For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
If you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4), Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to try out his Intel NIC driver update. He’s already updated the ix(4) driver to support more hardware.
As mentioned previously, Sepherosa Ziehau is printing up some DragonFly T-shirts for WeChat users. He’s going to have a few left over, so he is sending them to me to hand to non-China people. If you want one, leave a note saying so in the comments. Here’s the front and back.
You need to provide some way for me to contact you – preferably email, and the size you’d want. (Use the Land’s End Men’s Shirts chart for sizing, because why not.) I’ll only have a few, so no guarantees.
Update: I have more responses than probable shirts at this point – sorry! I’ll get in contact with each of you once the shirts come in and arrange delivery.
It’s tonight at 7 PM, with the details found on the NYCBUG mailing list. RSVP as soon as you can if you are near enough to go – and you should go.
A good chunk of this is brought over from last week, cause there was so much.
- Ramsey Theory in the Dining Room. Not the shouty chef. (via)
- Superpersistent bootkit. (PDF, via, via)
- Raspberry Pis stuffed into classic computer shells. (via)
- I Dreamed of a Perfect Database. “This is a risk of working alone, without anyone to tell you you’re insane.” A Paul Ford article. (via)
- Project: Keyboard Conversion. More ambitious than I expected. (via)
- It’s called fdisk because…
- Computer Man [Extended Version]. Very 1980s. (via)
- The story of one latency spike. (via)
- Peering into inodes.
- After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6. (via)
- Big Data? No Thanks! Even if you don’t agree with the position, the images are neat. (via)
- Roll your own toy Unix-clone OS. (via)
- King’s Hand, which turns Go programs into utility scripts. (via)
- Why doesn’t findstr use the standard regular expression library? Another grep variant.
Your unrelated game link of the week: Freecol. Runs on all the BSDs (thanks Thomas Klausner), as far as I can tell. (via)
I had this built up well ahead of time.
- Today’s world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim. The author is/was a OpenBSD developer. (via, via)
- Show Your Support for FreeBSD. (Foundation) Donation time of year.
- As an everyday user of Linux, should I switch to BSD, why or why not?
- vCenter Web Client Plug-in for TrueNAS Now Available.
- OpenBSD Xen support. (via)
- “look I come from debian so having a stable reliable system that _also_ has software that isn’t years out of date in the repos is a shocker” (about the ports system)
- pkgsrc is moving to dash as a bootstrap shell, to replace pdksh.
- The 2015Q4 quarterly pkgsrc freeze is coming.
- BSD Magazine issue 75, with a focus on FreeBSD development tools, is available.
- DistroWatch Weekly reviews OpenBSD 5.8. (via)
- n2k15: sashan@ on PF mpsafe progess.
- n2k15: tedu@ on rebound, malloc hardening, removing legacy code.
- OPNsense 15.7.22 Released.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/12/07.
Hammer now defaults to ‘noatime’, meaning the date and time of last access are not updated on every file action. Note that creation and modification date and time are still recorded. This will help with speed and disk activity.
This may cause a problem with any software expecting this to change – mutt, possibly? We will find out. This change was done after the 4.4 branch, so it’s not in the current release of DragonFly.
If you are a WeChat user and want a DragonFly BSD shirt, send your Chinese address and mobile number to seallyhs@dragonflybsd.org, or scan this image to join the WeChat DragonFly BSD group.
This is exclusive to China right now, as it’s being done by DragonFly developer Sepherosa Ziehau – who, as you might guess by now, is based in China.
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.