Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
I almost had an all-acronym title, darnit.
- Theodore T’so’s writing about SSDs. It’s Linuxish, so not all the problems he finds would apply to DragonFly, but interesting in the detail level.
- The WordPress Theme Fiasco. (via) I link just so I can say that BSD licensing certainly takes away some of these headaches.
- How to get Vim to highlight HACK the same as XXX.
- How many books are there in the world? (via) I find this strangely interesting, probably cause I like books.
- 10 Great Unix Tools (via).
- The oldest web page, via Prof. Dr. Style, also a good read. I still reflexively assume web links that contain a ~ must be more authentic and personal than any other. (via).
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Dru Lavigne has listed conventions she’ll be at over the next few months, so if you feel like taking a BSDA exam or just plain helping out at a BSD booth, check the list.
Jan Lentfer has updated pf (and pflogd and ftp-proxy) in DragonFly to match what was in OpenBSD 4.1. Why this intermediate step? pf went through a lot of changes after OpenBSD 4.1, so this was easier than jumping right to the current version – which he plans next.
In any case, this was a huge and difficult job, with somewhere around 10,000 lines of code added, and very useful for DragonFly. Jan also managed to keep the DragonFly-specific features working, where “no state” is the default, along with features like fairq.
Stathis Kamperis was looking for a way to list all disk devices and the associated serial numbers. Matthew Dillon described a manual way to find it. That manual method could be turned into a single shell script, if anyone wanted a small shell programming task.
Among other things, Joe Talbott has brought in support for the 6000 and 6050 series of iwn(4) wifi devices.
Samuel Greear has even more benchmarks for his kqueue work. This time, he took an example server from Unix Network Programming, and tested various permutations. His post has the relative timings for each server type.
Sascha Wildner brought in FreeBSD’s stress2 stress testing suite. It’s an efficient way to crash your system. Look at the README to find out the fastest way there.
Samuel J. Greear posted a note about his Summer of Code work, focusing on selective wakeup. He outlined his strategy, and then posted benchmark numbers – using Apache, lighthttpd, and a minimal web server he wrote just to show the improvements from selective wakeup.
Matthew Dillon has added ALTQ to the GENERIC (and X86_64_GENERIC) kernels, since there’s no module version to add later. Make sure to include it in your custom configs, if desired.
(I always worry that I’ll miss some new kernel option when upgrading, but also don’t want to go over my whole kernel config just in case.)
Sascha Wildner has pulled in a bunch of updates for twa(4), adding more devices for this SATA RAID device driver. There’s a list of what’s supported now on the man page.
Some links! I normally would save this for a Lazy Reading Sunday entry, but I want to clear the backlog:
- 10 vi tips and tricks. (via)
- Pomodoro Technique, a way of breaking work into half-hour chunks to keep yourself productive. (via)
- More unusual Git tips. (via)
- 10 Differences Between Linux and BSD. Not that exciting, but I like the anecdote in item 4.
Samuel J. Greear just updated his recent kqueue work with some fixes. If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.7, you should update to catch what it fixes.
The publishers of BSD Magazine are planning to launch a Russian issue in September, but they need more native speakers (and writers, and proofreaders, etc.). olga.kartseva@bsdmag.org is the person to contact if you can fit one of those roles.
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Interdisciplinary Lessons”. September’s theme will be “Keystone Companies” and October will be “Sales Strategy”. If you want to contribute to those issues, articles are due by the 15th of the month before.
Matthew Dillon created a new Features page on the DragonFly site; it lists the technologies added to DragonFly from over the past few years.
Dru Lavigne’s started a PC-BSD Blog. This is great news – I don’t tend to cover other BSDs because I think there’s enough space in the blogosphere to others to do it. (and I only have so many hours in a day.) Dru’s already shown she knows posting, so I’m very happy to see more specific BSD outlets.
The August issue of BSD Magazine is ready. It’s titled “BSD as Operating System“, and it’s available for download now.
AboutBSD.net is putting source attribution on stories now, so I have nothing to complain about.
Well, I suppose I could complain about the default margins on embedded story images. It’s too small. Yes, I’m really reaching.