After some testing of different ways to pre-zero out memory pages, Matthew Dillon came to the conclusion: page zeroing doesn’t matter any more. The idea dates all the way back to CSRG, and he’s removed it from DragonFly.
DragonFly 4.6 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, or update your source files and build – my users@ email describes the steps.
If you are near New York City, NYCBUG’s InstallFest is happening just before 7 PM Wednesday at the usual Stone Creek bar meeting location. Go, see what strange hardware turns up.
A mix of hard thinking and jokes today.
- Notes on notation and thought. (via)
- How has BitKeeper changed since it was used for the Linux kernel. (also via)
- McBullseye and the Hidden Network.
- I found six late 80’s Sysadmin posters in Imgur. Not really 80s.
- Comic-Con and FOSS Comic Book Solutions.
- A set of custom unix-like utilities that any developer could benefit from.
- How NOT to get help in open source. (via)
- The Delphi Method Techniques and Applications. (via)
- Wot I Think: Quadrilateral Cowboy. Aggressively retro-styled.
Your unrelated video link of the week: Duelin’ Firemen.
I did all of this in a hour, because I had so many tabs saved from during the week. Don’t get overwhelmed!
- EuroBSDCon 2016 schedule has been released.
- OPNsense 16.7 released.
- 2016Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
- SemiBUG has a Twitter. Here’s their last meeting, and the next is 8/23.
- August 3rd: NYCBUG Installfest. Go just to see what weird hardware shows up.
- Attacks against FreeBSD Update components. (via)
- How do I dual boot FreeBSD 10.3 with Windows 10?
- Steam on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. (via)
- ZFS and RAID.
- OpenBSD 6.0 pre-orders up.
- OpenBSD 6.0 to be released September 1, 2016. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016 talks and tutorials. (via and via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/25.
- Why FreeBSD? by Hamza Sheikh.
- pfSense 2.3.2 is out.
- AWS VPN config supports pfSense 2.2.5+.
- FreeBSD 11 Beta2 is available.
- n2k16 hackathon report: Stefan Sperling on dhclient bugs, iwm(4) issues.
- Will switching to FreeBSD give me an advantage over Linux when it comes to gaming?
- Translation Status for 1.0.0. (Lumina)
- one reason to hate openbsd.
- Status of wireless support for MacBook Pro (late 2011)
- Am I doing it wrong?
- VirtualBox 5.x finally on FreeBSD.
- Some notes on our new generation of ZFS-based file servers.
- A Grand Experiment by Leo Laporte. Shifting to BSD. (via)
- Announcing PacBSD (Formerly named ArchBSD). (via)
- OpenBSD: Release Songs: 6.0: “Another Smash of the Stack”. (via)
Bonus DragonFly items, sent by Rolinh on IRC:
- Migrate UFS drive from FreeNAS to DragonFly BSD
- Ask HN: DragonflyBSD – Do anyone use it in production?
Recently published: BSDNow 152, “The Laporte has landed!“, with an interview of Leo Laporte and his move to BSD, and also garbage[36], with some OpenBSD release conversation scattered in there.
I’m a bit late on this, but: If you are using DragonFly-current, you will need to rebuild world. If you are on 4.4, this won’t matter until you go to 4.6, and you’d be rebuilding world and kernel for that anyway.
(4.6 will probably be tagged this weekend.)
DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 has been tagged. You can pull it directly from the master site in img or iso form (check your local mirror instead if possible), or shift to the new tag.
“Where is RC1?” you may ask? I tagged the first release candidate some days ago, and this bug was immediately found right after. It was easier to go right to RC2 once a fix was found.
This candidate will probably lead directly to a release version, so if you want to run the release version exactly, wait a few days.
Off-the-beaten-path links this week. Strap in!
- The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99. (via)
- Magnetic core memory reborn. (via)
- Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Bunnie Huang.
- Why I’m Suing the US Government – also Bunnie Huang.
- Old, special phone numbers. I’ve used 800-444-4444 a lot when tracing lines.
- The Wanton Role-Playing (WaRP) and Mini-Six game systems. (via)
- Brief interviews with very small publishers. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers. (via previous and here)
- A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute. A PDF, and infinitely useful. (via)
- I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But I Miss My CDs. (via I lost it, sorry)
- This used to be Ethernet. (via)
- turn up the hope (report from the HOPE convention from Ted Unangst)
- VimGIFs. (via)
- HyperTerm, an open-source in-browser terminal emulator. (via)
Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: Permanent Wink.
Adding a new “BUG” category, cause there’s enough ongoing BSD user group activity these days that it’s a reoccurring theme. That makes me happy.
- OPNsense 16.7-RC2 released.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/18.
- Another Release of FreeBSD on the Horizon: My Thoughts.
- Why we use OpenBSD at VidiGuard.
- Thinking about switching from arch Linux to freebsd. I’m a complete bsd noob, pointers?
- Slides from Josh Grosse’s OpenBSD ports presentation at SemiBUG.
- New dmesg output from a variety of hardware. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016: registration is now open!
- PHP modules are now automatically enabled in pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!
Garbage 35 is up, with news about ChiBUG, an OpenBSD hackathon, and the ritual shaming of computer equipment.
HOPE starts today in New York City, and if you are going, there’s at least one BSD presence at the show that could use volunteers.
Fuzzing sounds cute, but it’s about finding security problems, not checking for adorable guinea pigs or llamas or something like that. It’s also episode 151 of BSDNow. It looks like there’s no specific interview this week, but plenty of interesting topics and links listed.
the i915 support in DragonFly now matches the Linux 4.4 kernel, which is good news if you have a Broxton, Skylake, or Cherryview processor, plus it adds a variety of fixes.
If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.
I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)
It’s a nerdy Lazy Reading today. Well, nerdier than usual, I think.
- Favorite Networking Links? Help a TA! Multiple good links there.
- UNIX Helps Put Out Fires.
- How to Write a History of Writing Software. (via)
- Canonical’s Snap: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. PC-BSD already did similar packaging – and stopped. (via)
- Acorn and Amstrad. (via)
- Dudley Buck’s Forgotten Cryotron Computer. (via)
- Unix for Poets. (PDF, via)
- Remembering Roger Faulkner, UNIX Legend. (via)
- The Megaprocessor. That’s the biggest CPU ever I seen. (also via)
- Biohacking for Newbies: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Getting an NFC Chip Implant.
- bug.n. For those who like wmii, i3, Xmonad, and so on, but are stuck on Windows.
- Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor.
I’m meeeeellllllltttinng!
- About Devio.us
- Let’s Encrypt client from BSD in C. (via)
- ZFS Deadlock: ‘Directory of Death’. (via)
- BSD vs. Linux (2005) Old, but new comments at the source link.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/11.
- “PAM Mastery” tech reviewers wanted.
- pkgsrc-2016Q2 is out.
- Errata and patches released! OpenBSD.
- my int is too big Related to previous link, I think.
- TXLF 2016 Recap.
- mandoc-1.13.4 released.
- usermount being removed from OpenBSD.
- Are you in Scottsdale, AZ, and want to talk about I assume fiction or BSD?
- (late update) LibertyBSD 5.9 is out.
A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.