BSDTalk 232 is 15 minutes of conversation with Thomas Cort about “Minix, NetBSD, and Summer of Code”.
Franco Fichtner recently received commit rights for DragonFly. This is so he could import mdocml, a OpenBSD-originating replacement for groff and man page display. Mdocml has been mentioned before on the Digest, and there’s a downloadable book. (See the more-interesting-than-it-sounds History of UNIX Manpages there too, but I digress.)
One advantage of using mdocml, as I understand it, is that groff is no longer required to view man pages. The only thing left in DragonFly that required a C++ compiler was groff. So, rebuilding could be a bit faster, and a bit less complicated.
Here’s the part that makes me happy: Changes made in DragonFly promptly made it back into NetBSD’s mdocml. Other changes rolled from DragonFly back into OpenBSD, too, and mdocml is in FreeBSD 10, though I don’t have a src change to point at right now. It all circled back around to DragonFly, too. It’s really neat to have a BSD-grown cross-BSD product.
(Incidentally, if you have a Thinkpad and keyboard issues, Franco has a patch for you to try.)
I’m going for pull quotes and dedicated paragraphs this week, just to mix it up.
The Slow Winter. It’s about the history and trends of chip design, if you can believe it. “Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.” I love it so much. (via)
Richard Stallman on 30 years of GNU. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the basic point is correct. “If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. ” (via multiple places)
When Pipes Get Names. For some reason, I’ve never had to deal with named pipes – directly. I’ve used them via other programs, of course.
The person who invented Whack-A-Mole also created dedicated email terminals in the 80s/90s called Anti Gravity Freedom Machines. All those smaller ‘Maker‘ projects seem unenthusiastic compared to this guy. Anyway, his warehouse full of robots blew up. I haven’t found pictures yet.
Joblint, a job description checker. This has more value than I thought. I’m curious about statistical results over a large number of jobs. Take a look at those warnings, too – they’re mentioning the possible dark side of a lot of job ‘benefits’. (via)
This XOXO presentation by Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, makes some good points about work, going against countervailing wisdom to some extent. “You can work on a lot of projects, but you will only get a couple of opportunities to work on something long-term.” Pinboard is one of those businesses that remains relatively successful without having to get bought by Google to return any profit. That’s a sort of success I find fascinating. (via)
CERN has created an in-browser version of… the first web browser. It accurately displays like a green-screen terminal, including key clicks. Watching the screen draw gives me flashbacks to playing MUDs.
Adding Vi To Your Zsh. Can you add vi-like keybindings to tcsh? (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Art comics links. It’s a link to more links, but it’s all worthwhile stuff. Be prepared for difficult but rewarding reading.
Less straight source links this week.
- FreeBSD 9.2 is out.
- FreeBSD no longer has GNU ar or GNU ranlib, or BIND.
- FreeBSD has an Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution update. (OFED info) (helps DragonFly)
- NetBSD has initial support for the OMAP1-183 board.
- NetBSD has updated terminfo to 20130607.
- NetBSD has imported FreeBSD’s new implementation of NFS – does not run yet.
- NetBSD 6.1.2 and 6.0.3 are out.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is over, and here’s the branch announcement.
- There’s some discussion of long-term support in pkgsrc, an idea I like.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 presentations for OpenBSD are online.
- OpenBSD now has a built-in snmp client. Undeadly has a description.
- OpenBSD now has ntpctl(8), for querying ntpd.
- There’s a new MaheshaBSD video on YouTube. (it’s a custom FreeBSD setup, though DragonFly versions exist too.)
Related to DragonFly: Patrick Welche updated glib2 in pkgsrc, and is interested in hearing how it works for DragonFly users. If you have pkgsrc on your system and it’s not a quarterly release, try building t.
There’s 30 days left to register for vBSDCon… except that 30 day mark was a week ago, but I didn’t get it posted. So now there’s 19 days. If you were thinking of going, go for it. This is I think the only east coast BSD convention in the US other than NYCBSDCon.
The BSDNow video series put out another episode already: Stacks of Cache. I didn’t realize this before, but they broadcast their episodes live as they are done on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC.
I had this to post, and managed to miss it: Daniel Flores, whose Summer of Code project was Hammer compression, posted a final report.
