Reading this HAMMER2 commit carefully shows some future plans: remote cluster control, and the ability to mount nonlocal HAMMER2 volumes. A reminder: those are future plans, not what you can do now.
The i386-only doscmd(1) is gone from DragonFly. I don’t think I ever used it, as other emulators/systems are so prevalent and complete.
Apparently a lot of modular-xorg packages in pkgsrc received updates. I think I found some of the changes, but probably not all, so I don’t have a good way to sum up the actual effect.
Update: see the end of this cvsweb pkgsrc CHANGES-2012 page for all the changed parts.
There’s a number of packages out there that assume you are using the GNU versions of ls, wc, and so on. However, you aren’t when using a BSD system. Pkgsrc has historically dealt with this when GNU tools are needed for a package by prefixing them with a ‘g’. ‘ls’ becomes ‘gls’, and so on. Aleksey Cheusov proposed a fix to keep these utilities under their original names, which I think will go into the next quarterly pkgsrc release.
Pkgsrc packages that have source files that can’t be redistributed, and go missing for the length of an entire quarterly release, will get removed. They are effectively broken at that point anyway.
That policy is now formally in place; I don’t think there was a clear prescription before.
The cache coherency management code in DragonFly has been removed, but it’s coming back under HAMMER2, as part of how HAMMER2 maintains multiple master drives.
Venkatesh Srinivas, currently on his colossal bike ride, introduced a different way of creating a tmpfs. This was test code, and Johannes Hofmann benchmarked it (see same page). It’s interesting cause there are numbers, and nice to see one person jumping in to test someone else’s results/idea.
I think I’ve mentioned building DragonFly with clang before, but not pkgsrc. There’s two variables to set, plus some special handling for libf2c. Thomas Klausner has details. This is not tested on DragonFly.
Week 2 Summer of Code status reports from Loganaden Velvindron, Mihai Carabas (plus followup), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas are available. Ivan Sichmann Freitas also has a RFC on changes to DragonFly’s 32-bit API.
So many links this week I’m already working on next week’s entry. Enjoy!
- git aliae so that you never lose work (part 2). (via) Aliae is the plural of alias?
- The Setup; people’s work environments. I’ve linked to it before, when nabbing links from Trivium, but I never realized how many people there were to look at. People like Chet Faliszek, Gabe Newell, ‘bunnie’ Huang, _why the lucky stiff, Lee Hardcastle, Joel Johnson, MC Frontalot, Derek Yu, Eric Meyer, Anil Dash, Jordan Mechner, Andy Hertzfeld, and Ryan North. There’s a lot more. If any of those names are unfamiliar, you should go look them up and be pleasantly surprised.
- How to use DragonFly to troll Amiga users. Funny/sad, like most trolling.
- One does not simply run Unicorn in DragonFlyBSD. Not sure what Unicorn is, but I feel bad that it crashed.
- Become a Vim Master By Learning these 30+ Key Bindings. Well, it’s vim, not vi, but oh well. It’s the standard list of commands that normally makes up articles like this, but I still look, in the hopes that I’ll permanently absorb another movement pattern and get that much faster.
- Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed? (via) The colorized hash maps are a pretty interlude in a technical discussion.
- Speaking of Vim, here’s the M command, implemented for a web page. (via) The only better thing would be a vertical split screen view.
- End of a Fishing Expedition. Makes a good point about the recently-lost-by-Oracle lawsuit about copyrighting APIs: if that was possible, most Unixish operating systems, including BSD, would suddenly have legal problems. Also, the judge in the case apparently knows how to program, and actually established a point of law instead of shrugging and saying “These kids and their newfangled Internets confuse me.”
- CPU wars. (via) A trump cards game based on CPUs. Super-nerdy!
- Oops.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Make Good Art. (via) The comic version of Neil Gaiman’s recent commencement speech, cause comics are more fun than video.
DragonFly has a page on updating pkgsrc, and so does NetBSD. I don’t think I linked to the latter before, but even if I didn’t, it’s still useful.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added netblast, a tool originally from FreeBSD that, if I’m reading the commit right, flings packets of a given size at an IP/port of your choosing, for as long as you want.
It’s possible to accidentally truncate your password when using DES encryption and 0x80 in UTF-8 encoding. It’s fixed.
BSDCan 2012 spawned a lot of interviews. We all benefit from that. For example, another BSDTalk interview, talking with Kris Moore of iXSystems about what’s in the next version of PC-BSD.
There were some benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 some time ago on Phoronix. (You may recall it being mentioned here previously.) The disk numbers always seemed weird to me, so I repeated that part of the test, and here’s my writeup.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to SIOCGIFDATA, so if you are using DragonFly-master and pf, you will need a full rebuild. Also pftop, if you use it.
Three more weekly status updates from DragonFly/GSoC students: Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. That’s all for the past/first week.
Let’s get right down to it:
- Hey, Nmap 6 is out. It’s one of those always-useful tools, similar to wireshark.
- Biculturalism, a fair assessment. (via) The generalizations are a little extreme (1 Unix-based author who Got Religion, vs. a diffused Windows developer stereotype) but still has value.
- A Git Horror Story. (via) Not a true story, but useful for describing how git commits can be GPG-signed.
- A recent Google Doodle, a playable Moog synthesizer, done for Bob Moog’s birthday. The Moog Music site has instructions. I happened to notice they’re using FreeBSD as the server – cool! Maybe it’s just the hosting org? Anyway, I link to it because Bob Moog’s cousin was for a while my father’s employer.
- “Google is transitive, whereas Facebook is reflexive.” (via) This sums up the practical difference between Google and Facebook rather well.
- I did not know this existed: OpenBSD Network Shell. (via) Interface like a Cisco-ish router, internals are OpenBSD.
- There’s been recent news articles about how programmers over 35 tend to not get hired. Here’s one of the reasons: younger programmers discount the value of their own time. Anything where all the benefits (cheaper labor, more products) accrue to the company, and all the costs go to the employee (time lost, extra work) is not a good idea in the long run.
- “Now I’ve met the other DragonFly BSD user, too.” That’s two more than I expected for any given project, really.
- Undeadly.org has an extensive interview/article about OpenSMTPd. It’s OpenBSD’s implementation of a SMTP daemon, which is something I haven’t heard much about before. Compare with DragonFly’s much-smaller-in-scope dma.
- Van Jacobsen Saved the Internet. Or just fixed a timing bug. Depends on whether you listen to Wired or to him. The interesting part is that he had to build the tools to troubleshoot the problem.
- Here’s something I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet: Microsoft is responsible for half of Google’s DMCA notices last month. My employer recently was audited by Microsoft (technically by Accenture contractors for Microsoft) for license compliance. My Dell sales representative, when I asked him for a list of what Microsoft-licensed OEM devices we had bought, said many of his customers were asking for the same thing. He joked that Microsoft was trying to improve its profitability numbers for the quarter. Given that they are trying to push to Windows 8, that might just be true, and they are trying to enforce their way to it, not sell their way to it.
Your unrelated link of the week: MAD GOD, the film.
Loganaden Velvindron posted a terse update on the state of his Summer of Code work for DragonFly. I’m still waiting on the other students.