Justin Sherrill – Page 172 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/02/222014/02/21

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/22

Read the first item, if nothing else.

You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
Power failure resistance.
LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.

2014/02/21

Do you have ACPI _PMM?

Grep /var/run/dmesg.boot for PMM, and if it turns up, Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch he’d like you to try.

2014/02/21

Clockmod replaces p4tcc

See the announcement, and the commit. I’m not totally sure what this affects.

2014/02/20

i915 users: lose your monitor?

If you have i915 chipset-based video on DragonFly, and you get a “Output xxx has no Monitor section” complaint in your xorg logs, look at this fix using xrandr.

2014/02/202014/02/22

Two AMD changes

Here’s two recent changes in DragonFly that may interest you if you have an AMD processor: Compute Units are now supported, thanks to Mihai Carabas, and Imre Vadasz ported over km(4), for temperature monitoring on 14h and 15h CPUs. I’m still not totally clear on what Compute Units are.

2014/02/192014/02/19

Tokyo meeting and Open Network Hardware

I was remiss in not posting this before it happened, but Issac (.ike) Levy of NYCBUG went to Tokyo to talk about the translation efforts for pfSense, on the 17th. He posted a summary of his talk and slides.

Normally I would be posting this in an “In Other BSDs” Saturday item, but the summary page includes links on Open Network Hardware, which .ike and I talked about at NYCBSDCon. I wanted to create a separate post for it, but he’s got all the links piled in with his talk summary already.

The hardware I want to see as a real product is the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design. (PDF) Having a device that looks like a switch but is actually a normal computer with a lot of network ports – that can run BSD – opens up a huge range of network possibilities.

2014/02/18

DragonFly 3.6.1 soon

As I mentioned on kernel@, I’m going to roll a point release of DragonFly soon. Push in your changes if you want to get them in!

2014/02/172014/02/16

3.8 release goals

Antonio Huete put together a list of goals for the next release on the DragonFly bugtracker. Some of them are pretty ambitious, some of them are relatively easy, but they are all very useful.

2014/02/172014/02/16

IPv6 enabled for shiningsilence.com

This site, shiningsilence.com, is now available on IPv6. Thanks to Markus Müller for getting me to actually complete the process.

2014/02/162014/02/15

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/16

Trivia fact that I told someone about at NYCBSDCon: the habit of using (via) to correctly attribute links comes from a still-online-but-not-functioning site called The Nonist. The fellow putting it together had the most wonderful ability to find esoteric, interesting items to read about. I can’t match his talent for images. The Wayback Machine has a copy of the Nonist site so you can see it in its original glory.

To the (text-only) links!

English minus the non-Germanic words. (via)
‘Tainted Love’, played via floppy drive.
Unix: When to look for a new job.
The Dreamliner’s latest in-flight emergency. I’m not that interested in the article, but I like the quote from the place where I found it linked: “The Internet of Rebooting Things”.
Android is becoming unforkable. (via) The article doesn’t mention Cyanogen or Replicant when it’s talking about ‘alternative’ strategies for Android development; I’m curious what to make of them.
Broken by design: systemd. (via)
A followup: Why systemd is winning. (via) ‘winning because nobody else showed up to the game’. Not a direct quote, but a summary.
Bunnie Huang’s Name That Ware February 2014 is a mystery to me, but it’s oddly pretty.
3D versions of D&D Monster Manual creatures from Patrick Farley. (via)
A Vim tutorial and primer. (via)
ICMP types in IPv6.
An objective points-based system for keyboards. “KLACKY keyboards feel great but they will get you knifed in the back by the people who work near you.”
Hello boss… Something happened…
All IBM training videos should be this awesome.

Your unrelated link of the week: If I met you at NYCBSDCon last week, did I seem like a mature adult? I’m not. Here’s Deer Fart.wmv.

2014/02/152014/02/16

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/15

Lots of links, yet again.

Michael W. Lucas intends to have more BSD books out this year – at least 2. He goes into great detail on his plans. He hints at other authors with material on the way.
BSD-linked Twitter accounts. I like finding accounts of individual developers, so you can see what projects people are working on. (plz suggest)
The PC-BSD Weekly Digest 16 and number 17.
The latest freebsdnews.net summary.
Another BSD-based product I didn’t know about.
FreeBSD has a new version of netmap.
NetBSD and FreeBSD have brought in version 2.0 of ATF, the Automated Test Framework.
FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s RNDIS framework.
More cross-BSD fixes.
Found through this OpenBSD sendmail upgrade: Sendmail, Inc., is now owned by a company called Proofpoint? A ‘security-as-a-service’ provider. I don’t know how to feel about this.
OpenBSD has Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230, 2200/105/135 support.
OpenBSD supports qle(4), the QLogic ISP24xx fibre channel HBA.
First Impressions of FreeBSD 10 on Distrowatch. (via)
The minimum acceptable OpenSSL for pkgsrc has been bumped up.
Undeadly has several n2k14 hackathon reports.
Ahem. (via Freenode #nycbug)

2014/02/14

Short outage, sorry

I knocked my own server out of commission today – sorry! I thought it was because I was experimenting with an IPv6 tunnel – but no. It appears to be a long-running Minecraft server. Once that was gone, it all got better.

2014/02/132014/02/13

Go maintainer for DragonFly needed

We’ve got Go builders running for DragonFly, but nobody actively maintaining Go itself on DragonFly. The dports version builds, but there’s a Go release coming up and having native support would be much better than relying on chance FreeBSD build compatibility.

The current error as I type this is a TLS problem that sounds like a simple fix, if only I knew where it was.

2014/02/13

BSDTalk 238: NYCBSDCon

For BSDTalk 238, Will Backman has recordings from NYCBSDCon 2014. I think I’m in there, even though I haven’t listened to it yet.

2014/02/12

BSDNow 024: The Cluster & The Cloud

BSDNow episode 24 is up, with a recap of NYCBSDCon’s events, an interview with Luke Marsden of hybridcluster.com, a chrooted SFTP tutorial, and of course more.

2014/02/11

For Summer of Code: >63 CPUs

Here’s a potential DragonFly and Summer of Code project: adding support for more than 63 cores to DragonFly. Matthew Dillon has already outlined how.

2014/02/11

HOPE X this summer

HOPE X, the 2600 conference, is happening July 18-20 in NYC. It’s not specifically BSD-themed, of course, but given that I heard about it at NYCBSDCon means there will be BSD people there.

2014/02/10

ACPICA-20140114 added

There seems to be a lot of ACPI-related updates lately: Sascha Wildner has updated ACPICA in DragonFly to what I think is the very latest version. See his commit for the differences.

2014/02/10

There really is a daemon in there

John Marino updated daemon(8) on DragonFly. For some reason, I didn’t know it was a standalone program. I knew about the idea of daemons as helpers based inside the computer, which is why so many server programs end with a ‘d’ – sshd, ftpd, and so on. Inexplicably, I never actually saw the program itself.

2014/02/092014/02/09

Lazy Reading for 2014/02/09

A low week this week, but I have been on the road… I will hopefully have a large NYCBSDCon report up later today, to make up for a skimpy Lazy Reading.

Bit rot, circa 1998. Enjoy looking at the old technology options and prices. (via)

The Industrial Internet of Things. Most of what’s out there that should be wired isn’t, and it’s because the companies making the equipment like to pretend the Internet never happened. Also, modbus is horrifying.

Bluetooth Low Energy: what do we do with you? I’m surprised more people aren’t excited about BLE; it has a lot of potential.

Your unrelated link of the week: a new Cyriak film! Starts cute, ends horrifying, but that’s no surprise.