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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I was out sick for a few days this week (Norwalk virus ain’t fun), and so there’s a whole lot of links to follow.
- The History of the Pocket Knife. I link to it because the pictures are pretty, and because a multitool is one of the more useful physical tools you can have. (via)
- “Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler” Scott Hanselman’s keynote at Velocity 2014. I would like the reaction GIF to die out as a presentation tool, but the talk is funny. (via)
- Ooh, a new James Mickens video! This is a sort of antidote to the overoptimistic Scott Hanselman video. Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure. (via)
- Book review: The Art of Unix Programming.
- Computing Across America.
- Again, not DragonFlyBSD.
- Some interesting thoughts and actions on copyright. I bought the bumper sticker the author’s talking about, directly from him.
- Uh oh.
- Multi-process architectures suck. Yet that’s everything we work on these days. (via)
- The March Towards Go. I keep meaning to sit down and actually try a project in Go. (via)
- UNIX Tricks. Some Linuxisms in there, but oh well. (via)
- Vim as Language. Not a bad description. Related by association: I get tired of seeing the little-avatar-plus-name-plus-job-title that gets stuck on so many blog posts. (via)
- An interview with Damien Conway. He’s a very smart and direct person, so the interview is worthwhile. (via)
- Patching the Newton. Some interesting early history. I remember holding a Newton and saying “This should work like a phone.”
- BOOTSTRA.386 – A Bootstrap theme that will entertain you, or maybe give you painful flashbacks. (via multiple places)
Your unrelated link of the week: The 1987 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. Imagine there was no Internet access other than what you can telnet to, and nothing on TV other than this. That’s 1987.
Another ‘quiet’ week – lots of commit activity in the other BSDs, but not a lot to point at directly.
- PostgreSQL/FreeBSD performance and scalability on a 40-core machine. (PDF link, via) There’s comparison to DragonFly’s results, mentioned here before. DragonFly’s solution of shared page tables is dismissed because it would require work to do, though I think that’s a symptom of FreeBSD’s more complex locking model rather than complexity of what’s in DragonFly.
- pkgsrc-2014Q2 is out.
- Here’s some notes on the systemd compatibility GSoC/OpenBSD project.
- The FreeBSD ixgbe(4) driver understands RSS, and so does igb(4).
- FreeBSD GENERIC kernels can now use vt(4), the replacements for syscons.
- FreeBSD images can now boot UEFI.
- FreeBSD 9/10 users using the WITH_NEW_XORG option have a temporary binary ports repository to use, to handle the change in the drivers.
The 44th BSDNow episode is out, with an interview of Craig Rodrigues, a tutorial on creating pre-patched OpenBSD ISOs, and the usual discussion of news items, including DragonFly’s recent pf changes.
(I don’t get the pun in the title this time, darnit.)
Matthew Dillon changed the default keep-policy in DragonFly to:
set keep-policy keep state (pickups, sloppy)
This is to match other BSDs (which? I don’t know) and reduce overhead, according to the commit.
A note for everyone: use Hammer default on a very busy filesystem, and you will eat a lot of disk space since all file changes are recorded. (I’ve done this to myself a few times.) Francois Tigeot has a list of tips on how to keep that from happening.
I am pasting the announcement verbatim because NYCBUG is having some hardware issues with their mailing list archive. It’s interesting for both subject matter and because you get to see the inside of about.com. RSVP soon so you can get in!
2014-07-02 – Introduction to Timekeeping, Steven Kreuzer
6:45, about.com (1500 Broadway enter on 43rd Street, 6th Floor)
Notice: RSVP to rsvp at nycbug.org and bring photo ID. RSVPs must be
received by 2 PM, day-of.
Abstract
Time is a funny thing. You can spend it, save it, waste it and kill it,
but you can’t change it and there is never any more or less of it.
Everyone knows what it is and uses it every day but no one can seem to
define it.
In this talk I will provide a brief introduction to time, timekeeping,
and the uses of time information, especially in scientific and technical
areas.
The max number of CPUs on DragonFly just went from 63 to 64. This is really just a side effect of preparation to move up that limit, but I am entertained by the single-digit bump.
Are you running a Hammer filesystem on a low-memory system? You may get some warnings. It’s possible to tweak some settings to accommodate it, or just deal.
I bring the audio and the visual today.
- The History of Mana. (via)
- Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from. (via)
- Futuristic User Interface 16. (video)
- Floppy table. The storage space is clever.
- As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software. This time, it’s Rust. (via)
- Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!” It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere. (via)
- Best of Vim Tips. (via) Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
- vimawesome.com. Pretty! (via)
- The Internet of Newsletters. A reaction (and a good one) to social media. (via)
- Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
- “I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
- Awww, it’s cute.
- Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars. And a counter-argument. (both via)
- Modern tech in 1977 Atari style. (via) Did I link this before? I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
- Sorta related: Betamaxx. (via)
- “Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
- Lisp implementation in sed. (via)
- Unix: having fun with diff.
- Visualizing Algorithms. Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap. (via)
You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis. I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.
This week seems relatively quiet; possibly because school is out and the weather in the northern hemisphere is nice?
- PC-BSD 10.0.0.2, the release, is out.
- The PC-BSD text installer now supports full-disk encryption.
- Where KDE is Going, part 1. (via)
- Another OpenBSD GSoC project summary.
- procfs in OpenBSD is probably going to be removed.
- Hooray for more cross–pollination.
- Thanks to Emulex for supporting BSD.
- csup is gone from FreeBSD; mentioned for nostalgia purposes.
- FreeBSD now has fine-grained CTL locking.
- The EuroBSDCon 2014 schedule is up. (hey, there’s DragonFly in there!)
Predrag Punosevac noticed that turning on pf was slowing his machine down. Rearranging the rules fixed a lot of it for him. However, Matthew Dillon decided it was time to make pf work concurrently instead of in a single thread, and 24 hours later, it does. Quick, someone benchmark this!
BSDNow 043 talks with Marc Espie of OpenBSD about packaging, goes through updating your BSD system (all of them? I haven’t watched yet), and discusses a number of other links.
If you are upgrading a DragonFly 3.6 system to 3.8, make sure you have the absolute latest version of 3.6 first. A few people have had a crash during install of the new initrd, which leaves the system in an unbootable state.
There’s a fix now in 3.6 from Joris Giovannangeli, so updating 3.6 and then moving to 3.8 will ensure this doesn’t happen. He posted a heads-up notice too.
(Why, yes, that is why shiningsilence.com was down for some hours today… With Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner’s help, I was able to copy bits of /boot and /usr from a live CD back on disk and get online again.)
Did you try to install DragonFly relatively recently and it never made it past the bootloader? Apparently there’s a bug in some BIOS when using a smaller USB drive to install. The loader checks multiple places for information, and if it checks somewhere that’s ‘farther’ than the end of the disk (i.e. 6G on a 4G USB key), the machine locks up.
Matthew Dillon and Kyle Davis spent a good number of hours figuring this out today, and Matt committed a fix. So, if you were bit by this problem, try a -LATEST image about 24 hours from now and see if it works.