It looks like OpenJDK7 works in pkgsrc for DragonFly, thanks to Ryo ONODERA, and I think it’s working in dports too.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their first week reports:
- 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
If any of these projects are interesting to you, or if you have any tips for these students on work they are doing, please provide feedback.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
I was going to make excuses for a low link count because of being on the road this week – but somehow I managed to find a lot to read anyway. We all win!
- Dragonflies with brain-tracking backpacks. Not DragonFly-relevant except for the subject creature. (via)
- Speaking of the actual bug, my daughter caught a dragonfly for me. That moth, incidentally, wasn’t as dead as I thought it was…
- Roguelikes breakdown. It’s an overview of roguelike games, which may not contain any surprises for you… the screenshots of graphical versions are nice, however, and there’s a lot of links to roguelike games at the end. (via)
- “If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?” Talking about APIs and how you should not trust your data to companies that won’t let you access it the way you want. Also, that’s a great pull quote, which is why I’m the second one to use it. (via)
- Great Works in Programming Languages. This is a list of titles but not links to the actual documents, though some (all?) are freely available. At least a few of you reading this just said, “Hey, I know what I’m doing this afternoon!” (also via)
- Rewriting history. It’s about shell history, though unfortunately Bash-specific.
- Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Playable online. (via multiple places)
- I enjoy old analog computer(ish) pictures, so here’s two.
- Here’s another: the first stored program computer was 65 years ago as of yesterday.
- PDP-11 systems, still in service. Doesn’t saw what they are running. (via)
- Fax machine evolution, an animated gif. (via)
- The Pet Shop Boys don’t like BSD. Yeah, it’s a typo, but a funny one.
- Here’s an NSA/PRISM joke; one of many.
Your unrelated link of the week: Who you gonna call? This kills me because there was some obvious prop work and setup just to create this 7 second joke.
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.
There’s support for a new timer mechanism in DragonFly 3.5, for x86_64 users: TSC. Sepherosa Ziehau added support and has described how to disable it – it’s on by default. It speeds up some very basic (and frequently used) system calls.
Whoops, I missed this when it happened, but: the freeze for pkgsrc-2013Q2 has started. That new quarterly release is anticipated for the end of the month.
The June 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the focus is Ruby. The PDF is free if you tell them your email address.
It’s possible your Internet service provider uses a non-routeable IP range (like 10.*) and occasionally your border device picks that up via DHCP by accident instead of an Internet address. If that happens to you, and you’re using DragonFly as your border gateway, it’s possible to prevent it with PF dhclient.
If you get your Hammer drive really full, a normal cleanup won’t make enough space. When that happen, use ‘hammer reblock’ in increasing increments. That works because it does cleanup in much smaller steps.
Switching terminals in X with ctrl-alt-Fx requires a not-on-by-default option. This could catch anyone used to the old behavior, so I might be doing you a favor by mentioning it.
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
- SELinux’s toxic mistake. If people aren’t using something you built because it frustrates those same people, it’s not their fault. (via)
- Contrary to popular belief, QWERTY was not designed to slow the typist down. (via)
- VMS will finally reach end of life in 2020. VMS was a contemporary operating system to UNIX, and started on nearly the same hardware. (the PDP-11) Aw, I feel bad. Not so bad that I’d actually use it again, but still: Aww. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “At the point all my hardware undeniably works on BSD, I will probably move there.” This article is in no way scientific, but it makes me a little happy. (via a Google search)
- The Deepest Uncertainty. A surprisingly enjoyable description of set theory and other math bits. (via)
- 8 months in Microsoft, I learned these. None of these are a surprise, really, but point 5, “not giving back to the public domain is the norm” is really sad. The example given isn’t even code – it’s just describing a solution on a web page, publicly. (via)
- Trillian is publishing the specs for their IMPP communication service. A quote from the announcement: “…our commitment to run a business whose primary focus is its communication products, not advertising”
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)
If you’ve been reading the Digest for a while, you’ve seen me talk about the value of hosting or running your own services. It’s not too much of a surprise in my case; if you are working on an open-source operating system, you want to run it. It’s good to get the experience, and you can run programs the way you want, instead of picking from whatever vendors happen to sell you.
The PRISM disclosure, which I am going to assume everyone is familiar with at this point, is another facet. Every time you use another company for your email, your entertainment, your software, and so on, their information on you can be accessed. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by going from one webmail provider to another. You can shop around, but notice that the author in that link effectively throws his or her hands in the air and says, “there’s no way out” by the end of the article. This is because corporations work as collecting agents for the government, even if they don’t plan to do so.
That sounds drastic, but there’s legal frameworks in every country for governments to require companies to give up data on any person, on request. It happens. I’ve seen it myself; I worked for Time Warner for several years, tracking down cable modem user information and handing it over as compelled by law. I know the lawyers at TW Corporate didn’t like doing it, but they didn’t have a choice. (I have some horrifying stories about what people would do to themselves and each other.)
Companies are increasingly working to create services to sell, not products to buy. A service never stops being consumed, so it forms an ongoing revenue stream. I’m not saying this is bad; I firmly believe that a financial incentive to be paid improves services. However, as only a consumer, you can end up not owning what you use. Other people have pointed this out, and I don’t want to sound like a frothing crazy person… but it is relevant, though not necessarily as catastrophic as some people pronounce.
What I’m working towards here is a reminder that you should run your own software, and running it on DragonFly is the best way. (Or some other operating system, I guess. If you have to.) Instead of trying to figure out what the least-bad commercial option can be, run it yourself. Good for privacy, good for learning. I know that’s not an option for everyone; fighting with Sendmail (for instance) is not an activity that many people pick voluntarily. But, if you’ve been thinking of setting up a replacement for Google Reader, or hosting your own mail, or own blog, etc… there’s never a better time than now.
(Follow all those links for some good information; consider it an early Lazy Reading post)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a sort of queuing to altq, where TCP ACKs get higher priority. You may have seen this in any number of pf configurations, where returning data is given its own queue to keep high-volume transfers from slowing themselves down because the acknowledgements can’t get back to the sender. His commit has statistics on the performance improvement. He also added a ‘netrate‘ tool for calculating results from using netperf.
If you’re using DragonFly 3.5, your next update should be a full buildworld. That’s because John Marino is adding the framework for symbol versioning. This means that individual library (.so) files will internally keep track of newer and older symbols. The current behavior is to name the files differently, which can cause problems if an expected, linked file is missing – even if the needed symbols are present. The basic framework is being added now, and will be turned on all at once, to minimize the number of times that full buildworld is needed.
The ‘amd64’ specific parts of kernel architecture have been removed, since x86_64 covers all that. As a side effect of other changes, John Marino warns that upgrading DragonFly from a version older than 3.4, to a version newer than 3.4, will require an intermediate step of going to 3.4 first. e.g. If your machine is a DragonFly 3.0 system, you will need to upgrade to 3.4 before moving to, say, 3.6 once it is out. This won’t matter for some months, since the next release is months off.
Larisa Grigore posted an introduction of her Summer of Code project: Userland System V IPC in userland, and Daniel Flores wrote out his initial ideas for Hammer compression. That’s the remaining two projects introduced. If any of these interest you or you want to make suggestions, respond on the lists. Work starts on the 17th.
FreeBSDNews.net has a nice summary up of video from all (?) the presentations at BSDCan 2013. Of particular interest to DragonFly users: a video about pkg, the tool used for package maintenance in dports. In this presentation, it’s talking about use on FreeBSD, but the future stuff applies to DragonFly too.