DragonFly has historically performed very well with NFS. I don’t have hard numbers to point at (an interesting exercise if someone wanted it), but in any case: DragonFly now can tune up to a much larger iosize, which means better NFS performance. DragonFly <-> DragonFly NFS performance can now max out a GigE link, or with anything else that can handle the larger iosize. That plus additional readahead, also in that commit, means easier netboots.
BSDTalk has a 65-minute recording of Ed Maste and George Neville-Neil at vBSDCon 2015 presenting “Supporting a BSD Project“. Note that it’s a recording of the presentation itself and not an interview after the fact. I don’t think vBSDCon has had any released video, or I don’t immediately remember seeing any, so this may be the only way to experience this talk.
I have a huge backlog of things to post, so this is originating from the 17th: Matthew Dillon has been working for some time on hardlinks and Hammer 2. Hardlinks are the same file, presented in multiple places. This can be a problem when your filesystem keeps infinite, writable snapshots. The solution he just commited is called ‘xlink’ and the commit message has details.
I am all over the map this week.
- How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive. I learned D’Nealian; my mother wrote Spencerian. Technical lettering in college and signing labs as a grad student destroyed my style. Anyone know a good source of fountain pens that are cheap/usable? I don’t want to go down the crazy route. (via)
- Triple redundancy in a Boeing 777. An Ada program compiled with 3 different compilers and run on 3 different processors. (PDF, via)
- If you’re curious about gold (the software, not the metal) and how linkers work, given DragonFly’s recent switch, the author of gold, Ian Lance Taylor, wrote a 20-part series about the topic. (Linked here before some years ago, but it’s worth reading now.)
- “We got around three“. A lesson in the persistence of Fortran.
- Former Atari Employee Posts Work Email Log from 1982-1992. The source of the link has many choice comments pulled out.
- Four examples of excellent interface design. In games, of course. The only one I’ve tried is Brogue, previously linked here, and its terminal controls don’t feel like terminal controls.
- The Storage Engine: Timeline. History of data storage, an online exhibit at the Computer History Museum. There are some delightful pictures and stories. (via)
- Raspberry Pi Zero: The $5 Computer. Pretty soon it’s going to be possible to sneeze and accidentally lose several computers because you blew them off the table. (via, also here)
- Also, a comparison of price between similarly-powered computers: everything circa 1980 and the Pi Zero now.
- C.H.I.P. vs Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better? Topical! “Which runs BSD better?” is the question you should ask, cause price is almost immaterial. (via)
- A browser-based optics sandbox. Funny how this used to require a standalone program. (via)
- The Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for your support. They provide infrastructure to software you use.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Sunday Comics Kickstarter.
Your unrelated open source game of the week: 0 A.D. Works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD and can run on DragonFly if you can fix gloox. (via)
I informally grouped by topic, cause it has proved an exceptionally rich week for BSD links.
- A FreeBSD AMI Builder AMI. (via)
- Status of pledge(2).
- Multiple Perl modules for OpenBSD’s pledge(2).
- Going full pledge.
- iXSystems at LISA 15.
- Current Status of OpenBSD / OpenBGPd at RIPE 71 by Peter Hessler.
- Zedboard and BSD. (via)
- FreeBSD on the QCA953x (“Honeybee”) from Qualcomm Atheros.
- Onion Omega and FreeBSD.
- Yay cross–pollination!
- Tools for cleaning up KNF-formatted code.
- You should try FreeBSD. (via)
- Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both desktop and laptop. Very thorough, and a useful guide if you are contemplating the same thing. (via)
- Interview: Renato Westphal
- Hackfest OpenBSD Presentations.
- “The Devil & BSD: Leaving Linux Behind” (via)
- freebsd vs arch linux
- NetBSD has the Blum Blum Shub RNG, which I thought was a name selected for comedy effect, but no, it’s the names of the creators.
- Wireless, finally – with NetBSD on my Raspberry Pi
- You can no longer not encrypt ssh traffic, on FreeBSD. I am linking that mostly so I can use that convoluted English statement.
- rsnapshot on FreeBSD. (via)
- OPNsense 15.7.20 Released.
- Inline Intrusion Prevention. An upcoming OPNSense feature.
- Multi-tenant/VLANs behind a virtualized pfSense firewall in ESXi. (via)
- OpenBSD support in psutil 3.3.0. (via)
- Comments on the previously-linked “Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System?“. Hey, someone mentioned the Digest!
Since DragonFly 4.4 has been branched, bleeding-edge DragonFly is now at version 4.5. As John Marino detailed in his post, that means pkg on 4.5 systems will look in a new place for downloads. (“dragonfly:4.6:x86:64”, since it always uses even numbers) To cover for this, set ABI to point at DragonFly 4.4 packages in pkg.conf for now. They’re freshly built and functionally the same, anyway. Once there’s a 4.6 download path, that ABI setting can be removed. Packages for DragonFly-current are available now and probably at the mirrors by the time this posts.
