Sepherosa Ziehau has continued his quest of making large-scale data transmission on DragonFly effortless; his latest change has cut the kqueue contention rate by two-thirds when dealing with a connection rate of nearly 400,000 connections per second. Note that’s number of connections, without even tracking the bandwidth used by each.
John Marino rearranged how GCC5 handles CPUTYPE settings. If you are specifically setting the target CPU when compiling, his commit will give you an exact list of what to target.
Note that I am not saying another architecture – this is all x86_64. I also don’t recommend doing this unless you have a specific use for it – compiler overoptimizations often create more problems than they fix.
All over the map this week.
- VT100 Terminal Art: old text-based animations you can run in your terminal. (via)
- Free security advice. Generally correct, and not so in-depth you can’t hand it to most anyone. (via)
- A project to resurrect Unix on the PDP-7 from a scan of original assembly code. (via)
- Refurbishing A 1927 Switchboard. I like the way very old electronics smell, strange as that may seem. (via)
- Y2K Futurism, or what people thought the future would look like 1996-2002. (via)
- NexDock, or a phone/laptop dock device. This is getting pretty close to the ‘seamless’ device version I have in my head. (via)
- The Five Stages of NoSQL. (via)
- GNU complexity 1.5. Someone run this on a BSD. (via)
- The past and future are here. It’s just not evenly distributed (yet). (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: teasmades, 50% off with the code ‘MOTHERSDAY2016’ until March 9th. Given the difference in US – UK voltage, I don’t know if this would be a good investment for me, but I’d sure like to have one.
I hope you have some time for reading this week.
- BSDCan: OpenBSD presentations.
- Linux Emulation goes to the great bitbucket of the sky.
- How do I find what is in the ports tree without installing?
- OpenSSH 7.2 released Feb 29, 2016. (via)
- Upcoming Features in GCC 6. Will this make it to a BSD other than maybe DragonFly? Dunno. (via)
- FreeBSD 10.3: Third Beta Available.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/02/29.
- X11 Forwarding with Kali Linux and bhyve. (via)
- Are BSD OS’ developed in the the open? If a device uses a lot of BSD, can it run XYZ?
- Who is the figurehead/rep/person who wrote BSDL? Ugh.
- Bryan Cantrill on Jails and Solaris Zones. (via)
- LibreSSL not affected by DROWN attack.
- OpenBSD 5.9 network improvements.
- Pre-orders for 5.9 are up! OpenBSD, if you weren’t sure.
- OPNsense 16.1.5 released.
- “it would have largely boiled down to the choice between a BSD family operating system or a Linux family operating system.“
- FreeBSD and NetBSD are in Google Summer of Code 2016.
- Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems. So many of these Linux problems aren’t even present on BSD. (via)
- NetBSD Core Team changes.
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2016 Tokyo/Spring.
Garbage 16 is out, with OpenBSD news and general tech talk. There’s apparently progress on Raspberry Pi 3 support.
(Podcasts tend to be timely, and time-dependent, so I’m not saving this for the weekend In Other BSDs)
Daniel Bilik has found there’s an issue with i915 acceleration, Baytrail CPUs, and some AUTODEEP low-power states. This will only affect you if you are using that specific hardware combo and setting certain low power modes. Interestingly, it affects other platforms, too, as it appears to be a symptom of how the video is addressed, not a DragonFly-specific bug.
BSDNow 131 is out, and has an interview of Jamie McParland, on I assume the topic of BSD in school environments, guessing by the title and guest’s email address. It has the normal summary of news items, including explanations of load average I think many people would find useful.
I almost missed this: There’s a NYCBUG meeting tonight, at 6:45 PM, at the Stone Creek Bar and Lounge in New York City. The presentation will be from Raul Cuza, titled “BSD init(8) and rc(8): Room for Improvement?“. I imagine there will be an opportunity to complain about systemd’s very existence, at this meeting.
UNIX tools are this week’s unintentional theme.
- The many load averages of Unix(es). (via)
- So you want to write a package manager. (via)
- Headshot: A visual history of first-person shooters. (via)
- Tolkien Ipsum. (via)
- Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions. (via)
- The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal. Insert comment about stuffy old newspaper here. (via)
- “Newton fax modems as packing material“
- The Ephemeral Software Collection.
