I am typing BSDXXX phrases a lot, it seems. BSDNow 250 goes over the just-finished BSDCan. There’s a ton of events, so get reading/listening.
DragonFly has had NX (Non-eXecutable) support for some time. It’s now on by default for read operations in DragonFly master – not the current release. You can step it up to level 2, for write operations, with a loader tunable, but it may cause issues with dports.
Matthew Dillon’s added some patches to DragonFly related to securing floating point state, following similar work in OpenBSD. There isn’t a reported catchy-name issue to match it, like Spectre/Meltdown – yet.
(If anyone has a good link to the similar OpenBSD commits, please share; I did not find them on a cursory search.)
Update: the fix is now in 5.2 and an update is recommended.
There was an optional ‘make initrd’ step in the DragonFly build process, where you can create a small binary to use for mounting encrypted root drives.
Aaron LI has removed mkinitrd in favor of ‘make initrd’, which builds a separate binary to use in exactly those situations. See the commit message for more detail. It incidentally creates a ‘/rescue’ directory and works as a rescue ramdisk, similar to other BSDs, if you should ever need it. (See updated MOTD for details)
It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have overflow from last week to help, so these are very fresh links.
- With ARM Wide Open. Acorn, where ARM processors first showed up.
- That led me to the BBC film Micro Men, a neat movie about not-Silicon-Valley early computing.
- MXE11: run UNIX on a microcontroller. Pocket PDP/11. (via)
- WiGLE, mapping of WiFi everywhere. There’s a certain amount of approximation, but still interesting. (via)
- DungeonFS, both a FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawl. (via)
- A few notes on daily blogging. Relevant to why I do this thing you are reading now.
- How Instagram’s Feed Works. It bothers me that what you see is filtered by how you use their tools, not by what you actually like. (via)
- The History of Telecommunications. (via)
- OpenVMS/x86_64: Proof Points to x86-64 First Boot (May 29th 2018). As someone who still has a VAX running… I’m interested.
- Stupid
cmd.exetricks: Changing directories with forward slashes instead of backslashes. I find this entertaining. - Six hacks for less(1). I don’t think of less(1) as configurable, but it is.
- GitHub: quo vadis? This note gets it right: self host, self host, self host self host self host. We all have the tools; don’t let a startup sell them back to you.
BSDCan is running this weekend. There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.
- Retguard: An improved stack protector for OpenBSD. (via)
- Mailing lists vs Github. Relevant to most every BSD project. (via)
- need help determining the best HA solution for 3 pfSense VM guests.
- OpenBSD’s ksh(1) does not export PWD, causing unexpected problems. (via)
- GOG.com summer sale – OpenBSD highlights.
- libcsi – Crypto Simplified Interface.
- Author Discoverability.
- Your own VPN with OpenIKED & OpenBSD. (via)
- zedenv, a ZFS Boot Environment Manager for FreeBSD and Linux. (via)
- TrueOS to Focus On Core Operating System. Not a name change; it’s work on becoming a base like Debian. (via)
- Isotop: French desktop-oriented OpenBSD distro. (via)
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server.
- Valuable News – 2018/06/05.
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.