More Summer of Code wrapups: Larisa Grigore has posted a final report on SysV IPC work, and Mihai Carabas has posted his on hardware support for vkernels.
(Mihai’s report was out several days ago and I didn’t realize it, sorry!)
Francois Tigeot posted his work on the KMS driver for Radeon video cards. He’s looking for help since he’s low on time for the immediate future, and this is a project that could benefit everyone. (Well, everyone with the right video card.)
Joris GIOVANNANGELI and Pawel Dziepak both have published final reports for this year’s DragonFly/Summer of Code experience. Both of them say they want to keep working on DragonFly, which is exactly the result I want. There may be more if the other students have time. A final report wasn’t required, but it is good feedback.
Related: Joris is working on Capsicum for DragonFly and published an API document describing how it has worked/will work.
Please welcome our newest committers: Joris Giovannangeli and Mihai Carabas. Joris has already updated bc(1) and dc(1) to match what OpenBSD has. You may recognize Joris’s name from his just-finished Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly, and Mihai Carabas from both this year’s and last year’s Summer of Code.
Matthew Dillon’s committed the work by Daniel Flores on Hammer 2 compression and Mihai Carabas’s vkernel hardware support – both Summer of Code projects. There’s a good amount of detail in the commit messages describing the work and what it changed; I expect more Summer of Code work to be getting committed…
Note: you’ll want to do a full update.
This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!
- Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
- Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
- The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
- The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
- A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
- The Walkman Archive. (via)
- Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
- The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
- Kickstarter for open source. (via)
- Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
- Atari box art.
- Atari box art parody.
Finally, a quieter week.
- pfSense (which I use at work; performs great) has updated to 2.1, and now offers a ‘Gold‘ subscription program.
- FreeBSD has a new iSCSI target and initiator. (World rebuild needed and again)
- FreeBSD’s bxe(4) now supports the BCM57712 and BCM578XX.
- FreeBSD now can build LLDB, though you have to do it on purpose.
- FreeBSD’s arcmsr(4) driver for Areca hardware has been updated. (Areca supports BSD; buy them)
- NetBSD has Renesas and ASIX AX88179 USB support.
- NetBSD has a preliminary NVIDIA Geforce driver.
- NetBSD has updated to dhcpcd-6.1.0.
- NetBSD has updated to tzcode 2013e.
- QNAP V200 boards all have the same MAC? Weird.
- OpenBSD updated a large number of xenocara windowing parts.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is on from now to the 29th.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has added a new rconfig script that automatically mirrors the installed disks with ccd(4). You don’t remember what to do with rconfig(8)? Automatically (and headlessly) install DragonFly, of course! There’s already other examples – they’re just shell scripts.
I put together a list of what I’m thinking could be in the next DragonFly release. Going by our regular schedule, that’s a bit more than a month off. Of note: Summer of Code material and defaulting to dports. Follow the thread for more.
Something I only just recently found out about: BSDNow. They’re planning weekly videos with BSD news and interviews. I say ‘planning’, but as of this writing, both Episode 1 and Episode 2 (which is much better quality) are already available. Another episode is planned this week. Episode 3 is out already.
ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.
(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)
Francois Tigeot wrote up a summary of DragonFly’s support for newer Intel video chipsets. (short summary: much better recently) KMS support is now the default in DragonFly. There’s still work ongoing.
DragonFly has two included compilers – GCC 4.4, and GCC 4.7. Traditionally, we switch from one compiler to the other as default, and then replace the old one with a newer release, and so on.
Until recently, dports built almost exclusively using GCC 4.4. John Marino’s switching to GCC 4.7, for a variety of reasons he lists in a recent post to users@. An interesting point that he raises: GCC 4.4 won’t necessarily be replaced with a newer GCC, but perhaps clang?
Michael W. Lucas needs tehcnical reviewers for his first draft of ‘Sudo Mastery’. If you know sudo, and know how to criticize (and who doesn’t, for this is the Internet), look at what you’d have to do.
We’re in the last week of what has been a very good Summer of Code for DragonFly, and here’s the last reports. (We’re missing two, but this is cleanup week, so not much to report)
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable (updated)
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (Joris, where’s your report?)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
I don’t think I saw it before, but there’s a list of speakers and events up for vBSDCon. There’s no DragonFly-specific talks, but there is a presentation from Baptiste Daroussin, one of the people behind pkgNG, which is used to create parts of DragonFly’s dports framework.
It’s positive to see a BSD conference sponsored by a company that’s not selling a BSD-specific product. It’s happening in about a month and a half, October 25-27, in Dulles, VA.
The September issue of BSD Magazine is out as a free download. The theme is BSD system administration, though there’s always other articles in addition to the issue topic.
(via freebsdnews.net, since I haven’t seen the announcement in the bsdmag.org RSS feed or by email)
I think I’m finally catching up on the backlog.
- Unix: Flexibly moving files with lftp. I usually copy and paste a shell script together.
- BANCStar source code. In that sort of environment, there’s no good or bad code. It has moved beyond such considerations. (via)
- The Lenna Story. About the 1972 Playboy centerfold image used to test image compression. I mentioned it once before in passing. (via)
- If you find regular expressions difficult, putting another layer of expression on top doesn’t help. (via)
- How not to check the validity of an email address. I had a similar experience at an old job in 1999, where a coworker set a site’s main page to get all news stories and then showed the 10 most recent. This started to really slow things down when we reached over 5,000 stories… (via)
- Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services. A PDF of slides. (via)
- It’s described as “the best programming fonts“, but it’s really the most popular monospaced typefaces. Who cares about correct language – it has visual examples. (via)
- Phone keypads could have been very different. (via)
- Sudo Mastery’s first draft is complete. You can buy it now and get updates as it gets polished.
- Have yourself a keysigning party. GPG is complicated. I know there’s reasons, but still, this is the sort of thing that would be better with as little barrier to entry as possible.
- The Internet, via Commodore64 and Neuromancer.
Your unrelated link of the week: The Alan Lomax recordings.
Barely getting this done in time for Saturday…
- FreeBSD can now download firmware for Samsung drives.
- FreeBSD has updated ipfilter to 5.1.2.
- FreeBSD has updated to OpenPAM Nummularia.
- On FreeBSD, clang means no gcc or libstdc++. (part of the switch)
- FreeBSD has new Hyper-V drivers.
- NetBSD has support for the ‘4G Systems XS Stick W14’.
- NetBSD has updated Postfix to 2.8.15.
- NetBSD has a pile of Broadcom chipset changes.
- NetBSD has support for the MPL115A2 pressure sensor.
- NetBSD has a start on xhci (AKA USB3) support.
- OpenBSD has support for the FreeScale i.MX6 SoC.
- OpenBSD enabled support for TLS/SSL Perfect Forward Secrecy.
- OpenBSD 5.4 is available for pre-order.
- OpenBSD used to build an MPLS network.
- PC-BSD is going to start building on FreeBSD-10.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 pre-release freeze starts tomorrow.