If you have a serial card add-in, DragonFly can now output the console to it – a way to run completely headless. It’s not quite like a normal on-motherboard serial port boot, so look at the commit notes for implementation details.
BSDNow 249 is covering a really wide range of topics including an uncommon amount of NetBSD, so I’m going to do the easy thing and repeat the summary: “OpenZFS and DTrace updates in NetBSD, NetBSD network security stack audit, Performance of MySQL on ZFS, OpenSMTP results from p2k18, legacy Windows backup to FreeNAS, ZFS block size importance, and NetBSD as router on a stick.”
NYCBUG is having an outdoors meeting in Bryant Park, today, 6:45 PM. Go, if you are near.
Treat this week: footage of a college animatronic project I was slightly involved in. See below.
- Maintaining Notepad is not a full-time job, but it’s not an empty job either.
- Concise Computational Literature is Now Online in Taper. 1KB items only.
- 80s Home Robot History. The first example is classic open source.
- Alphachat, economic film analysis. This podcast episode is talking about Tron/Tron Legacy. (via)
- Ten years of Vim. (via)
- 30 years later, QBasic is still the best. I link to this story because years ago, in college, some of my roommates built an entire animatronic gargoyle project around it. I found the footage, recently. (via)
- Vim 8.1 released. (via)
- Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
- Reverse NES emulation. (via)
- We Did Our First Kickstarter! And It Worked! Linking to it because the games are interesting, but also because it’s a viewpoint where he says “We’re getting older, enough so that the end of our careers is in sight. ” Not something you normally think of for an indie developer.
- Eudora, BSD-licensed. (via many places)
- WTFUtil, fun-looking terminal report screen. (via)
- OnlineASCIITools.com. Exactly what it sounds like.
One of these links will be very useful to someone.
- Join us, building a full OpenBSD mailserver. (via)
- Valuable News 2018/05/25.
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- BSDJobs.com. (via)
- Research Positions – Aberdeen Scotland.
- NetBSD: a new version of the CDDL dtrace and ZFS code. (via)
- OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space. (via)
- iXsystems Newsletter: The April 2018 Edition.
- OPNsense 18.1.9 released.
- OpenBSD’s httpd gets URL rewrite Not the final patch. (via)
- BSD: Networking Included. Some extremely useful tips in here for network troubleshooting. (via)
- Boot All the Things! (via)
BSDNow 248 has an interview with Patrick Mooney, talking about bhyve, along with the usual news summaries.
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has added a few options to the buildworld process in DragonFly. These options let you skip rebuilding the compiler and binutils rebuilds, for a significant speedup: buildworld times cut in half.
See his excellent commit message for all the numbers. Note that this is for development work, so it’s not advisable for regular upgrades.
Another wide range; hope you have reading time.
- Proposal for turning off standard I/O buffering.
- Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip: digital logic implemented with I2L.
- Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster. (via)
- From previous link comments: Scalability! But at what COST?
- Also: Taco Bell Programming, though that term is not as negative as my mental associations with it would seem.
- More Instantly Better Vim (2013). Video. It’s Damian Conway, so it’s a little bit turned to 11. (via)
- Free Software Needs Free Tools. Video based on this 2010 paper. (via)
- You need deli cups. I do this. All lids match; it’s great. (via)
- Inside printf. (via)
- Playing Battleships Over BGP. (via)
Your vector graphics video of the week: TANK. (via multiple places)
I have the normal list of links, but here’s a feature. At first glance, this looks like Netgate, the commercial entity behind pfsense, is not using FreeBSD for their new product. However, Jim Thompson of Netgate steps up and give a full-on explanation, and points out there’s already code out there to do this – it needs contributors.
- Where did devio.us go?
- Do Not Use sha256crypt / sha512crypt – They’re Dangerous. As the source link comments point out, FreeBSD’s implementation may be similar. I haven’t looked at other BSDs, and I’m not qualified to evaluate how dangerous this is or is not. (via)
- Simple Desktop for OpenBSD 6.3. (via)
- New Grammar for smtpd.conf.
- An annotated look at a NetBSD Pinebook’s startup.
- Valuable News – 2018/05/21.
- Draining the manual-page swamp. (via)
- WireGuard is available for OpenBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 3 – X11 Window System.
BSDNow 247 leads with a report on Mitchell Horne working for the FreeBSD Foundation (actually in the office) as an intern. It’s an interesting contrast to the all-online model for most committers. There’s plenty more links.
New DragonFly installs are chmod 700 for /root, not 755, from this recent change. Change your existing installation if desired.
If you’ve ever wondered what packages are needed to build a DragonFly release: here they are in one dports metapackage.
I’ve tagged a x.x.1 release – DragonFly 5.2.1, available now. It includes the recently-mentioned fix for CVE-2018-8897 and some other minor updates. See my email to users@ for the details.
A little more on building and less on rights this week.
- Making a Laptop From Scratch. Note the protocol used to fetch the document. (via)
- 25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
- Mutt and HTML Email. (via)
- Software Engineering Takeaways.
- The Game of Everything, Part 10: Civilization and the Limits of Progress.
- Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System. (via)
- Limbo X86 PC Emulator for Android. I want to try multimaster Hammer2 on multiple phones in emulation. No, it’s not a good idea, but it would be a fun idea. (via)
- The fanciest convention badge I’ve ever seen.
Note the eleventy-jillion hackathon reports.
- OpenBSD 6.3 : why and how. (via)
- Helpful OpenBSD Tutorials. A request for input, not a link to existing.
- A pile of p2k18 hackathon reports. And more.
- “We didn’t chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature.” (via)
- Getting CUPS working under NetBSD?
- What I Learned During My FreeBSD Internship.
- Valuable News – 2018/05/14. Catching links that I didn’t.
- OPNSense 18.1.7 released. No, I mean 18.1.8.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” Sponsorships, and writing schedule changes.
- FreeBSD 11.2 beta is out.
- Calamares “some day, a FreeBSD system installer”. (via)
Your thinkpiece for the week: The cultural shift from not selling out to blowing up. There’s a BSD analogy possible there.
Sascha Wildner has brought in the last 9 months of ACPICA updates to DragonFly. This may mean better power or motherboard support for your hardware in DragonFly. I always have a hard time pointing directly to ACPICA updates and how they benefit, but looking at the changelog update may help.
BSDNow 246’s title is talking about CVE-2018-8897, which was (unlike the original Spectre/Meltdown) responsibly disclosed to many different operating system vendors, including the BSDs. As a result, fixes arrived a lot faster… seems like a good idea. No interview in this episode, but as always there’s other topics explored.
This commit from Bill Yuan says “highspeed lockless in-kernel NAT”, and lists a huge number of changes for ipfw3. How much of a change is it? I don’t know; there isn’t a matching documentation update and I don’t have a way to test.