I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
This week’s BSDNow covers a few things I haven’t seen yet – a news update from the FreeBSD Foundation, and a status report on Project Trident.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
Reminder: the next KnoxBUG meeting is tomorrow, September 5th, with a demo of TridentOS.
There’s a social meeting for NYCBUG tomorrow, September 5th, at Suspenders. As far as I can tell, the only difference between “technical meeting” and “social meeting” is if there’s a presentation. Go, if you are near.
If you are near Stockholm, there’s a BSD User Group meeting tomorrow night. Go, if you are near.
It turns out Threadripper (well, a Ryzen CPU) delivers good performance at relatively low power usage. As I sit in a room made too warm by a single desktop machine running, this lower wattage sounds pretty good to me.
Unofficial accidental “time” theme this week. Also charts!
- “GlitchPEG is perhaps the first screen saver that’s excellent at detecting buffer overflow exploits.” XScreenSaver 5.4 is out.
- Arguably the same topic: A Brief History of Generative Art. (via)
- “Update: After 87 hours, I stopped waiting.“
- On the Virtues of Terseness.
- The Emperor’s New Tools?: pragmatism and the idolatry of the web. (via many places)
- wideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games. Nice technical explanation. (via)
- PaperTTY, an e-ink terminal emulator. Note that it’s running on solar power in some of the pictures. (via)
- Time is crazy, part 1: Working with Timezones. With graphs! (via)
- Time makes us crazy, part 2: Higgins Time.
- Time is poorly defined even now, part 3: [tz] Mozambique officially uses LMT?
- Takeaways from SIGGRAPH 2018. (via)
- Related: Technical Papers Preview: SIGGRAPH 2018.
- Metasploit+Amazon SES, or debugging Sendmail’s SMTP Authentication. Debugging SMTP when it’s encrypted. (via)
- Dogbot.
- The Curta Calculator, which I’ve mentioned before.
- The Pudding, where I’ve linked before, but I didn’t realize how much data research/visualization there was on the site. (via)
Lots of event notices in here… Watch for what’s near you.
- The next KnoxBUG meeting is September 5th, with a Trident demo. I’ll post a reminder.
- OpenBSD.Amsterdam. Dedicated OpenBSD/vmd servers, which is a neat idea. Could probably do the same thing with vkernels.
- MeetBSD is happening October 19-20 in Santa Clara, CA. (via)
- Configuring OpenBSD – System and user config files for a more pleasant laptop. Not all of it is OpenBSD-specific. (via)
- Happy Bob’s Libtls tutorial. Also not wholly OpenBSD-specific; more libressl-specific. (via)
- AsiaBSDCon 2019 is happening March 21-24, Tokyo, Japan. (via)
- Ravenports now on gcc 8.2.
- Recent freebsd-jobs posts.
- [talk] ARM – any Tier-1 *BSD options? Nice support work from Netgate.
- libfuzzer, parts 1, 2, and 3 – a Summer of Code project for NetBSD. I linked the first one before, but hadn’t followed up until now. (via)
- OpenBSD, SpamPD and the Startup Bug. (also via)
- Public Access Multics. I am happy just typing that sentence.
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
No interview this week in BSDNow 261, but links to a recent 1999 convention video, details about TrueOS/Project Trident, and the usual.
If you like pizza and BSD, and you are near Portland, Oregon, there’s an event you will enjoy tomorrow night. At least 2 of those 3 characteristics should match you. (via)
Following up on the DragonFly/Threadripper benchmarks, DragonFly now has some NUMA work to accommodate the non-uniform CPU and RAM layout on those boards.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.
There’s several deep dives in the links today; enjoy reading!
- NIST publication SP800-177r1-draft2: Trustworthy Email. NIST publishes suprisingly comprehensive documents on technology practices; I am surprised they are not referenced more often.
- Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models. More Mickens. (via)
- 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email, part one and part two. I feel but cannot prove that this is related to why people say, “DragonFly feels so responsive!” (via)
- Why
ed(1)is not a good editor today. There are people that like ed(1), unironically? - Why I’m mostly not interest in exploring new fonts (on Unix). It helps if you do everything in English, though.
- The Distracted State of the Union. A sort of “these kids today” article, but linked simply because it points out that when you read the news, the news now reads you. (via)
- Programmatically generated books, read out loud. I was going to say “by the author”, but I’m not sure that’s technically correct.
- Badness, Enumerated by Robots. There’s about a zillion links in this for more technical information; worth reading.
Your unrelated music link of the week: A Brief Primer on the Contemporary Glitch-Hop Scene. I liked Tipper more than I expected.
Still haven’t cleared my backlog of links…
- “DISABLE HYPERTHREADING ON ALL YOUR INTEL MACHINES IN THE BIOS.” You should not be surprised by this. (via)
- X11 on really small devices. There’s video, though it’s a .mov file and so could also be on YouTube.
- mandoc-1.14.4 released.
- NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2018 Kyoto. (via)
- Modern-day package requirements. I could have sworn I linked to this before.
- Michael MacInnis: Oh a new Unix shell – BSDCan 2018. Video, also probably mentioned indirectly before, but now there’s comments.
- unbound-adblock. “The ultimate network adblocker!” (via)
- OpenBSD on an iBook G4. (via)
- Netgate SG-1000. Runs pfSense; haven’t tried it but I like it just cause it’s tiny.
- PICO-8 works on OpenBSD using iridium browser. (via)
- People who run BSD: A series of BSD user interviews. I wish this kept going. (via)
- Valuable News for 2018/08/11 and 2018/08/18.
- Michael W. Lucas on IT the to D.
- End of life for NetBSD 6.x.
This episode has one of the more intriguing titles for BSDNow, and it’s because they are covering a recent hackathon and “BSDCam” (not BSDCan), which I did not know about. The tiny network terminal server mentioned this week may be of use to people, too.
If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems. It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process. I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.
DragonFly will now run on a Threadripper 2990wx. What’s more, Matthew Dillon has published some testing results showing how power, CPU use, and memory speed all interact with these things. There’s a followup, too. I imagine these are interesting CPUs to most people, since they perform well and don’t have recent Intel-specific security problems.
There’s a SemiBUG meeting scheduled for tomorrow; Michael W. Lucas talks about ed.
Update: might be a slightly late start.