NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.
Wojciech Puchar noted with some surprise that DragonFly uses less CPU than expected for high-packet-rate traffic. This has been going on for a while, and apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has even more improvements planned.
Busy week, but lots to read.
- My brush with Oulipo. Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
- The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was. Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
- BASIC turns 50. I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause. (via)
- More secure than telnetmallows. (via)
- The Great Works of Software. “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.” An accurate description. UNIX is #4. (via)
- GitHub monoculture. Git is decentralized, GitHub is not. (via)
- Novena’s hackable bezel. A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
- “Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?” Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.
Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea. Language warning.
Updated late this week because of circumstances.
- Michael W. Lucas is appearing at PenguinCon.
- Do you use Kerberos or SRP in libssl? Ted Unangst wants to know. (Thanks, Amit Kulkarni)
- Speaking of which, OpenSSH no longer requires OpenSSL.
- OpenBSD 5.5 is out.
- BSD for embedded devices?
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a spring fundraising campaign started.
- PC-BSD has a FAQ up for their new Lumina desktop environment.Writing your own desktop environment is a lot of work. Supporting all the Linuxisms in the existing ones is possibly worse…
- pkgsrc Perl package status is now automatically generated.
- Peek and poke freely on FreeBSD.
- PC-BSD’s new AppCafe handles package management – or at least the interface. I haven’t looked hard enough to know if it’s using pkg.
- CheriBSD is feeding back.
- OpenSSH is getting pulled into parts?
- /dev/full is always what it says it is. (related: lindev(4) is gone.)
- OpenBSD 5.5 is out. Here’s the signing policy that goes with it.
The reaction I have heard a number of times from new DragonFly users: hey, this runs really fast, even when I try to load it down!
ATM support is gone in DragonFly, and frankly, I’m surprised it was still there.
BSDTalk 240 is 35 minutes with George Neville-Neil talking about NTP and the precision time protocol.
BSDNow 035 is up with a whole lot of pf content, including an interview of Peter Hansteen, of “Book of PF” fame. There’s a 3rd version of that book coming out soon.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to version 20140424. Will that help you? Perhaps with newer motherboards; otherwise check the changelog.
The pkg tool, used in DragonFly (and FreeBSD) for ports, is at version 1.2. Version 1.3 will apparently be able to solve the problem where one port is ended and replaced with another. This is a problem that’s been around forever, and I don’t just mean with pkg. I don’t know how soon 1.3 will be out, or what version FreeBSD is at.
Just so nobody’s surprised: DragonFly process IDs now go an order of magnitude higher.
Settle back, there’s a lot to read.
- CERN Terminal font. I mentally expect the characters to be printed in green or amber, just from the shape. (via)
- Systems Programming at Twitter. (via)
- Richard Garriot’s D&D #1; his first game written in BASIC, long before Ultima. There’s a contest involved, but that’s not the important part. (via)
- Unix: Counting chickens or anything else.
- Matul Remit, a Dwarf Fortress story. Yeah, I know, third Dwarf Fortress item in three weeks. This one is about the story itself, not the gameplay. (via)
- The Pac-Man Dossier, Obsessive notes and details about Pac-Man. (also via)
- “…nothing worse for the future of home lighting than having to remember whether the lights in the bedroom were made by Sylvania or Philips before I can turn them off.” The Internet of (proprietary) Things.
- The Modern Perl book, 2014 edition, is out and is a free download.
- Your favorite 2-piece keyboard.
- The Novena laptop, has a crowdfunding campaign. It even has stretch goals, now. It sounds fun, but you have to be seriously interested in hardware twiddling. There’s a contest for a new logo, too.
- Worst common denominator programming. You can guess the source.
- Technology Monoculture as threat. It’s about OpenSSL, but I’d argue that Linux represents another monoculture problem.
- go in go. (via)
- A discovered quirk is just [a] few steps away from becoming a feature.
- Microsoft Word is not a terminal emulator. :wq
- Using Vim as a writing environment. (via)
- boycottsystemd.org. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City. It’s a kickstarter for the 13th volume of a long-running story – which is also free to read online. As I have mentioned before, the artist Phil Foglio drew the original BSD daemons.
