This has nothing really to do with DragonFly. I’m hiring a report developer for work. Here’s the Craigslist job posting. I consider it very unlikely that there’s a local reader of this blog that also has the right skills, but what the heck.
John Marino has updated ldns and drill to version 1.6.16.
Chris Turner was curious about clock skew when running under a VM, and Sepherosa Ziehau very kindly explained the different types of internal clock for DragonFly, and how to control them – a topic I’ve never understood deeply.
Whee!
- The Shady Characters blog talks about alternate phone dial layouts. I’ve mentioned those here before, but Shady Characters links to this video describing the testing that went on for the keypads. Check at about 2:40 for the story on how AT&T figured out the ‘correct’ length for the phone handset cable.
- The Youtube channel for Numberphile, the source of that previous video link, has some pretty entertaining math videos…
- The UNIX as a Second Language blog has an article up about using strace.
- The Roland SP-808. I didn’t know these had a built-in Zip drive. (via)
- The ICT 1301 runs again. This is what big computers are supposed to look like, with large cabinets, and spinning tapes, and oversized operator consoles. (via)
- Cryptogeddon, a sort of augmented reality game where I think you sneak your way across real systems. ‘Real’ as in not someone else’s computers, but real systems set up for this game. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence. I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers. The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab. For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since. I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover. It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.
I am doing this one at the last minute. I had all the articles noted, but normally I build this post over the course of the week.
- FreeBSD has added the atse(4) network driver.
- FreeBSD has added iw_cxgbe, for Chelsio T4/T5 chips.
- FreeBSD has added (initial, minimal) AR9340 switch SoC support.
- PC-BSD has an interesting install-to-SSD option that disables atime and swap.
- NetBSD now has a Lua device driver to access.
- NetBSD has added Apple’s libunwind.
- NetBSD has added several different iic sensors from OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has added vxlan(4), a virtual LAN setup. (Layer 2 traffic over layer 3)
- “Vendor said so” is a reasonable excuse.
- OpenBSD has an altq replacement.
BSDNow episode 7 is out, with jails as a feature among a number of topics.
The October episode of BSD Magazine is out. I haven’t seen it in their RSS feed yet (is it running?), but noticed it here.
Matthew Dillon was using poudriere, the dports build tool, on a 48-core system. Poudriere was building all 20,000+ dports, so the machine was quite busy. He decided to get rid of as much contention as possible, and he’s listed all the ways DragonFly’s been streamlined by these efforts. We need to revisit some of our previous benchmarks…
The Large Installation System Administration 2013 conference has been announced for is coming up on November 3-8, in Washington, D.C. There’s training and speakers and all sorts of stuff, and maybe even a working government in that town by that point.
There is a search plugin for Mozilla that searches DragonFly man pages. (Thanks Samuel Greear)
I stole Sepherosa Ziehau’s email subject for the title of this post, because that’s exactly what has happened. Gigabit networking cards under DragonFly will perform very well under extreme load – all of them.
As a followup to news that the git feed of pkgsrc through dragonflybsd.org is not being updated, Max Herrgard wrote out how to fetch pkgsrc via CVS, or tarball, or another git feed. CVS is still the ‘official’ way.
Matthew Dillon’s been working to make huge parallel software builds (i.e. dports) go a bit faster, so watch out. This only affects you if you are running DragonFly 3.5, of course.
I’m a bit slow in posting this, but: BSDNow episode 6 is out. Theo de Raadt is interviewed, and a lot of other topics (including DragonFly) are visited. The page listing shows all the areas covered, plus the embedded video itself.
This week just built up and built up.
- UNIXStickers.com. Not really UNIXish. More vaguely free software cause-ish. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hail Mary Cloud and the Lessons Learned. Peter Hansteen’s talk from BSDCan 2013. I linked to some of his earlier comments on this botnet before, but this is the comprehensive summary.
- Dwarf Fortress NYC. A good exploration of how the symbolic representations in Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes in general are not that far from ‘accepted’ artwork and design. (via)
- Killscreen on Salty Bet. Describing Salty Bet out loud sounds like a cyberpunk novel idea from 1998. (via)
- The top 100 inventions of the past 100 years. I’d argue that some of them are not that important, but the photographs are neat. (via)
- Resurrecting APL/360. People go to extremes to recreate not-very-pleasant historical computing environments. (via)
- Facebook and Open Networking Plan. Facebook doesn’t exactly do good, but I do like the idea of separating hardware from software in networking equipment, a la pfSense. (via)
- Polemic: how readers will discover books in future. Sounds awful, and unfortunately a bit feasible. (via, with a great illustration)
- Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance. A lot of the stupid mistakes tech companies make happen because they are uniformly run by inexperienced people. Worse, this is the sort of perspective you only gain with age. (via)
- How was Hangul Invented? I don’t know any Korean, spoken or written, but I find the planned creation of a language interesting. (via)
- History of the Telegraph. I like the physical design of the old models. Also, Western Union was once the largest telecom company in the world.
- A list of free programming books. (via)
- Connecting a payphone to Asterisk. I did a similar thing with a Model 500. Hmm… and this guy has the same initials as me. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.
I got some PC-BSD items this week, too.
- Open Source Snapshot: GhostBSD.
- (Free)BSD and Dropbox.
- FreeBSD finally dumped rcs.
- FreeBSD’s igb(4) driver is updated to 2.4.0.
- FreeBSD’s binutils now has “support for assembling and disassembling Intel Random Number Generator extensions“.
- You can now use ‘athsurvey’ on AR5212 chipset ath(4) devices in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD branched version 11.
- FreeBSD has changes contributed by… Microsoft?
- PC-BSD has added a GUI version of their Life Preserver application.
- PC-BSD has a new ‘pc-zmanager’ program for managing ZFS and disks.
- PC-BSD has branched version 10, I think.
- NetBSD runs on the iMX233/OLinuXino.
- OpenBSD replaced rc4 with ChaCha20. No, I’m not sure what that means. (via)
- OpenBSD now has the vmwpvs(4) driver, for VMWare paravirtualized SCSI.
- OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.1 and Freetype 2.5.0.1.
- OpenBSD supports the AM335x EDMA3 controller.
- OpenBSD supports the RTL8106E and RTL8168G/8111G networking chipsets.
- Diffe-Hellman key size increased in OpenBSD. It’s from NIST Special Publication 800-57, which is unavailable as of this typing because of the stupid U.S. government shutdown.
The pkgsrc repository in git for DragonFly is currently frozen. This is because many people have switched over to dports, and also because it’s a lot of work to keep it functional. If you do want to pull newer pkgsrc material, use cvs and grab it from a NetBSD server.
As the message notes, don’t go switching to DragonFly-current right now, cause there’s a lot of new material in there and it may not be quite safe. (There’s an ABI change that will require all new builds of your ports, for instance.)
If you’re watching for a certain event, dmesg(8) on DragonFly now has a -f flag that will display new output as it’s logged, sort of like ‘tail -f’.
The Radeon KMS driver from FreeBSD has been imported to DragonFly by Francois Tigeot. It still has problems with ttm, but don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of it.
While looking for a different bug, Matthew Dillon made some changes in the way memory usage is totaled in DragonFly. You’ll see this most when using ‘systat -vm 1’ or ‘vmstat’, probably.