This week’s BSDNow episode is all over the map this week, talking about Unix philosophy (that’s where the silence part comes in), tmux, and even Minecraft.
A note from Sepherosa Ziehau explains how you can check for Intel Turbo Boost effect on DragonFly, or at least see your current frequency if you’re using AMD.
The question of using vkernels(7) in a manner similar to jails pops up time and again, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, “it depends“. It looks like when you want to isolate greedy programs, vkernels are the way to go.
Thinkpieces, this week.
- The Magic Arrow: A talk about the SIP2 protocol and the purpose of REST.
- Testing LLVM
- git apply --palimpsest=3 --rewind-sprocket
- 25 useful web developer tools. Not clickbait as you’d expect.
- FAP80, A retro computer without the retro baggage. (via)
- Modern propaganda is distraction, not argument. (PDF, via)
- Ransomware takes a nasty turn
- Lock-Free Bugs
- Related: The compendium of database ransomware. A scientific approach to measuring a disaster.
- “…the open source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in…” RethinkDB post-mortem. (via)
- Maintainers Don’t Scale. Applies to far more than the Linux kernel. (via)
- Introduction to Precision Farming. I have seen this up close, so to speak, as there’s a company that does this around the corner from my workplace.
Your tea link of the week: Scary photo of an Indian tea plantation
Accidental theme this week: books.
- 11n support for athn(4) (via)
- Relayd auction results
- As a Nefarious Media Agent…
- Sponsorships on “Httpd and Relayd Mastery” available
- Understanding the modernization of the OpenBSD network stack, part 2: A story of if_get(9)
- Thinking about switching from Linux to BSD for my everyday computer, and have a few questions.
- Errata SECURITY FIX: January 5, 2017 (for LibreSSL)
- FreeBSD UEFI Root on ZFS and Windows Dual Boot
- Differences in pf between OpenBSD and FreeBSD?
- BSDCan 2017 is in June – the Call for Papers is up, along with submission guidelines. (via)
- OPNsense 17.1-RC1 released
- pkgsrc-2016Q4 released
- OpenBSD on Vultr. I’ve mentioned it being possible before, but this is an official announcement – it’s a supported platform. Spend your dollars there to encourage this. (thanks, Jeremiah Ford)
- “Any good recent books?” You all know about these, right? I’ve mentioned them enough?
BSDNow’s episode of the week has a number of Raspberry Pi-specific items, plus a discussion of iocage which I was not familiar with.
The DragonFly installer now supports UEFI directly. There’s a uefi(8) man page now, and there’s even rconfig support, though not enough people realize how awesome rconfig(8) can be.
I had a spurious carriage return in the RSS feed output that some I think xerxes based RSS readers like spaRSS didn’t like. It’s fixed now – can someone else running spaRSS confirm in a comment? Or just confirm that you aren’t getting RSS errors now if you were for the last few days.
SemiBUG has a meeting tomorrow, and Craig Maloney will be talking about Ansible. Patrick McEvoy may be streaming the proceeds, too. Are you near Detroit? Then go!
“Old consumer computers” is this week’s accidental theme.
- Viva Amiga, the trailer. (via)
- NANOG 69 is happening in early February.
- A New Year, a New Round of pop3 Gropers from China
- Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out. The Hacker News thread has some good stories, too. (via)
- Hidden Voice Commands, where the computer understands but the humans do not. (via)
- Using Unix commands to profile your users
- When the little hand is on the two, and the big hand…
- Read “The Tao of tmux” prerelease for free online (via)
- RIPEStat, nicely summarized information about a given network. (via)
- LISA16 slides and video (that’s the Large Scale System Administration conference) are available. (via)
- Donsol, technically a roguelike. (via)
- Portal for Apple ][. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Turbo Encabulator. There’s more like that out there, like the Rockwell Retro Encabulator.
This turned into a BSD User Group event list, which makes me happy. There was nothing like that 3 or 5 or whatever years ago.
- OPNsense 16.7.13 released
- Documenting NetBSD’s scheduler tweaks
- NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available
- 12? PowerBook G4 PT5 – Electronic Battle Weapon
- WiFi: 11n hostap mode added to athn(4) driver, testers wanted
- Would you bother learning PFSense when you are comfortable with Mikrotik for budget firewall requirements?
