Francois Tigeot has committed his Broadwell work, which has a longer-than-I-realized list of benefits. Does anyone have a 4k screen to try?
BSDNow 088 has an interview of Ed Schouten about FreeBSD, and all the normal roundups. Also “DragonFlyBSD has officially won the race to get an Intel Broadwell graphics driver”.
Maybe I need to start doing In Other BSDs posts on Wednesdays, cause BSDNow often has the links I’m already saving for the weekend.
John Vernaleo is giving a talk for NYCBug about Bitrig, tonight at 6:45 in New York City. See the announcement for details on location and etc.
Jesse Wattenbarger wrote in with his success story of switching to DragonFly, both for server and desktop. Of note is his noticeable speedup with swapcache.
If you’re running DragonFly-master and you have an Intel video chipset, Francois Tigeot has an update for you. It brings accelerated Intel video up to match the Linux 3.14 version, adds Broadwell chipset support, and should generally improve performance. He lists how to test right in the message.
I started sparse because this was a busy week, but I’ve still got a pretty good amount of reading for you.
- Comparing code layout. Not the code, but the visual arrangement. This could certainly be explored further.
- Schemaverse, a space strategy game implemented entirely within PostgreSQL. (via)
- The Cray 2 Computer System. (pdf, via)
- How to Operate the Apple II Plus. (via)
- “Analog“. (via)
- noTCP. (via)
- My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
- distribution, for ASCII histograms. I can think of many times this would have been useful.
- Disinformation Visualisation: How to Lie with Datavis. (via)
- How to pronounce hexadecimal. Not the word itself, but the numbers derived. Don’t actually do this. (via)
- Penrose binning. (via)
- Also, Go by Example. Linked because I like the description for it at the source.
- The Words the Media Industry Prefers. The narrative made me laugh. (via)
I’ve already mentioned the Hammer2/OpenBSD Summer of Code project (one of several), but here’s more:
- The April issue of BSD Magazine is out.
- OpenBSD on an iBook G4
- Midnight BSD 0.6 is out.
- OpenBSD 5.7 is out.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.4 is out.
- PC-BSD 10.1.2 RC1 is out.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/04/27.
- FreeBSD project report for 2015Q1.
- Hacking “/ on ZFS” and GELI Encrypted Drives, the Old-School Way
- Michael W. Lucas is giving a “Tarsnap talk” at mug.org on May 12 to match his book.
- vBSDCon is happening September 11-13 in Reston, VA.
(No mailing list links this week; I’m way behind in my reading because of work. Sorry!)
DragonFly committer Joris Giovannangeli has a Google Summer of Code project. He’s bringing Hammer2 to OpenBSD, in single-node form. It’s a very difficult project, but Joris is a very talented worker.
BSDNow 087 has an interview with Christos Zoulas, about NetBSD and blacklistd, along with the usual collection of news stories that I’m trying not to peek at because I’m behind on my usual reading and I want to get my own collection together for Saturday’s In Other BSDs.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been quietly making a lot of commits to Hammer. I haven’t been linking them because they don’t necessarily equate to new features, but here’s an recent exception: the -A argument will make your Hammer command run on every PFS. It only affects reblocking/rebalancing – for now.
We’re already 2/3 of the way to Christmas!
- UNIX history book recommendations.
- Networking for System Administrators, a BSD-friendly book I was slightly involved with, reviewed on Slashdot.
- How UNIX system administration is like filing your taxes.
- The history of computer data storage, in pictures. (via)
- Ops books. How much of Github is not-code? (via)
- The Heirloom Laptop’s Custom Wood Composite.
- BrowserHack: NetHack ported to the web. (via)
- Text adventure speed runs. (via)
- People who could really break the Internet. (via)
- This, everytime someone says “the cloud” (via)
- The Forgotten Ones: Unisys SCAMP-D Mainframe. Linking to it because that’s where “Master Control Program” came from. (via)
- Textblade. Sounds neat; I’d want to see it in action. (via)
- The Philco 2000 Model 212’s retirement party. (via)
- Good UNIX (History) books / material ?
- Copper vs. fiber. (via)
- Used Thinkpad Buyer’s Guide. (via)
Your unrelated tea links of the week: Do you even steep? The actual title is different, but I like that part of the link more. (Thanks, Jeff Ramnani) Also: Tea With Strangers. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, it’s not in my city. (via)
It’s been a relatively calm week, for once.
- New Delhi has a BSD user group. (via)
- PC-BSD and 4K — Oh my!
