purchase comes from, in light of this.
Slightly short this week, maybe because people are prepping for AsiaBSDCon? I have plenty of links for tomorrow’s Lazy Reading.
- iXsystems Attends Container World 2017. I know what it’s really about, but it sounds like a convention where everyone talks about cardboard boxes.
- NetBSD will be in Google’s Summer of Code 2017.
- FreeBSD will be in Google’s Summer of Code 2017.
- Can you run BSD packages on OSX
- Java development on BSD?
- Upcoming SemiBUG presentations. (March 21st, April 18th)
- TrueOS Stable update released 2/22/17. (via)
- Switch and FreeBSD. Only a rumor at this point, cause the license could be most any component. (via)
The longstanding practice is to load kernel modules in loader.conf, as early as possible. That’s good, for anything that needs them.
However, that also can be bad. Your machine can be unbootable if there’s a problem with a module or loader.conf is messed up, since that file is read long before the startup process finishes. Enter the new alternative: modules can be loaded in rc.conf, and the only loader.conf modules needed are those required by / to mount.
Matthew Dillon has been doing a significant amount of work on cache lines, and I haven’t been linking to it because it’s hard to point at single commits with such a technical subject. However, he’s summarized it all, along with news on NUMA handling and vkernel improvements.
The again-early BSDNow episode this week has an interview with Tom Jones about BSD Sockets, plus a number of news items that include something new to me: playonBSD.
Matthew Dillon moved some locks and exec() performance jumped up significantly – 50% or more. This is a single system call, so I don’t know how much translates through to real performance change, but it’s interesting to see.
The normal monthly meeting for NYCBUG for March 1st (tomorrow) is canceled; next month’s meeting is still on.