Justin Sherrill – Page 160 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/07/192014/07/18

In Other BSDs for 2014/07/19

More than the usual source commit messages this week.

LibreSSL got another point release. And complaints. (via)
NetBSD 7’s branch date is planned.
FreeBSD 9.3 is released. EoL for 9.2 has been extended, too.
Cloning a FreeBSD/ZFS Machine with ‘zfs send’.
An OpenBSD hackathon means a lot of articles.
Troubleshooting Large, Stalling git/ssh Transfers.
pkg == systemd == government conspiracy. Surely, the writer can’t be real.
Installing and Using TarSnap. A BSD-friendly service.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/07/14 roundup.
OpenBSD has OpenSSH and put together LibreSSL. OpenSSL bought… libressh.org? Use whois libressh.org to see. (no link; use your own whois lookup.) (via)
NetBSD has updated to dhcp 4.3.0.
OpenBSD has imported ucpp. (hope that’s the right ucpp; there’s lots out there)
One of those times it’s OK to store passwords in cleartext.
PC-BSD is now using Samba 4.1 by default.
OpenBSD has a new httpd(8). Bonus long-in-the-tooth joke, too.
Yay, SSL library cross-pollination.
Cross-cross-cross pollination, here. (someone do it in DragonFly, too)
ssh (on OpenBSD) now supports Unix domain socket forwarding.
EruoBSDCon 2014 is happening in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September. The FreeBSD Foundation is funding travelers.
A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to.

2014/07/18

Improvements for qemu

While Matthew Dillon was testing the new up-to-256-processor support for DragonFly, he added a few sysctls, one of which helps qemu performance when emulating a lot of processors. I note it here in case it’s helpful to someone else.

2014/07/18

Interlock Roc: Linux Workshop

There’s an open source meetup at a hackerspace near me, happening tomorrow. Well, today by the time most people read this. Anyway, it’s at Interlock, starting at noon. I don’t think I’ll make it, but I’m always happy to see this stuff happen in my own town.

2014/07/182014/07/17

BSDNow 046: Network Iodometry

BSDNow 046 interviews Brian Drewery, talks about tunneling through DNS ports (an useful trick to get around network paywalls, if it’s what I think it is), and of course more general discussion of BSD topics.

2014/07/17

H.O.P.E. starts tomorrow in NYC

HOPE X starts tomorrow in New York City and runs through the weekend. There will be some BSD people there. (see first line of link.)

2014/07/17

Reserving more memory

DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.

2014/07/17

Semaphore test suite added

Thanks to Nicolas Thery, there’s a POSIX semaphore test suite on DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD. Anyone want to integrate it into dfregress?

2014/07/15

SYSRET fixed even if not broken

There’s a recently talked about bug in SYSRET that apparently affects a lot of operating systems, including Linux and several BSDs. It looks like DragonFly is not affected, but Matthew Dillon has put in changes just in case.

2014/07/152014/07/15

More i915 updates

Francois Tigeot has been working on making i915 video support work better; with his latest update, it’s worth trying the Intel-specific driver instead of vesa if you have both the 915 chipset and are running X.

2014/07/142014/07/14

DragonFly powerd: go full speed if killed

Matthew Dillon changed powerd on DragonFly so that the system is set to max performance if powerd is killed. Now you’ll know why your fans turned on!

2014/07/14

New random algorithms, implementation

Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device. You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.

2014/07/132014/07/12

Lazy Reading for 2014/07/13

It’s a manageable list this week.

Markov Chains Explained. It’s useful to at least know what Markov chains are, because there are some silly text tricks that can be done, and it’s a good term to use so that you sound smart. (via)
Rob Pike’s 5 rules of programming. (via)
Similar: Epigrams in programming. (via)
snowdrift.coop, a new funding service for open source projects. It’s not launched yet, but it appears to be using a ‘shares’ approach which could be interesting. (via IRC)
Unix: never go topless.
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science. Good quote where I found it, too.
Don’t tell people to use VIM (because) You’re Using It Wrong. Notes how trendy “use Vim!” articles have become. (via)
The levels of Emacs proficiency. (via)
The genre-defining video games we forgot. A surprisingly in-depth documentary.
Eulerian Video Magnification. Heartbeat reading with common cameras. (via a newsletter)
Sometimes you think of something that should exist, and then you immediately find out it does exist – foot switches for emacs.
Explaining X11 for the rest of us. (via)
Awesome-awesomeness. Curated lists of resources for various languages. Two things struck me: one is that Github is being used more like a document repository than a code repository, sometimes, and the other is that this is such a huge list, it almost overwhelms the original purpose of showing what to use next. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Formicapunk. Boulet’s version of analog technology.

2014/07/122014/07/12

In Other BSDs for 2014/07/12

Finally, a much more eventful week. I already noted LibreSSL’s release.

DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/07/07.
PC-BSD Digest 31 – there’s now a PC-BSD IRC channel.
Your server can probably tell you the temperature.
Future of pf in FreeBSD? Follow the thread. (via)
DragonFly’s pf alterations discussed for OpenBSD. It wouldn’t be easy without some of the underlying DragonFly architecture, but something for everyone to remember: Henning Brauer is generous with his time and will help people updating pf.
mfiutil on FreeBSD.
ia64 processor support is gone from FreeBSD.
NetBSD now has BIND 9.10.0-P2.
FreeBSD now has bmake-20140620.
OpenBSD now has lynx 2.8.8rel2.
OpenBSD’s relayd now has a new filter language.
pkgsrc 2014Q2 binaries are out now for several platforms.
FreeBSD has a new core team.
More cross-pollination – also from Android?
OpenBSD-current users will need to update their kernel.

2014/07/11

Portable LibreSSL out

The portable (meaning ready to be brought into other operating systems) version of LibreSSL is out.

2014/07/10

BSDNow 045: ZFS War Stories

BSDNow episode 45 is up. This one is an interview with Josh Paetzel of iXSystems. No tutorial this week because Allan Jude is at the devsummit in the UK, an event I totally did not know existed.

2014/07/09

pkg and conflicts

Some dports packages can’t be installed in combination with others. The easy way to find the conflict without doing the install? Look for CONFLICTS= in the Makefile. If you don’t have the dports tree on disk, you can always look online.

2014/07/09

LDAP on DragonFly

If you’re looking to use LDAP on DragonFly, follow this thread (read the first, keep going) as people talk about implementing it, what they installed, etc. I haven’t tried it myself, yet.

2014/07/082014/07/08

Heads up: changing mfi to mrsas

The mfi(4) driver has had some data corruption problems on “Thunderbird” series RAID controllers. There’s a newer driver, mrsas(4), that replaces mfi(4) for these controllers and does not have these issues, but switching may mean new drive locations and therefore some work to get booting correctly again. Sascha Wildner has an extensive writeup about what this entails, and how to switch now if you have that hardware (recommended).

2014/07/072014/07/06

ACPICA updated to 20140627

ACPICA has been updated by Sascha Wildner to version 20140627, which as you can guess from the version, is the most recent. See the included changelog for what’s different.

2014/07/072014/07/06

DragonFly x256

DragonFly now supports running on up to 256 CPUs. 256 is the initial limit on the basic interrupt controller, and it can be extended further. It’s been tested on 255 CPUs so far, since that’s the highest number of CPUs you can bring up in qemu.