BSDNow 119 is up, with even lengthier news summaries than usual, and an interview of Paul Goyette about his testing work with NetBSD.
John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
Matthew Dillon has added two Hammer2 directives – ‘info’ and ‘mountall’. See his commit message for a explanation of each. This predates the 4.4 branch, so it’s available in the current release. The usual caveat applies: Hammer2 is for development only; don’t use this to store data you want to use.
I am taking this moment away from my significant backlog of things to post to note that there have been a lot of games fixes in DPorts lately. Thanks to Rimvydas, many small bugs that kept games from compiling on DragonFly are now fixed. The easiest way to see is to look at the commits from December 8th and back, but the best way is to pick one and play.
DragonFly 4.4 is released! The release page has the information, and your nearest mirror should have the images by now. To update an existing 4.2 system, see my users@ post.
Sharp-eyed users will note that release is happening with version 4.4.1, rather than the 4.4.0 you’d expect. That’s because I tagged 4.4.0, built the images, and then OpenSSL 1.0.1q was released. Rather than make everyone who installs DragonFly need to immediately update, Sascha Wildner brought in the OpenSSL update to the 4.4 branch, and I built 4.4.1 instead.
Another done-early week. I’m already filling in next week’s Lazy Reading.
- Computer graphics from the 1970s/1980s. (via)
- How the Atari ST almost had Real UNIX. (via)
- Worg, the Org-Mode Community. So many people sing the praises of orgmode. (via)
- The 68000 Wars, a history of Commodore, parts one, two, three, four. (via)
- Novena: A Laptop With No Secrets. Not easy to build or use, but I’m glad it exists. (via)
- XINU OS – Xinu Is Not Unix. (via)
- Eavesdropping on the Hidden World. (via)
- “How the heck do you people google for Windows problems?“
- dd – Destroyer of Disks. Not all these apply consistently to various BSDs. (via)
- I can appreciate some of what Facebook’s doing with new offices, but a big room doesn’t have to be so ugly. (And I don’t even like FLW!) (via)
- What’s so special about 2147483648?
- Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 is out.
- Let’s Encrypt is in public beta. (via many places)
- How I stay happy making open source software. (via)
- Taco Bell Programming. I agree with some of the sentiments, though Taco Bell mostly just means crap, not reusability. I prefer my tacos to be Mighty.(via)
Your unrelated music clip of the week: Coldcut – More Beats n Pieces.
Your unrelated open source game of the week: MegaGlest. Runs on DragonFly, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, or at least I can find references to binaries for all of them. (via comments)
Your unrelated community funded game of the week: Psychonauts 2. A sequel to one of my favoritest games ever.
I was going to make comments about this being a light week, and then suddenly I had overflow.
- The 2015 NYC Tech Meta-Party is December 14th. Lots of BSD people there; I wish I was.
- The Call for Papers for BSDCan 2016 is out. (also via)
- Early days of Unix and design of sh. Stephen Bourne’s recent NYCBUG talk; make time to see this if you missed the BSDCan 2015 show.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems, the early access draft, is available.
- Hosted NetBSD (and others) from Serveraptor. We need a list of hosting orgs where you can run BSD.
- One of the three OpenBSD users. (via)
- PXE boot OpenBSD from OpenWRT. (via)
- NetBSD gains sqlite3db and also DTC.
- PHP5.4 is being retired from pkgsrc.
- IBCS2 support in FreeBSD is removed, for now at least.
- OpenBSD now has an etherip(4) device. (No man page to link to as of this typing)
- iXSystems at Fossetcon 2015.
- Preparing multitouch support – request for tests
- Is That Linux? No, It’s PC-BSD. (via)
- How to Install Ajenti with Nginx and SSL on FreeBSD 10.2. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/11/30.
- Distrowatch reviews NetBSD 7. (via)
- FreeBSD and FreeNAS in Business by Randy Westlund.
I’m combining two items because news happens faster than I can post: Tomohiro Kusumi has added a ‘dm-flakey’ target to the disk mapper, so you can simulate an unreliable disk, reliably.
Also, the DRM support for radeon chipsets has been updated to match the Linux 3.18 kernel, same as i915. Remember, you can control backlight brightness with it now.
BSDNow 118 is up, and it has an interview with Mark Heily about relaunchd, along with a number of other BSD news things that I haven’t even read yet because I didn’t expect the episode before today.
If you are running DragonFly-master (i.e. 4.5), and you have a system between these two updates (roughly between November 27th and now), please rebuild your kernel to avoid a TCP bug.
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.