Posted on
More microbenchmarks

Venkatesh Srinivas performed the fefe.de ‘scalability’ benchmarks, which have been mentioned here before.  He performed it on different hardware and only with DragonFly, so it’s not really for comparison but rather for analysis.  However: graphs!

Matthew Dillon added some system tunables to match these microbenchmarks, and then changed the values.  The benchmarks looked better, but according to him you wouldn’t want to run a system normally with those values.

Posted on
pkgsrc current and 2.9, plus shallow pulls

There’s two recent changes for pkgsrc and DragonFly:

Posted on
BSDCan 2011 announced

Dan Langille has announced the BSDCan 2011 schedule/list of events in several places.  There’s some fun stuff in there, like discussion of Sendmail from the guy who (originally) wrote it.  There’s a talk about Roff (it’s that old?)from Kristaps Dzonsons, whose mdocml also happens to just have been committed by Sascha Wilder to DragonFly’s contrib.

NYCBSDCon 2010 was crazy fun.  I hope I can make it to BSDCan…

Posted on
Lazy Reading
  • The Cognitive Style of Unix (via) – I find this argument absolutely correct based on all my computer experience.
  • Hacker News is apparently getting more of a general news bent, rather than the actual hacker news it started with.  (via)  That seems to be an easy trend for many tech sites that start out focused on a topic (Let’s cover this area of interest!) and eventually diffuse (Let’s cover all our reader’s areas of interest!).  It may be because that seems to bring greater subscriber numbers?  Slashdot would be a good example of this generalization.
  • Note to self: Try to not do that with the Digest.
  • This page has a lot more good places to visit, but I’ll just link directly cause I don’t have any more commentary to associate with it.
  • Did you know there’s open source software for managing conferences?  Not conference calls, but full-on have-speakers-with-papers-and-attendees-with-a-schedule conferences?  It’s called Pentabarf, and it’s used for BSDCan, among other things.  I find the name funny, and it has funny origins.
  • Well, if I’m going to have a Discordian link, I should have a BSD-related Subgenius link.  By the way: I can perform weddings.  You know, just in case that comes up.
  • You know you’re important when the IETF needs to come up with a plan to deal with your retirement.  (via)  This is why it’s neat.  Go, look, because this is one of those parts of the Internet that will not exist this way again, ever.
  • This article at The Register about how open source isn’t making it very far in app stores is more aggressive than exploratory, as Register articles usually are, but there are some good points: phone app stores are able to charge money because of the ease of the delivery system, which apparently trumps ‘free’.   It’s also more purpose-built; pkgsrc I bet would work on an Android phone, but there’s not many applications you could interact with, easily.
Posted on
BSD Needs Books, the video

Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form.  I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk.  Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.

Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV!  How did I miss this?  Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.

Posted on
The best way to fix up pkgsrc…

… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program.  (Often called “pushing patches upstream”)  That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project.  That tracking down can be a majority of the work.  In that case: thanks, Rumko!

Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke!  He did the same thing for pcc.

Posted on
Anatomy of a Summer of Code proposal

“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting.  Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year.  It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.

Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!

Posted on
Bridge building better

Matthew Dillon’s improved bridging to the point where you can now modify the MAC address of the bridge and most everything, including ARP, will come from it correctly.   It’s even possible to bond 2 or more interfaces together, with the side effect of dragonflybsd.org having a lot more bandwidth.

Update: the config for his bonded interfaces has been posted as an example.

Update 2: More notes here.