Following up on an earlier post, the new servers for DragonFly are in place. The old 40-core machine used for bulk build, monster, is being retired. The power efficiency of the new machines is startling. Incidentally, this is where donations go – infrastructure.
I’m covering all my areas of interest this week, or nearly so.
- Famous computer history quotes, some probably new to you.
- The Bit Player, a movie about Claude Shannon, and a review of it.
- A new Cyriak video, Breakfast. Another attempt to describe fractal infinity, I think. (via)
- D&D plus Shakespeare. (via)
- The Design of Dungeons and Dragons. Talking about the books themselves, not the game. (via)
- Noise Machines, including the nonrepeating sound of a data center. (via)
- Oddball analog smartphones.
- Voyager 1 and 2 are still talking, still active, and possibly the highest-latency communication problem possible. (via)
- Old video game advertisements. (via)
- Absolute scale corrupts absolutely. Lots of great pull quotes in this.
- Tumblr, the Day After. As a counterpoint to the last link, WordPress and Tumblr are two social networks that do not financially depend on either damaging privacy or encouraging outrage.
- Waldenponding, a term new to me.
- Paul Ford Uses This. I’ve linked to his excellent writing before.
- Chesses, variations on chess. Immediately understandable, and playable if you have a second player right there. (via)
Incidentally, my employer, REDCOM, uses FreeBSD as a base for its main product, is deployed in rough areas and in high-security government locations, and is one of the few electronics manufacturers still working entirely in the U.S.. REDCOM also has jobs to fill in New York, where I work. Please, apply if you see a job that interests you – and tell me.
- DistroTest.net, which happens to have runnable online versions of GhostBSD, FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, MidnightBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OPNSense, and DragonFly. (via)
- The VBSDCon schedule (Sept 5-7, very soon!) is up.
- Update webmin/usermin if you have them installed.
- Impact of Tariff Increases. Eventually relevant even if you aren’t a U.S. reader.
- Project Trident 12-U3 and 19.08 now available.
- Valuable News for 2019/08/14 and 2019/08/19.
- Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, third evaluation report.
- USBNET: A story of networking and threads that won’t stop pulling.
- Getting the GNU gdbserver to work.
- Fuzzing NetBSD Filesystems via AFL. [Part 2].
- GSoC 2019 Report: Adding NetBSD KNF to clang-format, Part 2.
- Brutal Doom 64 on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD -stable gets package updates! Release OpenBSD doesn’t normally get packages?
- Blueprint and progress status for mixed environment multilevel backup. Really, the thing to see is a spreadsheet.
- When a hacker tries to infiltrate an OpenBSD machine. Pufferfish reference.
- CFT: CBSD project switched to its own cloud images.
- Instant Workstation.
Taken from IRC: “DFBEADM(1) A Boot Environment Manager for HAMMER2“. This could be fun! Here’s the users@ post to match.
This week’s BSD Now covers a lot of topics, including linking to a gentle explanation of package management, which surely no reader here needs to have explained? Well, you are covered if so.
Here’s something I haven’t see before: at the time of me typing this, there are commits in DragonFly, FreeBSD, and I assume NetBSD (haven’t found the commit), but the 2019-5612 CVE entry is still shown as reserved and not public. This may change by the time you read this article, of course.
Update: the original source, found by an intrepid reader.
If you have an AM4 motherboard and also can’t EFI boot DragonFly on it, this recent change may fix that for you.
Also, if you are using a Corsair keyboard, this commit may be useful to you.
Matthew Dillon posted an extensive writeup about the hardware changes for dragonflybsd.org; price to performance ratio has been improving so much for multiprocessor machines that we can jump forward both for hosting hardware and for a testbed.
He also mentions his immediate thoughts on what to tackle next, since SMP has been so relentless improved in DragonFly. It resulted in a very long conversational chain as people weighed in with opinions, so I’ve held off posting it until the conversation finished. (I chimed in too.)
Again, way behind cause of being online only irregularly over the last week. There’s still plenty to look at – August is made for Lazy Reading.
- Never fast enough. (Scroll way down) There’s a nonlinear payoff for software speed … for tools.
- Related: Fast Software, the Best Software.
- Also related: Performance Matters.
- On the flip side of that, limiting and slowing social software is a good idea. (via)
- freemium.cc, free tools for makers.
- https://thehistoryofweb.design/. The URL is perfectly descriptive. (via)
- Typography Terms. Gadzook! (via)
- Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1. (via)
- Why Checklists Fail. Linked cause checklists are usually super-effective. (via)
- The Roguelike Toolkit (RLTK), implemented for Rust. The comments in the source page have some interesting further links.
- Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity – Episode 22: Goatbusters.
- The Last Working Olivetti Mainframe Sits In a Tuscan High School. Comments led me to this neat-looking Olivetti calculator from the year before I was born. (via)
- There are even bots crawling gopherspace.
- We all spend half our day using a keyboard. Do you use any specific keyboard? Which one? Why? Far more suggestions than you need.
- USB-C Easy Bake Oven. Interesting for how power is handled. And cookies. (via)
- Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019. (via)
- I chanced upon an ancient cache of code… (also via)
This is a somewhat pre-made post coming off a week on the road, so I packed it chock-full.
- The UNIX Philosophy in 2019. (via)
- Converse to previous: Brian Will – Replacing the Unix tradition.
- Summer Sun and microsystems.
- How does a “real” Unix system feel compared to *BSDs and Linux?
- GSoC 2019 Report Update: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/08/05.
- Removal of route-collector mode in bgpd(8).
- tpmr(4) driver added to -current.
- OPNsense 19.7.2 released.
- Linux kernel’s inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure. Linked cause you know what performs well under memory restriction? Any BSD. (via)
- Devine Lu Linvega’s Uses This entry. Interesting to see his workstation details because his workstation is 2 machines, with Plan 9 variations, and segregated on work vs. distraction. (and sometimes FreeBSD.)
- NetBSD light weight theme.
- Wanting to install Trident to boot from my USB stick…
- LibreSSL 3.0.0 Released. (via)
- Play Windows Games On FreeBSD. Encapsulating setup. (via)
Roy Marples, the ‘upstream‘ for dhcpcd(8), noticed that DragonFly was working with it as a dhclient/rtsold replacement, but the process wasn’t complete. So … welcome new committer!
DragonFly’s tap(4)/tun(4) devices have been historically precreated – tap0, tap1, tap2, tap3. They are now auto-cloned, which might surprise any software counting on the prior behavior. I don’t know of any specific packages that are affected by this, though. DragonFly version 5.6 is unaffected by this; it’s in -current only.
If you upgrade DragonFly and one of the shared libraries used by pkg gets updated, you can’t run pkg until you get files, but pkg is the program you use to bring in new files. This chicken-and-egg problem is solved with pkg-static, a version of pkg built without shared libraries.
You may have noticed some format flip-flopping between pkg and pkg-static if you had to run it after the most recent DragonFly upgrade; that is fixed. There’s a larger issue of certificate installation identified there; I don’t know a solution to it, but I do want to mention this for next time pkg breaks for someone – pkg-static will work as backup, including to bring in a new version of pkg.
I’m posting this late cause I was traveling when it went up: BSD Now 310 is a nice cross-BSD roundup this week. I might miss the next BSD Now too, so don’t wait for me to link to it.
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow, at the usual place. RSVP to the mailing list if you are going. And you should go, just to find out what hardware Joshua Stein is working on right now.
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
I have some neat history items mixed in this week.
- ASCII table and history (or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?) (via)
- As Flash dies a little more.
- Beginner Problems With TCP & The socket Module in Python. Linked cause it shows why MTU size matters. (via)
- My Top 20 Interactive Fiction, 2019 Edition. With links to play.
- Monsters and Manuals’ 1500th Anniversary: Half Time After the Time? Linked for the best-of links in the article; that’ll give you some reading.
- ‘A Humument’ is a completely novel project. A meaningless book, extrapolated into 300+ works of art. (via)
- Scanimate News. This was TV/computer graphics in the early 80s. (via)
- Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research. Linking to the summary; continue on if the thread is interesting.
- The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online. One of the reasons I don’t use Cloudflare.
- Level Design Patterns in 2D Games.
- disquiet.com. Lots and lots to listen to. (via)
- Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses.
- ASCII art RPG Stone Story launches into early access. I’m stretching it with the ‘roguelike’ tag here.
- Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Blarf: Cease and Desist. (via)
A reminder: if you have a BSD user group and I’m not posting about your meetings, please make sure I know about it.
- The OpenBSD Ada Library. (via)
- BSD Link Roundup 7.29.
- Project Trident 19.07-U1 now available. No, wait, 12-U1 now available.
- Valuable News – 2019/07/29.
- Nvidia optimus drivers for FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenBGPD 6.5p1 released.
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019).
- Installing Owntracks recorder on FreeBSD.
- Mod-able voxel engine written in common lisp. (via)
- Thief-like FOSS stealth game “The Dark Mod” running on OpenBSD. (via)
- Obviously related: Let’s Try on OpenBSD: The Dark Mod (Thief-inspired stealth game).
- Upcoming changes to LISA and SREcon.
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.