BSD Now episode 4 is out, though you have to look at the episodes page to find it right now. It has an interview with Devin Teske of FreeBSD. The usual other commentary isn’t there, probably to make room for Devin’s completely awesome beard.
I know I said Summer of Code was complete for DragonFly, but Larisa Grigore published some rough benchmarks of her “SysV IPC in userland” work, plus a followup.
DragonFly has generally shifted over to dports for 3rd-party software management, away from pkgsrc. Because of that, I haven’t been building binary packages of the quarterly pkgsrc releases. Pierre Abbat asked why on users@, and here’s my explanation of the change.
If you’re around New York City on Wednesday, Boris Kochergin will be giving a talk at the NYCBUG meeting about how he and his employer, New York Internet, managed to be in the middle of Hurricane Sandy and survive without interruption.
That same announcement lets drop the news that NYCBSDCon will happen next February 1st 8th.
John Marino has put in a large patch to DragonFly 3.5, updating all sorts of language-related items. As he warns, you will need a full buildworld/buildkernel in a specific order to update. On the plus side, you can now probably use your native language for nvi and for git.
Moved 20 servers to new hardware this week. Normally my workplace doesn’t get very active until snow hits. Normally. Anyway, going for the long sentences this week.
- Why I moved away from Microsoft ASP.NET. I agree with everything in this. I’m overgeneralizing, of course, but there’s a certain diminishing return in how easy you make any programming language.
- In which I revisit the pastimes of my misspent youth. The last 2 sentences are a nerd experience I am sure we’re all had.
- The Floppy ROM. Software via record. If you ever wanted to be able to see a head crash as it happens on your storage medium, this is the way. (via)
- Chart of Electromagnetic Radiation. You’ll need to/want to zoom in. (via)
- The Practice of Network Security Monitoring. I’ve linked to a review of the book before.
- Paula Deen X Machine. Baked goods and graphs, two of my favorite categories of thing. (via I forgot, sorry)
- The new Amazon tablets are nice, but there’s no video out. You have to use their network service. This is what makes me leery of newer tablets and phones; as it becomes easier to use network bandwidth to replace physical connections, you become dependent on a separate company to use your own hardware.
- Vim documentation in PDF form. Maybe print it, maybe don’t. (via)
- Salesforce Architecture. I like seeing how the really, really huge server setups work, but I doubt I’ll ever have to handle one; how many are there outside of Google/Amazon/a couple other companies? (via)
- Obstacles to future proofing home automation. At that level of hardware, you can’t assume everything’s going to talk 802.11 or have an Ethernet port.
- Tape rescues big data. I need to set up a larger backup system at work, and it might be tape. I hate tape, but I hate it less than the alternatives.
Your unrelated link of the week: Proper Opossum Massage. Yes, it’s a serious video, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.
This week was relatively quiet, but also had the most cross-BSD work I’ve seen in a while. Look at the links and you’ll see.
- Here’s some encryption fallout in FreeBSD.
- MegaRAID Invader cards now work on FreeBSD.
- OpenSSH is at version 6.3p1 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has moved to Unbound as a BIND replacement.
- FreeBSD imported a newer version of NetBSD’s readline.
- NetBSD supports the AlphaStation DS15, ported from OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has updated le(4) to match NetBSD’s version.
- OpenBSD has also moved to Unbound – version 1.4.21.
- OpenBSD now has ldns 1.6.16.
Here’s more on Unbound, since it seems to be a trend.
If you want to boot from a Hammer 2 /boot volume, you now can. Hammer 1 never worked well as /boot, though it was technically possible. Hammer 2 will be just fine.
Note that you can’t turn on recently-added disk compression since the bootloader doesn’t understand it, and Hammer 2 is not ready for anything but being worked on. Don’t try it unless you’re ready to be submitting code changes to fix Hammer2.
When Sepherosa Ziehau decides to improve something, he goes all out. For example, he recently improved the mxge(4) driver for Myricom 10G network cards – which is for relatively older hardware – and improved performance by 150Mbps.
This will not be a surprise to anyone seeing the work being done, but: All 5 DragonFly/Summer of Code students for 2013 passed, as noted today in emails from Google. It was possibly our best year yet in terms of buckling down and just plain working.
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.