You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn’t, Matthew Dillon’s updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
The post-holiday rush of links has slowed.
- Getting smarter and faster with vi
- Escape key alternatives in Vim (via)
- Actually using ed (via)
- Advent calendars: Advent of Code, Perl Advent 2016, QEMUAdvent, SysAdvent, and more. (via and via)
- Eaten by a Grue: podcast on Infocom games, text adventures and interactive fiction (via)
- History of the Click of Death
- FreeDOS, still going
- How to get a C64 on WiFi and start BBSing again (via)
- NeTV2 FPGA Reference Design. Read the last paragraph and get irritated.
I have no BSD-themed links this week. Sorry! It’s been hectic. We return to normal tomorrow.
BSDNow 171 has no interview this week, but more in-depth news articles than normal, including something interesting about bsdiff.
I know the title’s not that helpful, but I like rhyming. The i915 driver in DragonFly now matches what’s in the Linux 4.5 kernel, for a more complete description. (Here’s the Linux changelog to match.) This is good news for anyone with Skylake, Broxton, or Kabylake processors.
This is another one of those events that’s coming up too soon to wait on my normal BSD Saturday summary post. FOSDEM 2017 is looking for ‘BSD devroom’ talks, with the suggested length being 45 minutes. The deadline is December 10th, in 3 days. Submit a proposal if you will be there.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.
Dig up more on James Burke (linked below) if you can, and if you have the time. His Connections show was a delight.
- “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design” This clickbaity title is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley journalism… but I digress. (via)
- QoS when there is no congestion. (via)
- “Blame is apportioned appropriately.”
- James Burke and Connections kickstarted app. (via)
- “Weird, fun, wonderful, or useful automated phone numbers to call?” 1-800-444-4444 I use often at work, with a recorded message from a company that ceased to exist years ago. (via)
- Monads: Programmer’s Definition (via I think)
- The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers
- Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
- A vi-centric family tree of editors (2000) (via)
- Making umask work for you
- No more Solaris 12. A rumor. (via)
I have a pretty significant backlog of links for this week – to the point I had to open a separate browser window to sort out open tabs.
- TMUX Config Help on FreeBSD
- FreeBSD Foundation Contributions, Fundraising, and More
- Donating to the OpenBSD Foundation
- The Insecurity of OpenBSD. The article is from 2010 so reading comments at the source link may be better.
- BSD now 169: Scheduling your NetBSD, plus a comment. A followup to the second-most-recent BSDNow.
- Apple Releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Open Source Darwin Code. I don’t cover enough of the BSD side of MacOS, but it’s hard to separate from the Mac part.
- “Does OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD ship with binary blobs?” A perennial religious issue.
- Kristaps Dzonsons on pledge(2)
- TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients (via)
- openbsd changes of note 2
OPNsense 16.7.9 releasedOPNsense 16.7.10 released See my note about backlog.- LiteBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32 (via)
- Start the holidays off with FreeNAS 10 BETA 2!
- EuroBSDcon 2016 Presentation Slides (via)
- OpenBSD on PC Engines APU2 (via)
- The Saga of Concurrent DNS in Python, and the Defeat of the Wicked Mutex Troll (via)
If you are moving to the newest 1.8 version of Go, the language, you need to be on at least the last release of DragonFly 4.4, or 4.6. You’ve probably upgraded by now anyway, or at least I hope you have.
The cohabiting part of this week’s BSDNow is about someone running FreeBSD and Gentoo on the same ZFS drive. No interview but lots of material from the recent EuroBSDCon and MeetBSD conventions.
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
Tennessee area BSD user group KnoxBUG is meeting tomorrow, and Warren Block will be the guest speaker. He’ll be talking about documentation. Going by the linked announcement, there will be both prizes and blame, so something for everyone!
It’s a Cyber Monday deal, so I can’t wait until the normal weekend roundup: BSD Magazine is offering their Devops with Chef on FreeBSD course for 30% off today only.
A lot of this I picked up in previous weeks, knowing that the U.S Thanksgiving holiday was going to either dry up all links or give me a crapload.
- Junkbot competition results. (via)
- It Came From Bell Labs – Story of the Plan 9 operating system. (via)
- Modelling data structures as files and directories on disk.
- Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES?! (via)
- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? Starts describing awful things I knew about and then charges to a new level of awful, like this. (via)
- Jason Scott on porting VLC to the browser. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile. (via)
- Comments on the previous link led me to the fun-looking Pyra handheld.
- The end of the general purpose operating system. Or the start of a new application development category? I think this is a view that changes depending on what technology you are invested in.
- Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell.
- 30 days in a terminal: Day 0 — The adventure begins. Spoiler: it doesn’t work out. (via)
- Were your grandparents hacking in 1963? (via)
- IFComp crowns its first non-parser game.
- The current Humble Book Bundle is a lot of classic/useful Unix books. DRM-free, pay very little. Worth it for any two of the books involved. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Secret World of Stuff. (via)
I use italics a lot this week.
- Reddit advertising of “PAM Mastery”.
- Related: Michael W. Lucas talks about open source and fiction. Best pull quote: “imagine if I wrote a piece of fiction claiming that OpenBSD was contemplating a switch to GPLv3?“
- $ git commit murder is an excellent title, by the way.
- Also also: PAM Mastery is out for purchase.
- Debian considers merging /usr. For contrast to BSD. (via)
- Pinky Bar. An ecumenical status bar, which I didn’t realize I needed until I saw it. I like that the author specifically notes BSD in describing what to use. (via)
- FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016 slides – all of them. There’s a lot of material here.
- In-kernel audio mixing ahead. (NetBSD)
- OpenBSD Foundation Welcomes First Iridium Donor: Smartisan. That’s a lot of money.
- OpenBSD on AWS : An Unexpected Journey. (via)
DragonFly has had binutils 2.24 and 2.25 both available for some time. 2.24 has been taken out and replaced by binutils 2.27, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas.
The 2.25 version was and still is installed by default. If you want to try out 2.27 instead, WORLD_BINUTILSVER=binutils227 is what you need. I didn’t test that, of course. The binutils changelog will tell you what’s different in 2.27.