DragonFly 3.2.2 has been tagged. The tag commit has a list of the fixes; this is a bugfix release, but it’s a good one. Download an ISO (they should be at the mirrors by now) or update your system.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot of commits to increase packet-per-second rates without increasing CPU usage. He’s published a sort of progress report/benchmark to show current performance levels. It sounds like he’s expecting even better performance in the future, though I’m not sure how much more he could push out of it, since the bulk performance appears to be close to the rated capacity of the copper…
I hope you like links, and lots of history. It’s been a bumper crop this week.
- The Radio Shack catalog from 1983. Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk. For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte. A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte. Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002. (via)
- Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download. Found from a link to Unix Text Editing. I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987. (indirectly via)
- The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
- Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters. The ancestor of the TTY. It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter. I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
- The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels. I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style. (via)
- Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports. (via) Warning: they’re all in Postscript. Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
- If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel. I had to read the solution twice to get it.
- Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago. It’s true, and also makes me feel sad. (via)
- Google60, Google via punchcard and printer. It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun. (via)
- If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry. The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general. Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case. It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it. You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.
BSDCan 2013, which is being held in Ottawa May 17th-18th, has a call for papers out. You’ve got until January 19th to submit, so just about a month.
There’s been a large number of fixes and improvements to DragonFly 3.2 lately, so I’m planning to roll DragonFly 3.2.2 this weekend so there’s an image with them all.
This is mostly unrelated to DragonFly: I need to get more Python experience in the next few months, mostly around the OLPC project. I’ve only messed with Python when needed to get an existing script running, etc. Any Python users that can point me at a good learning resource?
BSD Magazine for December is out, offering the usual mix of articles in a free PDF. There’s several Postgres articles in this one.
If you were thinking you wanted to try gcc 4.7 with pkgsrc, John Marino’s described the option you need to set. It only works in pkgsrc-master right now (because of changes John made), and not every package in pkgsrc will build.
The advantage is that it’s also possible, with the same syntax, to set pkgsrc to build with gcc 4.4. This means the default compiler in DragonFly can be changed to gcc 4.7 and pkgsrc packages that aren’t compatible can still be built.
Update: Check this minor change: ‘?=’ instead of ‘=’.
Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed. The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math. While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.
(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)
If you’re running DragonFly 3.3, make sure you perform a full buildworld and buildkernel when you next upgrade. Sascha Wildner is mentioning this as a cautionary note after experiencing issues when using quickkernel, after removing a number of syscalls. Once past that point, it should be safe to go back to quickworld/quickkernel.
Matthew Dillon has written up another update on his progress with HAMMER2. (I need to be consistent in how I write that.) He has disks being exported and mounted on other systems, and adds an explanation of some of the issues around creating reliable multi-master setups. Before you get too excited, no, multi-master isn’t working yet, and this is not production ready.
There’s more benchmarks for DragonFly vs. other systems on Phoronix. It has the same problem as previous benchmarks; some of the benchmarks may have no connection to reality (what does the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver” actually test?), and almost every system has a different version of the gcc compiler. So it’s meaningless in terms of comparative or absolute performance. On the other hand, DragonFly doesn’t do badly.
You can also look at the comments to see someone absolutely freak out over the very existence of things that aren’t Linux. I’m not sure if it’s actually trolling, since the comments are so exactly wrong.
Matthew Dillon turned off the machdep.pmap_mmu_optimize sysctl by default, since wider testing has found some bugs. It’s only on by default on DragonFly 3.3 systems, so there’s nothing to do if you’re on 3.2-release. The feature will come back after some bugfixing.
This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.
- Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools. The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect. Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
- “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive” Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982. I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work. (via).
- While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format. (via)
- And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California. There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio. Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
- Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401. I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers. I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on. Well… I can think of one that would be OK.
- The Enduring Object. I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well. It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
- The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide. There’s some really neat board games in there.
- Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
- The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection. An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA. My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
- It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie. This time, it’s “Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“. (via)
- The DuckDuckGo command line. (via)
- Exploring Emacs. Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff. (via)
- “What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“. A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference. I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about. I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.
I knew about files like /etc/services, for common IP port usages, and /usr/share/zoneinfo, for time zones, but I didn’t know that DragonFly (along with other systems) keeps a list of agreed names for various human languages defined by ISO639 in /share/misc/iso639, and it’s maintained at least in part by the Library of Congress. At least I didn’t know until Sascha Wildner updated it.
Updated: Birthstones and flowers. Don’t know why.
Michael W. Lucas has a coupon code for his new edition of Absolute OpenBSD, so jump on it now. I haven’t read his first edition, but his other books are certainly good.
It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for the FreeBSD Foundation’s end of year campaign.
If you’ve ever wondered how building all of pkgsrc would go with GCC 4.7.2, which is in DragonFly but not the default compiler, John Marino can show you just that. He has a list of the results from a bulk build of all packages on DragonFly with GCC 4.7.2.