Justin Sherrill – Page 212 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/05/132012/05/12

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

“My 10 Unix command-line mistakes“. (via) You will have done at least a few of these – see comments on that article for even more. I know I’ve shut down the interface I’m connected on a few times…
BSD vs. Linux. (via) Maybe you know the details, maybe you don’t.
Git now has subtree support. You can now stuff git repositories into other git repositories, but they remain ‘normal’ repos that can be split back off later. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying. Also, the git website has gone through a redesign.
A BSD daemon patch, $3. (via) No Puffy or Fred ones that I’ve seen.
Here’s a puppet fix for DragonFly.
The Grammar of Vim. (via)
Rob Pike vs. Richard Stallman. (via the same place) Not enough drama, guys, come on!
Anatomy of a Scam. I link to it because my employer just received one of the bogus invoices mentioned in the article.
Computing Fossils. (via) If you follow one link from that article, make it this one about a punchcard IBM from 1948, still in use.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig. A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor. The first two chapters are available as a PDF. Read and if you like it, order the whole thing. Also: Steve and Steve. If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

2012/05/11

BSDTalk 213: Paul Schenkeveld and EuroBSDCon

BSDTalk 213 is out, with 14 minutes of conversation with Paul Schenkeveld about EuroBSDCon. EuroBSDCon is happening in late October, in Poland. Also, the BSDTalk website has a new layout.

2012/05/10

Virtio drivers, an explanation

Venkatesh Srinivas posted an explanation of the virtio update he’s working on. I linked to the work before, but not his explanation, which goes into the ‘vm_balloon’ device.

2012/05/10

Update, Asus G2K users

Sascha Wildner’s posted an update to the acpi_asus(4) module, so it’s worth updating if you have an appropriate Asus machine and are running DragonFly-current.

2012/05/08

Pkgsrc doing better on DragonFly

Thanks to the efforts of John Marino and others, pkgsrc is having possibly the highest success rate ever of successful package software builds. If only I could get a pkgsrc-2012Q1 build to complete and upload…

2012/05/08

Something new under the sun

You’d think everything that could be done with grep has already been done, but no: grep, which is an externally-produced program, has been updated in DragonFly to version 2.12 by John Marino.

2012/05/07

Recent syncs from FreeBSD and back again

A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog. Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).

In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.

2012/05/062012/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/06

Drowning in links this week. Is that so bad? No.

I pity people that had to make illustrations about abstract concepts like the Internet, especially in the 1990s.
Slashdot jumps the shark. I’m not really knocking what they are adding – I could use it for work – but Slashdot has gone corporate, in the bland sense of the word. There’s no clear voice behind what they talk about. Even if you don’t like what they are posting, there’s no longer a specific author to disagree with. Younger folks may shrug and say “So what?”, but Slashdot used to be nearly the only decent source for nerdity online.
A sensible discussion of open source and how it relates to obsolescence and access.
Jan Schaumann’s NYCBUG presentation in mp3 form: “The Useless Use of *“
Winning entries in the 2011 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
Hyperrogue III (Zeno Rogue). (via) It’s a roguelike, with vi-based directional controls and a non-Euclidian hyperbolic plane world, or at least that’s what the description says. It might compile on DragonFly.
“Why don’t more developers contribute to open source?“
Spam-merican Apparel (via) Spambots and T-shirts; that combination seems to be a natural growth of the internet.
XFCE 4.8 is on the way in pkgsrc. I know this will please some people.
The smallest (ELF) Hello World possible. (via profmakx onEFNet #dragonflybsd)
A SSD roundup. I have one in my work laptop right now and it makes a huge difference.
DuckDuckHack. (via) Quick, someone make a plugin for pkgsrc packages.

Your unrelated links of the week: Turntablism. I was talking about assembled music last week, and this is a whole area to itself. Watch Kid Koala turn a few seconds of trumpet playing into an entire blues progression.

