All the machines in dragonflybsd.org should now be available over IPv6.
Also, Matthew Dillon did something weird to the DragonFly IPv6 network stack.
Almost done with this year’s GSoC. It’s been astonishingly… easy? The students are working and the problems are difficult, but there’s been very little in the way of crisis.
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature (includes performance graphs)
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (no actual report; student is traveling)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
In BSDTalk 213, Will Backman talks to a number of people about the FreeBSD Documentation Project. It’s about 14 minutes and it comes from the recent BSDCan 2013 event.
Another week of links completed early. And there’s a lot, so get clicking!
- 1BSD, the installation. Interesting to see the procedure and the tools used.
- Over the Rainbow, polychromatic type from Microsoft. I don’t know if this is as exciting as they seem to think it is.
- Do your own backups. Yeesh, what an unfortunate event. I’m fixing up my backups now, after my own troubles.
- Operating System Development series. Dry but interesting. (via)
- Windowing operating systems are too messy, too restrictive. From 1984. (via)
- Home Automation via the Internet. For those who don’t want to deal with x10.
- Chess implemented in Sed. No en passant? Sheesh, I was on board until that point. (I’m making a joke) (via)
- Managing sshd in Ansible. Ansible’s getting more popular, it seems.
- Remember that PDF compression/scanning error I mentioned a few weeks ago? Xerox has fixed it for their devices, and the patch is available. One of the ways to apply the patch is to print the file to a copier, via LPR/raw. Firmware updates via printing – that seems like a good and bad idea all at the same time.
- JAVASCRIPT MESS. 45 different computers all emulated in Javascript. A Javascript Mac SE, for instance.
- An XKCD cartoon slightly related to the previous link.
- Learn to code. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The remix of this 1997 Kid’s Guide to the Internet – somewhat NSFW, and has all the best moments. More from EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.
I need to update this post during the week as I see stuff, or else I spend an hour rushing to get it all together before Satuday. I need to start watching PC-BSD src changes, too.
- DiscoverBSD has a recent BSD roundup, too.
- EuroBSDCon registration is 20% off but just today.
- Using 6rd in OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD has imported the Radeon KMS driver.
- FreeBSD’s mfiutil has JOBD support.
- FreeBSD has ARMv6/7 superpages support.
- FreeBSD supports the PCI-E SSD in the Macbook Air. (It needs separate support?)
- FreeBSD has updated support for Centrino 2200-N wireless.
- FreeBSD has a speedup in madvise calls.
- FreeBSD is using PCIDs on Intel chips to reduce process switch latency.
- NetBSD has the start of a potential lint replacement, called ‘mint‘.
- NetBSD supports the BCM57762 and BCM57765 chips, for Thunderbolt <-> Ethernet.
- OpenBSD has support for more ciss(4) devices, via FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.30.2, DejaVu Fonts 2.34, libX11 1.6.1, and xterm 296, and added ipv6-toolkit 1.4.
- pkgsrc nearly has a signed packages mechanism.
Sascha Wildner has ported rum(4), run(4), and urtwn(4) from FreeBSD to DragonFly, to work within the not-yet-default new USB framework. This happened some days ago, but I’m just now catching up.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master, is the final dragonflybsd.org system to be moved into the new colocated blade server. Your downloads of binary packages or DragonFly images should be speedier.
Remember my recent disk issues? As a side effect of protecting myself, I have a good example of deduplication results.
I have a second disk in my server, with slave Hammer PFSs to match what’s on my main disk. I hadn’t put them in fstab, so they weren’t getting mounted and updated. I got them re-created, but they were nearly full. Here’s an abbreviated df, from which you should be able to tell which drives I have :
Size Used Avail Capacity 929G 729G 200G 78% /slave/slavehome 929G 729G 200G 78% /slave/slavevar 929G 729G 200G 78% /slave/slaveusr 929G 729G 200G 78% /slave/slaveslash
That 78% is how full the Hammer volume was. I turned on Hammer deduplication, since it’s off by default. The very next day:
Size Used Avail Capacity 929G 612G 318G 66% /slave/slavehome 929G 612G 318G 66% /slave/slavevar 929G 612G 318G 66% /slave/slaveusr 929G 612G 318G 66% /slave/slaveslash
It’s a 1 terabyte disk, and I gained more than 10% back – That’s 100g of disk space that I gained overnight. There might be more tomorrow, given that it was all of 5 minutes of dedup work.
This won’t surprise you if you’ve seen previous deduplication links here, like my previous results or some real-world tests. It’s still great. I’d suggest turning it on if you haven’t – hammer viconfig the appropriate PFS and uncomment the dedup line.
There’s several debates exclusive to the Unix-like world: Vi vs. Emacs, System V vs. BSD, and so on. A more recent one that people tend to fragment over is XML in config files vs. anything else. Read through this recent threa, starting here, about SMF (which became about XML) on users@.
Only 3 more Mondays left in the student work part of Summer of Code! Unsurprisingly, it seems the students are mostly in the cleanup phase – as it should be.
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (updated)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
I’ll be working on the 3.4.3 release of DragonFly within the next 24 hours, and it should be available this week. I’ll have a list of the bugfixes it contains…
This week, I’m opinionated on every link.
- An 80s computer ad that got almost everything correct. It used to be sci-fi environments were super-clean – now they’re dirty, with ubiquitous electronics. That’s something that could be picture-blogged to prove, but I ain’t doing it.
- Bunnie Huang does “exit interviews” when he stops using equipment. Given his electronics knowledge, he goes into a lot of detail, including pictures through a microscope. Speaking of this, how has my ancient HTC Incredible survived 3 years of trips into a salt mine? I don’t know.
