Justin Sherrill – Page 197 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/01/072013/01/07

More on the Himeno Phoronix benchmark, and memory allocation

If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly. One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”. I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the missing ingredient. DragonFly now scores the same as Linux.

Tangentially related, this cache coloring is happening in nmalloc, which is now used on 64-bit DragonFly systems. The previous one, dmalloc, had problems in long-running programs.

2013/01/062013/01/06

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/06

I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.

Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via)
2600, from 1985, in free collected form. (via)
Russ Cox’s writing. I’ve linked to some of it before. It’s all fun reading.
IRC is dead, long live IRC. Shows the first IRC server.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Some very good tutorial videos. Don’t worry, it’s just electrostatic discharge, wire safety, fun with capacitors, and how to make a Windows shortcut (via/via)

2013/01/052013/01/05

BSDCan 2013 proposals

BSDCan 2013 is looking for papers, all due by the 19th. I mentioned it before, but a reminder went out and Michael W. Lucas wrote up a lengthy explanation of how and why you should present that paper.

2013/01/052013/01/05

DPorts and what it’s about

John Marino has been working for some time on a project he calls, ‘DPorts’. You may have noticed his recent commits for it. He wrote up a summary on users@ to explain what he’s doing. It’s translating FreeBSD ports to DragonFly in a way that appears to be (relatively) low-maintenance. It only works on DragonFly 3.3 and up and you can’t use it at the same time as pkgsrc.

Most interesting to me, it gets rid of the quarterly release chase that happens with pkgsrc releases. Since it’s primarily a binary install system, packages are only upgraded when the results are known to work.

2013/01/042013/01/04

Project ideas again

Ishan Thilina asked for some project ideas, and Samuel Greear gave a list of links that may be useful for anyone looking for a project of their own. I offered strategy. It didn’t work out, but this information’s still useful.

2013/01/04

BSDDay 2013 in Europe

Are you anywhere near Italy? BSD-Day is happening April 6th, 2013, in Naples, Italy, and it would be nice to have some DragonFly representation. (seen on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)

2013/01/03

EuroBSDCon 2012 videos are out

As seen on OpenBSD Journal, the videos for EuroBSDCon 2012 are online. There’s a lot of sessions there, so set aside some time.

2013/01/02

AVX support added to DragonFly

Adam Sakareassen submitted a patch for AVX support for 64-bit DragonFly, and Alex Hornung has committed it. If you’re like me and have only the vaguest idea what AVX is, it’s a set of processor instructions added by Intel to Sandy Bridge and later CPUs.

2013/01/02

pkgsrccon 2013: March 23rd, Berlin

Will you be near Berlin, Germany, in March? The pkgsrccon 2013 technical conference will be held there. Julian Djamil Fagir posted details about the event. The conference is free; you pay for your food and drink. If you’re interested in presenting, you need to contact them before March 8th.

2013/01/01

Maintaining a wiki for fun

The Open Graphics Project, which is building a completely open video card, needs a wiki maintainer. It’s a volunteer effort. If you were perhaps thinking you wanted to step up to a more complex project but didn’t want to just be writing code, here is a perfect opportunity.

(Not too different from maintaining a project work blog, after all, and I know that’s rewarding.)

2012/12/31

BSDTalk 221: Matthieu Herrb and Xenocara

Right in time for the end of the year, BSDTalk 221 is out, with Michael Dexter interviewing Matthieu Herrb at EuroBSDCon 2012 for 11 minutes about Xenocara.

2012/12/302012/12/30

Lazy reading for 2012/12/30

The last of the year.

Outgrow.me, a list of successfully funded Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. There’s some neat technology doodads in there. And a zillion hipster iPhone tripods.
Remember when you could find program source code printed in magazines, for you to type in? Here’s an interesting story about that. (via)
Some good news: despite the completely hostile (and wrong) story on Slashdot, the FreeBSD Foundation has exceeded their pledge goals for the year by a wide margin.
A very early pre-Internet story about packets. (via)
Relational shell programming. (via)
History of the Microwriter. I remember seeing a version of this called the Twiddler. (also via)
How to Host a Dungeon. Follow some of the links at the bottom. (also also via)
Early Apple computer designs. I link not because it’s Apple but because it’s very much 1980s industrial design, which is both wonderful and awful. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Marlo Meekins’ Tumblr. Her lettering is refreshingly expressive. That may sounds strange to single out, but so many people place words as an set block of text rather than as part of a graphic layout.

2012/12/29

Brief conversation about disk encryption

There’s a short thread running on the DragonFly users@ list about disk encryption; there’s some descriptions of encryption work there for the curious.

2012/12/29

Upcoming pkgsrc removals for 2012Q4

As is customary with pkgsrc, a number of packages that do not build or are no longer needed will be removed. This will happen in the next quarterly release. It’s a short list, and one item on that list, misc/p5-Locale-Maketext, will actually stay.

The freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q4 is due to complete in about 48 hours.

2012/12/27

IFQ packet staging mechanism added

I’m not sure what IFQ stands for, but Sepherosa Ziehau’s added it. It appears to be based on an idea from Luigi Rizzo called ‘netmap‘. In this case, network packets are grouped together before being placed onto the network interface’s hardware queue. That means better packet per second performance without a corresponding increase in CPU usage, as Sepherosa Ziehau’s report lists, along with needed sysctls.

2012/12/25

Merry Christmas

Hope your presents are interesting this year…

2012/12/242012/12/24

Outage fixed

The Digest was down over the last 12 hours or so – sorry! Upgrading this system took a bit longer than planned. I upgraded to Apache 2.4, and had to figure out all the config changes, and several packages didn’t like upgrading.

I’ve resisted upgrading for a long time, mostly because I think I could recreate the entire Apache 1.3 config file layout from memory. For the benefit of anyone else, this checklist of Apache errors and corresponding modules helped tremendously. Also, pkg_leaves is a great, if minimal, way to find packages you don’t need.

2012/12/232012/12/23

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/23

I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week. Merry almost Christmas!

Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage. (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk. I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail. This seems pretty slick. Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more. Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘ (via)
How I got four errors into a one-line program. All via git.
Go for C programmers. (via)
Mars Code. I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time. (also via)
I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general. I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
Why is grep always fast? Here’s a very technical explanation of why. There’s more.
Bunnie Huang is building a laptop. All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox. (Bunnie mentioned previously here) (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine. One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive. (I’m licensed to operate it.) There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic. It can be a fun drive. However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon. (via)

2012/12/19

Linux and cpdup, plus a note

I could have sworn I noted it before, but as Venkatesh Srinivas points out, there’s a port of cpdup to Linux. Also, if you’re using cpdup to copy material out of a Hammer volume’s history, use the -VV switch.

2012/12/18

Pkgsrc freeze for next quarterly release

Pkgsrc has entered a ‘freeze’ for their next quarterly release, which would be pkgsrc-2012Q4. (DragonFly 3.2 ships with 2012Q3) The freeze ends and the release happens at the end of the year, assuming no surprises.