2012/05/052012/05/04

BSD Magazine for May is out

BSD Magazine for May is out, with the theme of BSD security, though of course there’s a lot more than that topic in the free PDF.

2012/05/04

Virtual IO drivers status

Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on integration of Tim Bisson’s virtio-bhyve drivers into DragonFly. This would make throughput better in KVM/Qemu. His bug ticket has some questions that could use answers.

2012/05/04

Ebooks sale, just today

There’s a Day Against DRM sale going on for O’Reilly. 50% off everything, and all the books are DRM-free. I found out about this through Michael Lucas, whose No Starch books are represented there too. It’s a fantastic deal and it’s today only, so strike now while you have the chance.

(I should make a ‘buy buy buy!’ tag for articles.)

2012/05/03

Debugging RANCID

Michael Lucas has a writeup on how he debugged his RANCID setup. I link to it for the technical details, and also because if you have to manage more than a few switches or other network devices, RANCID is very useful.

2012/05/032012/05/04

ichwd(4) added, watchdog watches

Francois Tigeot has added ichwd(4), a driver for the watchdog function on some Intel ICH motherboard chipsets. Sascha Wildner has also made the kernel option for it on by default. (Look for /dev/wdog.)

Update: Francois Tigeot sent a link to an excellent page explaining hardware watchdogs.

2012/05/02

Upgrading to pkgsrc-2012Q1

Here’s a post by yours truly, on how to move to pkgsrc-2012Q1 though building from source. This is for anyone sick of waiting for me to finish the binary build of pkgsrc.

2012/05/01

Followup on clustering

Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday. It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.

2012/04/30

Update for a clusterfix

A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you’re running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you’ll want to update.

2012/04/292012/04/27

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/29

I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week. Not too much! Enjoy.

Best ad for a front-end designer ever. (via) It will make sense if you used the Web in 1995.
A while back I linked to a article about Valve’s development process. Now, here’s the Handbook. (PDF, via) As I said before, they’ve arguably taken the best parts of open source development work and used then to create a workspace. These best parts are not the ones usually talk about when they say, “open source company”, though. There’s a Harvard Business School paper that talks about the carrot or stick approach to motivation, and I think Valve nailed it. Read the PDF, cause it’s more fun than this.
Animated Engines. (via) Animations that show how different engine types work. I find them oddly soothing. Also, I finally know more about a Wankel Rotary Engine outside of its existence as a punchline in a Monty Python sketch.
The best reaction to space mining. (via)
LOL memory, to the moon.
A BSD-specific fork of ekg2. Never used it; just saw the BSD part of the name.
“Imagine that you’re crazy enough to think about building a search engine.” (via)
“Before you write a patch, write an email“.
If you’re going to fund open source work, you should fund the boring stuff for maximum effectiveness.
Volatile Software (via) You may or may not agree with the strategy, but I can agree with the sentiment. For better or worse, BSD is generally a more sane/stable platform.
Twitter CLI. (via) Ruby-based, and seems like an actual good idea, not just a hack to see if it can be done.
“FreeBSD Device Drivers” for a pre-release 40% off. Some of the contents may apply to DragonFly. Or perhaps you enjoy device driver documentation?
Go Right (via), for anyone who played a game console more than 10 years ago.
VIM Adventures. (via) Surprisingly fun.

Your unrelated link of the week. Youtube Poop. As far as I can tell, ‘Youtube Poop’ are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames. Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude. Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before. Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan. I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn’t I?

(Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)

2012/04/27

OpenSSL 1.0.1b updated

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL, though this version is apparently a bugfix, not a security fix. Still need it anyway, since it disabled TLS 1.1 in an unexpected way. See the OpenSSL changelog entry at “[26 Apr 2012]” for details.

2012/04/26

Google Summer of Code: the projects

Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects. Here’s direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:

Vishesh Yadav – Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
Mihai Carabas – Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
Loganaden Velvindron – Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
Ivan Sichmann Freitas – 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels

(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)

2012/04/25

SACK retransmission added

Sepherosa Ziehau added “Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm” in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy. It’s on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.