- Are there any nice Unix shells newer than fish?
- An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. (1989, via)
- What was the first terminal command that really wowed you?
- Do Artists Need Websites? This is why businesses only on Facebook bother me. (via)
- How I Vim. (also via)
Your unrelated robot link of the week: Every new Boston Dynamics robot is creepier than the last.
Look at the ZFS discussions if you want to feel smug as a BSD user.
- Should I use BSD? If so, why?
- Delphi development in FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD and Comic Sans problems. (a sort of background to that?)
- Garbage podcast 14, for February 19th, which I missed linking to before.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/02/22.
- February 2016 status and sponsorship questions.
- OPNsense 16.1.4 released.
- USB-stack broken on Chromebook 2 (CB30)
- GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux. (also found here, via and via)
- Related to that: FreeBSD and ZFS, from the FreeBSD Foundation, quietly pointing out that BSD has been the best place for ZFS for a long time.
- iXsystems Partners with Veeam. (Note to self: get quote before buying that VNXe3150 tray expansion, next week…)
- FreeBSD Storage Summit 2016.
- Speaking on BSD: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part. The photo is funny.
- Setting up your own Package Cluster in MidnightBSD.
Normally I’m just linking to BSDNow, but there’s even more BSD-themed media coming up today: BSDNow 130 is out, titled “Store all the Things“, with an extended summary of the recent Storage Summit.
Garbage episode 15 is out, titled “Compressing with Broccoli“. It notes a lack of activity for Bitrig – I still see commits happening, though.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
Francois Tigeot has again updated Intel i915 video support in DragonFly, bringing it even with what’s in Linux 4.2. This will be very useful for Broadwell and Skylake users, and even Broxton, apparently the newest Atom platform.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
I earn the roguelike tag this week.
- “I built Space invaders into Dwarf Fortress.” Featuring the Almighty Dwarven Calculator. (via)
- Free Lovecraft stories. (via)
- Imagining your future projects is holding you back. Talking about fiction, but this applies to open source work too. (via)
- Happy 25th, Webcam!
- @Play 83: HyperRogue
- Mac System 1.0 (via)
- ASCII cows. (via)
- The website of Bob Bemer, the Father of ASCII. COBOL, too? (via)
- Bell Labs in the 1960s. Note how many women were there. Rementioning. (Thanks, BSD32x)
- The scarcity of college graduates with FOSS experience. The license isn’t the important part where students learn; it’s the workflow: coordinating with others, source control, discussion channels, etc. That’s what isn’t taught enough. (via)
- “Here’s a quant fact: the online space is measurably dumber than it was two years ago.“
- Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang. (via)
- The Lonely Dungeon, the random RPG rulebook generator linked last week, now has random illustrations to go with it. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Voynich Manuscript and Codex Serahinianus, in PDF form. Ignore the “never-cracked ancient mystery” bit about the Voynich Manuscript, but it’s still interesting to look at.
Keep an eye out for BSD user group meetings in your area – just because I didn’t note it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
- “FreeBSD Filesystem Fun” at March 15th SEMIBUG. The next few months of SEMIBUG speakers are posted there, too.
- Deploying NetBSD on the Cloud Using AWS EC2: Part 1.
- NetBSD on Google’s Compute Engine.
- The OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising Campaign. (via)
- The Complexity of Doing Things Right in Distributed Board Elections. About the NetBSD elections.
- Using GPIO on the Raspberry Pi. (on NetBSD)
- flashrd 2.0 is out, and there’s a new mailing list location. Here’s the flashrd site to save you looking it up, if it’s new to you. (via)
- When Sony uses FreeBSD for Playstation 4, how much money do they save?
- htop now runs on several BSDs. (via)
- FreeBSD and the recent glibc CVE-2015-7547 vulnerability.
- OPNsense 16.1.3 released.
- PVS-Studio delved into the FreeBSD kernel. (via)
- Registration for AsiaBSDCon 2016 is open. (via)
- pfSense training now available in Europe.
BSDTalk 262 is available, talking with Tex Andrews for 23 minutes about LightZone, “open source digital darkroom software”.
BSDNow 129 is available. Along with the normal news summary, it has an interview with John Marino, the fellow behind DragonFly’s dports system, and author of recently-noted-here synth, which has reached version 1.0.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.