Another active week.
- RetroBSD recently moved to Git and GitHub, and is now buildable on Mac OS X.
- ALTQ is gone, at least for the OpenBSD version of pf.
- So I’ll bring up this point again: pf is fragmenting, and we should do something about it.
- The EdgeBSD presentation from FOSDEM 2014. (via)
- OpenBSD could use some VLAN testing.
- FreeBSDNews is running an swag contest.
- netbsd.fi replaces onetbsd.org.
- Here’s a GSoC project that could help everyone. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
- I’ve linked to some parts of this work, but Undeadly has a summary of the man page search improvements in OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/04/14 summary.
- LibreSSL started because of a leaky water heater.
- I always like threads about small hardware.
- FreeNAS hardware unboxing.
- Man, everybody likes pfSense.
- Lua in pkgsrc is getting versioned.
- Why would you do this?
The plugin I use for posting to Twitter managed to silently stop working after a recent WordPress upgrade. It’s fixed now. Thanks to alert reader TJ for telling me. If you are picking up articles here through Twitter, you have some backlog waiting for you.
BSDNow 034 is about Network Attached Storage – specifically with an interview of John Hixson at iXSystems about FreeNAS development.
Remember the joke I and probably a zillion others made about OpenOpenSSL? It’s happening, except it’s called LibreSSL. (thanks, Tomáš Bodžár)
If you’re using DragonFly in qemu, virtualbox, whatever – but not VMWare – there’s a new virtio-net driver to try out.
This is another week where I find neat stuff at the start of the week, start the post, and by the time the post date rolls around, those links have been seen everywhere. Yes, I’m complaining I don’t get “First Post!” the way I want.
- UNIX: More ways to spin the top command.
- Leslie Lamport’s Thinking for Programmers talk. It’s the opposite of a TED talk; not glamorous, not made accessible, and not there to make you feel good about yourself – but quite useful. (via)
- A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross. This fascinates me in the same way Markov-chain generated text can be interesting. (via)
- How ‘DevOps’ is Killing the Developer. Not necessarily an accurate description of how DevOps works, but accurate for describing problems with poorly implemented DevOps. ‘Reaction-to-new-strategy-that-gets-implemented-poorly’ is not new – see Agile. (via)
- Here’s a conversational intro to Dwarf Fortress. Unlike every other article, it emphasizes how quickly you can get into the game. This is probably the better way to talk about it.
- A Secure C and C++ reference recommendation.
- @ around Europe. I can’t confirm this, but I’m sure many readers can. (via)
- According to this story about XENIX, Microsoft almost went with it as a successor to DOS. That certainly would have made things different. (via)
- UNIX ACTUAL. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Heads or Tails. Chris Ware’s comics are all about using the comic as a way of expressing the movement of time, in so many ways. (via)
I’ve got “coverage” of most every BSD this week.
- OpenBSD has brought in OpenSSL – and is modifying it severely. Instead of linking to the many commits as they tear it into little bits, I’ll just link to this Lobste.rs post. Will it be OpenOpenSSL? It looks like it’s for internal consumption only. Undeadly has a similar summation. Apparently there’s a running blog of the changes, or at least the snarky comments.
- Have you never been to BSDCan? Dan Langille asks the question. As he points out, BSD conventions are awesome, where you get to meet some smart people and put names to faces.
- “I have been given the option of Linux or BSD at work…” A discussion of BSD as a Java development platform.
- FreeBSD has added the if_nf10bmac(4) driver, for the “NetFPGA-10G Embedded CPU Ethernet Core”, which appears to be a programmable network card? I’m not sure how it all works together.
- Goodbye EISA on FreeBSD. (Gone long ago on DragonFly.)
- NetBSD src and pkgsrc changes are being twittered. (NetBSD link does not work just now when I tried it.)
- PC-BSD Digest 26 mentions the addition of a new desktop environment called Lumina, built just for PC-BSD.
As you can guess from the title, this week’s BSDNow talks about building OpenBSD packages in bulk among other things, and also interviews Jim Brown of bsdcertification.org.