Justin Sherrill – Page 154 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/12/112014/12/12

IPFW2 branch for testing

bycn82’s rewrite of IPFW2 is available as a git branch to try out; he’s posted the link. Please try, especially if you are still working with the original ipfw.

(note: remember, ‘ipfw’ in DragonFly is what was called ‘ipfw2’ years and years ago because it was a replacement of the original ‘ipfw’ in FreeBSD. It was called ipfw2 but referenced as ipfw so that the same commands worked. Technically, this branch bycn82 is working on would be ipfw3, but he keeps referring to it as ipfw2. Confused? Good.)

2014/12/10

Remember AUTODEEP

If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:

machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP

To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.

2014/12/08

Support for a device nobody has

Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.

2014/12/072014/12/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/12/07

Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!

Don’t panic and keep forking Debian. It leads to devuan.org. For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not. (via)
Advent Planet. Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
On file formats, very briefly. I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read. (via)
Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via) 6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
Bumper Sticker Computer Science. More “epigrams”. Some dated, some excellent. (PDF, via)
ParkyTowers thin clients. Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game. See Softalk link below too. (via)
Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
Grand St. short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide. (PDF, via) Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
The strange world of computer-generated novels. (via)
Why my book can be downloaded for free.
Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI. (via)
The Softalk Apple Project .
Unix: tricks with history.
Clip Art is dead. Awww.
RowHammer. Ugh. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.

2014/12/062014/12/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/12/06

I have been building up quite the variety this week.

Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
A week of pkgsrc #5.
FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
Coreboot on the BSDs.
More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
Is it time to give BSDs a try?
Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.

2014/12/05

The Varialus page

This page, Varialus et Anisoptera, set up by… I’m not sure of the real name but it’s ‘varialus’ on IRC – has a detailed description of the DragonFly install process and installation of MATE, plus extra notes. I always find these sorts of cheatsheets entertaining.

2014/12/04

BSDNow 066: Conference Connoisseur

The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.

2014/12/042014/12/05

Fred, in color

The DragonFly boot menu has been cleaned up a bit, and Fred, the dragonfly drawn on DragonFly, is now in better color. In fact, there’s even an option to turn him blue.

Update: I wanted to see what this looked like, and I realized screenshots might help everyone else.

redfred

bluefred

2014/12/03

A pile of DragonFly commits

In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:

The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default. (that’s bit me in the past)
There’s a new callout*() implementation.
cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates.
libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which because of library versioning support, won’t cause compatibility problems for older vs. newer DragonFly versions.
C++11 support is also now available.

2014/12/02

svc(8), service manager for DragonFly

I’m running behind so this is a bit old, but: Matthew Dillon commited svc(8), a service manager program. Take a look at its man page to see the potential uses.

2014/12/01

A rcrun(8) conversation

Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.

2014/11/302014/11/28

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/30

I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week. No simple hacks, these.

Mysteries of the unix kind.
Nerdy trivia about Unix time_t. (via)
PDP-11/04 – Restoration. (via) Very nice pictures.
Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. (all via)
Linux on Obsolete Displays Project Page. (via)
USB Power Issues. That is definitely a hardware problem.
Know Your UNIX System Administrator – A Field Guide. (via)
Fitness machines for big data.
It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source.
Historic Computer Images. Hosted by the U.S. military.
EDSAC, the (only?) computer from the 1940s, is being rebuilt. No keyboard, no monitor.
God’s Lonely Programmer. (via)
Some light reading on lock-free programming.
A Rare Peek into the Massive Scale of AWS. Their capitalization, not mine. (via)
Metastable failure state. (also via)
Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software. (via)
Remote work: an engineering leader’s perspective. These articles never seem to note how open source developers fit this mold. (via)

2014/11/292014/11/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/11/29

Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.

BSD on Mini ITX.
Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/24.
pkgsrc and i386 may have issues on partial rebuild. Or not? Follow the thread.
lang/guile16 is leaving pkgsrc soon.
check-update, a script for finding what packages in pkgsrc need to be updated.
FreeBSD now has libgpio, I think for those general purpose I/O connectors on small ARM boards that are all the rage.
FreeBSD has switched to mandoc.
Your SGI hardware running OpenBSD will now tell you via LCD.
Tools for checking for updated packages on OpenBSD. (read the whole thread)
Conversations about a home PF-based router. “APU units run hot but are OK” seems to be the thread consensus.

2014/11/28

LDAP and DragonFly

Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.

2014/11/27

BSDNow 065: 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops

This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.

2014/11/262014/11/26

XHCI and installing DragonFly

With a recent commit from Sascha Wildner, DragonFly now loads XHCI (meaning USB3) by default. If you had previously tried to install DragonFly via USB stick, and it inexplicably refused to mou t the installer drive… It may work much better now.

2014/11/26

Release followups

There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.

2014/11/252014/11/25

DragonFly 4.0 released!

The 4.0 release of DragonFly is out! Quoting from the release page:

Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.

The more eagle-eyed downloader will notice it’s version 4.0.1, not 4.0.0. That’s because ~~nobody trusts .0 releases~~ I tagged 4.0.0 just before a few useful commits went in, and it’s better to retag to make sure everyone got them. See also my message to kernel@/users@

2014/11/24

Books books books

I’ve placed an image slider over on the right side of the website; it’s all BSD-related books. Each image is linked to a page about the book where you can buy it. It’s not paid advertising, or perhaps advertising at all; there’s no in-kind benefit. It’s specifically books I think people would find interesting to read, and we’d all benefit by the expansion of the BSD ‘ecosystem’.

The most recent edition added is Michael W. Lucas’s FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, which is out in ebook form today, and printed form soon.

2014/11/24

Several DragonFly updates

I’m working on the 4.0 release, but in the meantime, I wanted to point at a slew of updates from Sascha Wildner: ACPICA 20141107, pciconf(8), axge(4), and the kernel part of the netgraph7 Bluetooth stack.