- InterTwinkles, open source group decision making software. Don’t know how well it works, but it certainly seems like the right idea. (via)
- Turning the Apple //e into a Lisp machine, part 1. They don’t actually get to the Lisp machine part, but it talks about how Apple computers could load data through the audio jack. I remember doing that with a tape player, too. It sucked. (via)
- kOS. It’s so minimal that I am not sure what it can do or how to use it, but it’s also so minimal that I’m sure there must be something to it. (via)
- Building a Chording Keyboard. I’ve mentioned the Microwriter and Twiddler before, but this article goes into a lot of detail about the actual construction of a home-made unit. (also via)
- Book review: The Healthy Programmer. It may or may not make you exercise, but it will make you feel a little guilty about sitting and reading the web like you are doing right now.
- Hyphen, en dash, em dash, minus. So few people know there’s a difference. (via)
- ASCII Art. History of, examples, and so on. (via, with video)
- Five Useful Git Tips. Git tips come up all the time, but this one is interesting because it’s using “showterm“, which lets you make text-based animations? movies? to show a work process in a terminal. I think I may have linked to something similar before, but this is good.
- How to Avoid the Emacs Pinky Problem. A neat idea, but some of the suggestions are actually going to make it worse. (via)
- Vim: revisited. Decent ideas, and the links at the end are good further reading. There, I’ve posted on both sides of the editor issue. (via)
- The problem with Vim. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: the Scary Godmother Doll. One of my favorite illustrators, building a doll. I met the creator years ago in Pittsburgh; she is an astonishingly energetic person.
I hope I’m catching the interesting stuff; I’m only reading the src changes.
- A talk about pkgsrc at a YAPC conference.
- FreeBSD has improved parallel read performance by changing how locks work.
- FreeBSD has enabled VFP in QEMU. No, I don’t know what that means.
- FreeBSD has upgraded to BIND 9.9.3-P2.
- FreeBSD has imported NetBSD’s libexecinfo-20130822.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s vmx(4) VMWare network driver.
- FreeBSD has upgraded to ACPICA 20130823.
- NetBSD has added ‘multigest’, for calculating multiple digests in parallel.
- NetBSD has updated to Postfix 2.9.7.
- NetBSD now supports the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi controller.
- OpenBSD has updated a number of x* utilities in xenocara, including xserver.
It’s really neat to suddenly encounter something done just for DragonFly that you didn’t know was coming: A port of Go to DragonFly. I think these changes are going into the next Go release, or at least I hope so. (More on Go if you haven’t encountered it before.)
Just seen: EdgeBSD, a version of NetBSD with different goals in mind. (Seen on Hacker News)
Michael W. Lucas has a short article up about sysrc, a FreeBSD tool for handling rc.conf across multiple machines. This could easily be a cross-BSD tool – hint, hint.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, rcrun covers that in DragonFly. Mostly I’d like to see the same interface, then, I guess?
If you’re curious about the hardware being used for the colocated dragonflybsd.org servers (this includes the website, the repository, the mailing lists, dports build machines, etc.), here’s the ‘MicroCloud’ product page. DragonFly’s model was purchased from iXsystems. Apparently those Haswell processors have a fantastic power consumption to performance ratio. (via)
I’m running a bit behind because I’ve been on the road, but here they are:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Had this one done before the last Lazy Reading. There are so many things to see and think and do in a day, and they’re not even all on the Internet. You get only the Internet ones here, though.
- Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News. Found on Hacker News, of course, and I suspect the title was designed to get clicks from there. Some interesting thoughts on how people read.
- Facebook is like a television that monitors to see how much you are laughing and changes the channel if it decides you aren’t laughing hard enough.
- Unix routing. It’s actually Linux routing, but if you avoid the Linux-specific parts, it’s a useful introduction.
- ASCII cheat sheet.
- How to build a user-level CPU profiler. Followed by Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles.
- Mediagoblin. I haven’t tried it, but the idea is a good one. As long as we don’t have to call it GNU/Mediagoblin.
- I was going to make a joke about not using software I can’t name out loud without sounding incomprehensible, but then again, I’m using BSD. Too late for that joke.
- The Future of Programming. Take the time to watch this. The list of resource links is enough to fill several afternoons with reading. Also, it’s not yet another TED talk where someone is trying to communicate excitement rather then information. (via)
- If I’m going to link to Reggie Watts, why not look at one of his music videos? Normally that would be an Unrelated Link, but I just made it related from the previous item, yay! (link contains naughty language.)
- Go for system administrators. (via)
- Git + webcam = lulz. This could be fun or scary or both. (via)
- Retro video games, delivered. (via) I still hope to build a MAME box someday.
- 0.9999999999 repeating = 1.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Boulet’s Long Journey. Get ready for a lot of scrolling. I know there’s a lot of really good French comics that I don’t see just because I don’t speak the language. (This one’s in English, but the cartoonist is French.)
Not just source links, this week:
- OpenBSD no longer has the Y2038 problem.
- A head-mounted augmented reality display using FreeBSD?
- The 2013 EuroBSDCon is going to have a vendor summit (primarily FreeBSD, from the sounds of it).
- There’s a new BSD Certification Group training CD.
- NetBSD now supports the Sitecom N300 wifi adapter.
- Do you have an Amiga that runs NetBSD, and an X-Surf 100 network card? It’s supported.
- nvi now has multi-byte character support, at least on FreeBSD.
- The July FreeBSD Foundation newsletter has a “Strategic Planning” section that I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with. The goals expressed – experience, design, and documentation – are all things that each BSD project can do better than Linux or most any other open source system.