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In Other BSDs for 2018/12/15

I think/hope I cleared my backlog of BSD links.

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HAMMER2 update on the way

Matthew Dillon’s been working on “reliable on-media topology” for HAMMER2.  If you had a crash at just the right time with HAMMER2, you wouldn’t lose data but you might have to do some manual cleanup.  (Don’t ask me the steps; never happened to me.)  With these changes, that doesn’t happen any more.  It’s present now in -master and will be in what should be DragonFly 5.4.1 by the end of the year.  He has a post to users@ that goes into better detail.   If you want way too much detail, you can check the commits.

Three related notes: snapshots are now faster, the HAMMER2 design document has been updated to the tune of 400+ new lines, and yes, you can encrypt your root HAMMER2 filesystem, and have been able to for a while.

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Lazy Reading for 2018/12/09

Involuntary vi theme this week.  Or ssh!  I have lots of links.

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In Other BSDs for 2018/12/08

Once again playing catchup – but we all benefit from the abundance.

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DragonFly 5.4 released!

DragonFly 5.4.0 has been released.  This release bring a new compiler (gcc 8.0), asymmetric NUMA support, and a number of new and updated drivers for virtual machine devices and network.

My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as do the release notes.  Note there’s a step in there to update initrd, which has been available for the last few releases, though I’ve never mentioned it.  It’s probably a good idea, since that builds a mini “rescue” system, in case disaster strikes.

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Lazy Reading for 2018/12/02

It’s a classic Lazy Reading this week – some deep dives, some history, some stuff that will take a while to explore.  Enjoy!

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In Other BSDs for 2018/12/01

An oddly uplifting batch of BSD stories this week.

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How all those dports get built

I’ve mentioned it before, but the tool ‘synth‘ is what DragonFly uses to build all the dports binaries – over 30,000 packages, though I’m typing that from memory and not from looking at a tool.  Anyway, the one part of the release process I’ve never touched was the package building – and now it’s documented.  This document is oriented towards DragonFly releases – but if you wanted to create your own package repo with custom options, this is the way to do it.

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DragonFly 5.4rc1 image to use

I uploaded the current 5.4 release candidate – there’s an ISO and an IMG file, though your local mirror may be a better place to get it than those links.  Or just wait; I think the release won’t be long.

Note that I was smart for once and named it ‘rc1’, so if there’s another release candidate, it can be named ‘rc2’.  I used ‘rc’ in previous releases and was never sure if I should name a second candidate rc1, rc2…

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wpa_supplicant installed by default in DragonFly

Bear with me; this is the history: wpa_supplicant is the program DragonFly uses to connect to most wireless networks.  It’s been part of the base system for some time, but if you start it up, you will see a warning (at boot time) about how this version is deprecated.  Installing from dports puts a newer version in place.

As is the case with most third-party include in any operating system’s base, there’s always lag between the newest version of software and what’s been included in.  Dependencies creep in, or it’s duplicated work between packaging and basic OS maintenance, etc.  (Who here used Perl on FreeBSD 4?  That was frustrating, but a good example here.)  Anyway, the dilemma is that since wpa_supplicant is a program that may be required in order to get online, it must be in the base install.  However, since it has / had vulnerabilities, it must be updated.  The base install doesn’t update as fast as the origin of the software, and there’s the mismatch.

All that’s a long explanation as to why network/wpa_supplicant is now on the DragonFly install CD, and gets automatically used if installed.  Thanks for Aaron LI and Matthew Dillon for making it happen.  The base package is still there, in case someone deletes their installed ports and needs to get online before they can reinstall.  This is in master now and will be in the 5.4 release.

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Lazy Reading for 2018/11/25

A sorta backwards-looking list for you, this week.

Unrelated video of the week: Mashups are a mental dead end in most cases, but this “Benny Hill/Slayer Mashup Disaster” tickled me.  (via)

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In Other BSDs for 2018/11/24

Games are the unofficial accidental theme this week.