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BSDNow 100: Straight from the Src

I managed to be on the road and so did not post about the milestone 100th episode of BSDNow, which has an interview with Sebastian Wiedenroth about both pkg and pkgSrcCon, along with all their other news.

I’m glad to see 100 episodes together of a video podcast for BSD; if you had asked me a few years ago if that was possible, I’d have dismissed the idea.  Not for lack of news, obviously, but because I didn’t think anyone would have that level of dedication.  Investing time and care is what sets people apart, and they’ve done it.

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Lazy Reading for 2015/08/02

Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.

Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.  (via an internet cult.)  Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English.  Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation.  That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.

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In Other BSDs for 2015/08/01

It’s an unexpectedly diverse list this week.

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No more hostapd

hostapd, for creating a wireless access point, has been included in DragonFly along with wpa_supplicant, for a long time.  Like wpa_supplicant, there’s a version in dports that is the latest version and is easier to update (e.g. no system update required to get a newer version.)  Unlike wpa_supplicant, there’s no chicken-and-egg installation problem if it’s not in the base system – so out it goes.

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Use wpa_supplicant only long enough to replace it

DragonFly ships with wpa_supplicant, for setting up WiFi.  However, there’s no guarantee it’s the latest version.  A solution exists: security/wpa_supplicant in dports.  However, this has a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need wpa_supplicant to get online and download the dports version of wpa_supplicant.  So, DragonFly still includes wpa_supplicant in the base system, but you should upgrade to the dports version when possible.

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Lazy Reading for 2015/07/26

Short list this week – no particular reason.

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In Other BSDs for 2015/07/25

A lot of variety this week.

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Power statistics

Sepherosa Ziehau has been doing a lot of work with various processors states to save power on DragonFly.  He’s published a summary of how well the various P-state/C-state/mwait settings work.  He found that setting a lower C-state can perversely improve performance.

For those saying “but how do I set these lower power states?”:

sysctl machdep.mwait.CX.idle: AUTODEEP
sysctl machdep.cpu_idle_hlt: 1 (or higher)

	

 









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Lazy Reading for 2015/07/19	




No theme, though I’ve been thinking about IPv6 lately.  Mostly in a “oh man all that PLC equipment at work can barely do IPv4 this won’t be easy” sort of way.



Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Dr. Fun comic archives.

	

 







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In Other BSDs for 2015/07/18	




I seem to have In Other BSDs exactly 1 day off from the OPNsense release schedule, so far.