I took some liberty with the spelling of the title, but it’s more accurate that way: The newest episode of BSDNow has a roundup of BSD news (some of which is pretty major) and an interview of Ike Levy, AKA ‘the guy at NYCBSDCon who showed me how useful pfSense could be’. Ike is speaking at a SemiBUG meeting on the 17th, too, which I’ll post about.
If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.
Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.
The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.
Network tools and analysis is the accidental topic this week.
- More open-source network management tools.
- How do ISPs and modems actually obtain the right signal off of a phone/cable/optical fiber/whatever line? A layer-1 overview. (via)
- A damp discussion of network queuing. (via)
- How To Make Fossils Productive Again. (via)
- Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence.
- SSH for fun and profit. (via)
- CV of Failures. I like the last one. (via)
- Go best practices, six years in. (via)
- PocketCHIP, hardware for PICO-8. (via)
- Typewriter.
- Circuit Classics — Sneak Peek!
- An update on SSH protocol 1. Dead in a year, that’s the update. (via)
- How difficult is the GVG-AI competition?
- Deflecting it old school. From here.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: British tea consumption has been going down. (via) I like the additional charts about biscuits and cake, complementary to tea. Which reminds me: Welsh cakes are so good that the first time I made them, I was angry that I hadn’t tried them years ago.
Episode 25 of Garbage went up yesterday and I forgot to check for it, so I’m linking to it now. Among other things, they mention Garbage merchandise. I’d pay for a shirt that pointed out most technology is garbage, to take it from the page.
Another trifecta week.
- GNOME 3.20.1 on OpenBSD, the usual screencast; not too bad for a server OS. (via)
- A comprehensive guide for OpenBSD desktop?
- Tredly – Containers for Unix. Powered by FreeBSD. (via)
- Bootstrap pkgsrc under ‘bash on Windows’. This should be on pkgsrc.org.
- OpenHUB’s NetBSD Project Statistics.
- Dru Lavigne Will be Speaking @ KnoxBUG.
- New Release Schedule and Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 Released. (via)
- OpenBSD Foundation Announces Gold Sponsor.
- libcrypto errata – May 2016. Related: regarding embargoes.
- .NET framework ported to NetBSD. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/02.
- GhostBSD 10.3 Alpha release! (via)
- FreeBSD Quarterly Status report for 2016Q1.
- p2k16 OpenBSD hackathon:
Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
This week’s BSDNow is the normal news roundup, plus an interview of Samy Al Bahra, about ‘backtrace‘.
I’m talking multiple times a week about BSD-themed podcasts/video/whatever these days. This is great! 5-6 years ago I was probably the only BSD source posting more than weekly.
If you’ve ever wondered how having multiple swap devices can work, here’s your DragonFly-specific answer.
NYCBUG is meeting tonight, and Thomas Levine will be there to talk about Urchin, a shell-based test framework. The announcement also has future meeting/speaker dates noted.
If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.
(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)
BSDTalk 264 is out, and rather than an interview, it talks about a topic I’ve always enjoyed: Gopher, including ways to access Gopher resources even now.
Cinco De Mayo is coming up.
- Why I run my business like an open source project. The contractors I use at work that take this approach are much easier to work with. (via)
- Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side. Even more evidence of what a bad idea that strategy can be. (via)
- Developer Certificate of Origin versus Contributor License Agreements. Boring, but I understand the reasoning. (also via)
- Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM. (via)
- The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem. Displaced by Winbuntu. (via)
- What happened to _why.
- Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At. I see so many people with this problem. (via)
- Baby UNIX.
- Dyson’s Maps & Cartography. Hand-drawn D&D maps. (via)
- Related: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed. Buy here. (via)
- 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script.
- GEOS, an operating system I never really knew about.
- when i wore a younger fool’s cap. GitHub uber alles.
- O Reader! My Reader. I’ve gotten used to tt-rss.
Your unrelated link of the week: What was the weirdest 911 call ever received? (via)
I think I manage to link at least one story for every BSD type this week, or close to it.
- FreeBSD GPIO Benchmark. (via)
- ASLR now on by default in amd64. (via)
- anti-ROP mechanism in libc.
- The p2k16 hackathon has begun.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/04/25.
- Rethinking Unix: A New Apropos Implementation from NetBSD. (via)
- BSD at LinuxFest Northwest 2016.
- UPnP on Pfsense: security risks and alternatives. (via)
- OpenSMTPD, spamd, SpamAssassin and Dovecot on OpenBSD – part 1 (via)
- a prog by any other name. Some BSD history.
- OPNsense 16.1.12 released
The garbage podcast for this week is up, with discussion of OpenBSD and TRIM, and, well, a very wide range of topics, going by the summary.
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
This week’s BSDNow has some news catchup, since they’ve been on the road, and an interview with Brooks Davis of FreeBSD-on-Cheri. (CheriBSD?)
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
Posting it now, because it’ll be too late by this weekend’s In Other BSDs: The inaugural meeting of KnoxBUG is tomorrow night. That’s Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The speaker is Kris Moore, of PC-BSD. The website has directions.