- Is nvidia the best option for gaming on FreeBSD?
- EuroBSDCon 2015 has extended the time for paper submission, cause they have so much to work through.
- Hipster keyboard layout on NetBSD
- The pkgsrc-security GPG key has changed.
- Binary packages of pkgsrc-2015Q1 for illumos and OS X are available.
- I like cross–pollination.
- PC-BSD can now restore encrypted volumes over iSCSI.
- Two more mentions of OpenBSD (though any should work) on Vultr.
- Better OpenBSD performance on KVM via x2apic mode.
- OpenBSD rolls their own file(1).
- OpenBSD has W^X support for i386 userland now.
- 2-factor authorization on FreeBSD. (via)
- My switch to OpenBSD, first impressions (via)
- Microsoft .NET Running on FreeBSD 10.1/amd64 (via)
You can now export Hammer slave volumes as NFS mounts – but since slave volumes are updated from master, you’re mounting a snapshot of that point in time. That may actually be an advantage.
DragonFly builds two compilers by default. If you weren’t interesting in building both, there were switches to build only the default, like NO_GCC47. This changed with every compiler update.
With the switch to GCC 5, the new switch is “NO_ALTCOMPILER”. That will last through compiler changes. I’m mentioning this now because sooner or later, you’ll want to gain back some time on a buildworld.
BSDNow 086, just out, has the usual roundup of news, plus an interview with Antoine Jacoutot about OpenBSD and BSD in business environments.
DragonFly now has GCC 5.1 release. If you are running DragonFly master (i.e. 4.1), you’ll probably want to both rebuild world and kernel, and update your packages so they all match. There’s already packages built with GCC 5.1, so binary package upgrades can happen quickly. There’s GCC 4.7 packages still available if you aren’t making the jump yet.
If you’re on DragonFly 4.0.x – nothing’s changed.
I’m late posting about these, but they go together: Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ability to read CPU temperature through various sysctls, and the same for DIMM temperature readings.
Spillover from last week, even.
- Big Changes at USENIX LISA in the last 5-10 Years.
- Open Source won, so what’s next?
- “The lack of diversity in the Valley isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic one.” If you doubt the hive mind of Silicon Valley, look at We Put A Chip In It. (via)
- The Story of the ZX Spectrum in Pixels (volumes 1 & 2)
- Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet’s Least Favorite Tool. Linked because they have a screenshot of Snowcraft. (via)
- Found in previous link: Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad? Of course, I loaded that page and got a full-page overlay advertising video, so maybe news websites are the new restaurant websites.
- FreeDOS on your camera. That’s two mysteries: Why FreeDOS? Why still have a separate camera? (via)
- How a bridge full of zombies reminded me of the great possibility of games. I love this sort of discovery in games. (via)
- Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? (via)
- Mushroom Cultivation Revisited. (via)
- The Zero, One, Infinity Disease. First comment on the source link is good too.
- Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments. (via)
- since.
Your unrelated video links of the week: 80s nostalgia is happening now that there’s a generation young enough to not have experienced it. You can have the 1980s as a parody, or as the real, unmitigated awfulness.
I couldn’t help the commentary on some of these links.
- The Arrival of TrueNAS 9.3 and more.
- Has anyone tried making a BSD phone? They did; starts with an i.
- softraid(4) – RAID 5 Call for Testing for OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD’s rcctl. (via)
- Solaris moves to pf. I still wish for compatibility tests so people can tell what’s supported in the flavor of pf they are running.
- Same news seen here.
- Time Machine for every Unix out there. Or use Hammer. (via)
- Optimizing TLS for High–Bandwidth Applications in FreeBSD [pdf]. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/04/13.
- Spinning up a quick cloud instance with Digital Ocean. Includes BSD hosts.
- A week of pkgsrc #8
- FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS is available for pre-order.
- Cross-platform software packaging with pkgsrc.
- pfSense 2.2.2 is out.
- pkgsrc-2015Q1 is out.
- pkgsrc shirts are available.
- BSDStats is out as version 6.0, though it needs to be tested. Please run, especially if you are on DragonFly.
- Setting up your own mail server, BSD edition. (via)
- The talk on blacklistd from the April NYCBUG meeting. The slides are available too. (via)
- NYCBUG is also hosting a new Polish BSD users group list (“subcarpathian” is a fun word) and has a list of upcoming events – straight through into fall!
Matthew Dillon bought a system with a Broadwell series CPU, installed DragonFly, and wrote up his experience. Read it if you plan on purchasing this hardware any time soon.