Update: as John Marino pointed out to me, anyone on DragonFly-master who upgrades now will be at version 4.5. This means pkg will get the new (4.5) packages on the next pkg upgrade. That means a mix of old and new packages unless you either reinstall anything (pkg update -f) or hardcode the 4.4 download path until you are ready to switch everything.
So: DragonFly-current users should either hardcode the 4.4 path for now or force an pkg upgrade for everything. DragonFly 4.2-release users are unaffected.
Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. isn’t slowing down BSDNow, cause there’s a new episode up with Bryan Cantrill talking about the awfulness that is Linux interfaces, along with a bunch of summary news items written out on the page.
Did you need to use SLIP on DragonFly? Do you remember what SLIP is? Well, it’ll work with a USB modem on DragonFly, even if you are making a face right now and saying, “SLIP? Who uses that?”
The default linker in DragonFly has been switched to gold, the newer version of ld. (get it, go-ld?) It’s faster, cleaner, going by the commit message. It’s possible to switch back to the old one if needed. This predates the recent branch for 4.4, so it will be default in the release, too.
The next release of DragonFly is coming due, since it’s been 6 months. I just tagged 4.4RC, and I’ll have an image built soon. Current estimate is that we’ll have the 4.4-RELEASE at the end of the month.
This is one of those weeks where everything gets covered. Settle in, there’s lots to click.
- For Better or For Worse. About Go, but also about language design in general. (via)
- The Birth of ZFS. See comments in the source link about Oracle’s version vs. the BSD version.
- The Docker Monitoring Problem. Good for an explanation of containers. (via)
- Cmder. Slowly, the UNIX workflow style is taking over everything – even Windows. (via)
- The Early History of the more Command. “I named the program more. This was a daring move at the time, since it was such a long name for a UNIX command, and was also a real English word.” (via)
- Early Phishing. Click the PDF link on the upper right for the content. (also via)
- Where SCCS came from. (also also via)
- Alta Vista, 5 servers, 1996. (via)
- Dragonfly Key Exchange, RFC 7664. Nothing to do with DragonFly. (via swildner on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- ex reference manual, from Bill Joy. (PDF, via)
- xv6, “a modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix” (via)
- Something to think about for “supported” older versions of software, especially in those long-term support versions of various Linux distributions.
- ADOM is now available on Steam. Runs on BSD, sorta.
- The AS7007 Incident. I knew of things like the Morris Worm, but not this event. (via)
- Does the Internet route around damage? I also did not realize the size of the RIPE ATLAS network.
- System Shock, a font reappears! (via)
- JF Ptak Science Books. A historical bookseller blogs – a lot! (via, via)
Your eighties video link for the week: The 80s.mp4. (via)
Your unrelated browser toy of the week: A browser-based optics sandbox. (via)
Another week where there’s so much to link to, it overflows into next week.
- Inaugural SemiBUG meeting notes. Next meeting is December 15th, with Josh Grosse presenting on bulk package builds in OpenBSD.
- Yahoo and FreeBSD (1997). For those who enjoy correlation without clear causation, there’s a relationship between Yahoo’s fortunes as a company, and reducing their usage of BSD. (via)
- “…I use BSD for my websites for a reason.” Similar material sprinkled through the comments. (via)
- What are some active BSD-focused blogs or news sites you follow? My answer’s in there.
- Setting color temperature.
- Try to make Graylog2 working on FreeBSD (and failed)
- Various options for presentation software on the BSDs. (Follow thread)
- rough code and working consensus, working in a group at the recent u2k15 hackathon.
- Speaking of which, one more u2k15 report.
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2015 Tokushima.
- Samba QoS? (FreeBSD)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/11/16.
- OPNsense 15.7.19 Released.
Imre Vadász fixed top so that hitting ‘c’ filters displayed processes by command name. I am mentioning this not because it’s a huge change, but because I forget about all the interactive elements that are possible with top.
Does that count as alliteration? Anyway, Matthew Dillon has increased the size of the starting window in TCP. If you are on a higher-latency link and/or fetching lots of small files, you should notice better performance.
This week’s BSDNow has the usual news, plus an interview of George Wilson talking about ZFS. There’s a new Beastie Bits section that contains a bunch of short links to BSD material… Hey! That’s my niche!
If you are on bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3), you will need to rebuild both kernel and world to keep them in sync, after Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit. This won’t affect you at all if you are on 4.2.x.
I don’t think I linked to this anywhere else: Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System? By Siju George, at BSD Magazine.
The disk scheduler apparatus in DragonFly has been removed. This may not affect you much, since alternate scheduling setups were never utilized much with it. It may fix some rare Hammer cleanup issues, though, and you may need to adjust your custom kernel config, if you have one.
Reminder: Stephen Bourne, known for the Bourne Shell, among many other things, will be talking at NYCBUG this Thursday. Plan to get there early, cause it’ll be busy.