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.
BSD author Michael W. Lucas is talking at the Troy Public Library (Michigan, not New York) tonight, about his nonfiction writing. Go, if you like his books and/or if you are thinking about technical writing for yourself. He has another appearance coming up on March 11th.
Reminder: the 2017 FreeBSD Storage Summit is tomorrow.
Another diverse link week, hooray!
- Stupid Hackathon 2017 – results under Project. (via)
- using yubikeys everywhere
- Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself. I have seen all of these happen. (via)
- Getting started with vim. (via)
- The many faces of grep. grep, egrep, fgrep.
- Finding the Lost Vikings – Reversing a Virtual Machine. (via)
- Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2. (via)
- SHAttered. Every vulnerability has to have a cool name and website now. (via)
- I found the best anagram in English, Moore’s law beats a better algorithm, and Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring, a series on anagrams that goes into glorious depth.
- Puzzle Zapper Blog, from the previous link.
- PuTTY 0.68 has been released, useful everywhere. (via and via)
Your unrelated item of the week: How Wegmans inspired the most rabid fanbase in the grocery world. I live in the town where Wegmans started. “Grocery fanbase” is a relative thing, but: yes, they are that good.
I measure the success of In Other BSDs by how many different BSD flavors I can reference. This is a good week.
- Was thinking of switching to a BSD on my Thinkpad 11e, do you think this is a good idea?
- Adblock on Pfsense
- pfSense 2.3.3 RELEASE Now Available!
- Review of RaspBSD (FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi computers)
- NetBSD fully reproducible builds (via)
- mandoc-1.14.1 released.
- OpenBSD kernel lock removal for IPv4 forwarding. (via #dragonflybsd)
- OPNsense 17.1.2 released.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising.
- What happened to my vlan? (OpenBSD network performance, via)
- GhostBSD version 11 Alpha 1.
- NetBSD at the upcoming AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- Now available: video recording of the recent “OS : The underlying overhead of computation” presentation at NYCBUG. (via)
- Options to rid ourselves of MS Windows “servers”.
- Easy pkgsrc on macOS with pkg_comp 2.0.
- NetBSD 7.1_RC2 available.
- The Heirloom Project. Chunks of that code are probably still present in all the BSDs. (via)
- features are faults redux. Pseudo-transcript of a tedu speech not exactly about OpenBSD, but has plenty of funny one-liners.
- “Hi, I’m jkh and I’m a d**k” I don’t 100% agree with the idea, but it’s still a good plan.
There’s the DragonFly syntax for loader hints, and there’s the FreeBSD syntax. If you happen to use the FreeBSD syntax on DragonFly, it’ll still work.
This week’s BSDNow runs across a wide range of topics, so it’s worth browsing through. There’s no interview this week, but there is a report on an interview, if that’s meta enough for you.
Thanks to Imre Vadasz, the virtio driver in DragonFly now has PCI MSI-X support. This should help with virtual performance, though I say that on principle, not with any actual numbers to back it up.
Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
If you are anywhere near KnoxBUG’s meeting place (mid-Tennessee, US), Joe Maloney will be presenting on OpenRC and TrueOS, tomorrow night. See the link for address and times.