- 2017 presentation proposals
- BPF and formal verification (via)
- KnoxBUG is having a Raspberry Pi installfest on 01/31. I’ll post a reminder.
- KnoxBUG is also planning an OpenRC talk in February, though no date yet.
- And here’s the writeup from the most recent KnoxBUG meetup.
- People in NYCBUG are looking to have a classical code reading group set up – no date yet, but it sounds fun. (This has happened before as a one-shot event.)
- Craig Maloney is speaking about Ansible at the next SemiBUG meeting, this Tuesday. This meeting may be streamed. I’ll put a reminder up on Monday, too, and link to the stream if I know it.
The ncv(4), nsp(4), and stg(4) drivers are now removed from DragonFly. So is the portal file system. Also, though not a removal, vm.swapcache.use_chflags now defaults to 0. Does this affect you? Almost certainly not! I feel compelled to point it out, though, just in case there’s that one person who didn’t want a surprise.
This week’s BSDNow has extended notes about FreeBSD and lld, the LLVM linker, plus notes on the NetBSD scheduler, OpenBSD changes, and so on. It’s very ecumenical.
The i915 driver has been updated to match Linux 4.6 – this is of most benefit to the owners of newest hardware, but the commit message lists what has changed, for owners of Haswell series GPUs and later.
If you are on DragonFly -master, now is a good time to update. Matthew Dillon has been changing how DragonFly handles locking and memory use, with differences in the vmstat structure and page coloring, some memory settings, and many other locking changes. I am only linking to a few examples. If you don’t want to dig through those links for performance numbers, he summarized his changes and their effects in a post to users@.
That’s Non-Uniform Memory Access, to disambiguate. Matthew Dillon’s changing how memory is allocated in DragonFly. NUMA is been a long-discussed and complex topic for a long time, so I will point at the initial commits and call it “a developing situation”.
I hope you have lots of time to read today.
- SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim. A Vim … distribution? (via)
- Mid-century modern electronics. (via)
- Open Source Won. So, Now What? (via)
- A Historical Geography of RPG Playing
- 2016 year-end link clearance. Going down the rabbit hole of links to links.
- Data formats of Rogue One (via)
- Architects on Death Star design. A bit clickbaity, I know. (also via)
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, looking just at user interfaces. (via)
- Great Talks and Presentations at 33C3 (I think via)
- Truffle Hog, a clever search-for-accidentally-committed-keys script. (via)
- Hacker News, like any news aggregate, has now reached the astroturfing / advertising point. (related)
- Goodbye to GNU Libreboot (via)
- Irssi 1.0.0 Released And here’s the XKCD cartoon to match. (via)
- fortran.io, a FORTRAN web framework. (via)
- A Tourist’s Guide to the LLVM Source Code
- Story behind malloc(0) standardization (via)
- python 3k17. Perl’s is the only scripting language I know that successfully navigated major version changes – for compatibility, at least.
- zz: a smart and efficient directory changer
- Internet of Shit and CES. Of note: 42tea, where you need a smartphone to do what only maybe needs a timer and thermometer.
- chmod 777. Not sure if real.
- The many lives of Packard Bell. I hated these.
There’s always a rush of links after a holiday, as people sit at home and catch up on what they’ve wanted to do.
- 2016 computer review A lot of people like that X1.
- For God’s sake, secure your Mongo/Redis/etc! This is why services don’t get automatically started after installation via ports/pkgsrc. (via)
- openbsd changes of note 5
- OPNsense 16.7.12 released
- Lumina version 1.2.0 Released
- Netgate Taps InfoSec Global for pfSense Code Review
- A pretty splash screen for the Chrome Pixel and OpenBSD. (via)
- Hotplugging RAM – uvm_hotplug(9), the Xen balloon(4) driver and portmasters’ FAQ
- pkgsrc-2016Q4 released
- This is why I try to be specific when talking about BSD book author Michael W. Lucas.
- turn your network inside out with one pf.conf trick
- Get your name in the relayd book
This week’s BSDNow: no interview, but a lot of link summary. Does that title make sense if you are outside the U.S.? No matter.
If you have a NVMe-capable EFI BIOS on your machine, you should be able to safely install DragonFly, using these instructions from Matthew Dillon. It’s not part of the installer, yet.