This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but covers most every BSD to some extent, and talks about something I find super-interesting: a BSD phone.
KnoxBUG is meeting tonight – there’s no speaker scheduled, so it will be open discussion.
More thinking topics than version changes this week, which is interesting.
- Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It’s the PDF transcript from the FOSDEM 2017 “My BSD sucks less than yours” presentation, linked previously. (via)
- OPNsense 17.1.3 released.
- Ask HN: Why is BSD becoming more popular in embedded devices? Lots of half-informed theorizing there.
- The BSD family tree. Not new, but the discussion at the source link is more to look at, along with other links.
- Upgrading notes for pfSense 2.3.x users, where 2.3.x < 2.3.3.
- tech@openbsd.org: regarding OpenSSL Licence change. Nothing goes well with OpenSSL. Hey, it rhymes! (via)
- golang now has native support for OpenBSD’s pledge(2).
- “And then the murders began.” – applied to tech BSD books.
- TrueNAS and ZFS terms and explanations.
BSDNow 186 gets back into the convention grind after last week’s news about new roles: coverage of the recent AsiaBSDCon, and an interview of Philipp Buehler.
Michael W. Lucas will be presenting at SemiBUG tomorrow, talking about the OpenBSD web stack.
Much better than last week, but there wasn’t any hurricane-force winds this week – which helps.
- Complexity and Strategy. Talks about Microsoft products, but think about this in terms of any long-lived operating system code base – e.g. any BSD, or specifically OpenBSD given their correctness goals. (via)
- Freenas 10 (now called Freenas Corral) released – the press release.
- pfSense OpenVPN unattended deploy options?
- Intel’s ACPICA is now available under a BSD license. Doing the right thing.
- New mandoc -mdoc -T markdown converter
- time scrolling. Remapping keyboard/mouse events in X.
- /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know. Linked here because the example is from a BSD environment. (via)
- NetBSD 7.1 released.
- iXsystems Attends AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- “What exactly is BSD?“
- openbsd changes of note 6, openbsd changes of note 7
- EuroBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- vBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- Relayd and the Next Tech Book. Related to the next link,
- Get your name in “Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition”
BSDNow 185 has existing host Kris Moore performing his last episode (because $dayjob) and Benedict Reuschling coming in to replace him. Allan Jude is unchanged, of course. As they correctly point out, 185 weeks of on-time video content is a tremendous achievement so far. This week’s episode is 55 minutes of talking with the old and the new staff.
Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking. He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.
Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk. The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.
Way short this week because we had high winds in my area, knocking out power for most people. I didn’t lose power, but I lost my data link.
Michael W. Lucas will be showing up tomorrow with physical copies of his books at the Grosse Pointe Library. (I’m assuming it will be both his fiction and non-fiction BSD books.) If you are near, I bet you can get a signed copy.
Even though the hosts are currently off to AsiaBSDCon, BSDNow is once again a bit early with lots of BSD news, plus an interview of Konrad Witaszczyk, apparently about encrypted crash dumps.
In what can be described as perfect timing, Sepherosa Ziehau has produced a document comparing FreeBSD, several different Linux kernels, and DragonFly, for networking. He’s presenting it in the afternoon track of Day 3 for AsiaBSDCon 2017, starting later this week.
He’s published a snippet as a PDF (via), which includes some graphs. The one place Linux outperforms DragonFly seems to be linked to the Linux version of the network card driver being able to access more hardware – so DragonFly should be comparable or better there too, once the powers-of-2 problem is solved. (This already came up in comments to a post last week.)
Those graphs are available standalone, too, which means it’s easier to see the fantastic performance for latency – see the thin blue line – that seems exclusive to DragonFly. That, if anything, is the real takeaway; that DragonFly’s model has benefits not just to plain speed but to the system’s responsiveness under load. “My CPU is maxed out cause I’m doing a lot of work but I hardly notice” is a common comment over the past few years – and now we can see that for network performance, too.
Slightly short this week, maybe because people are prepping for AsiaBSDCon? I have plenty of links for tomorrow’s Lazy Reading.
- iXsystems Attends Container World 2017. I know what it’s really about, but it sounds like a convention where everyone talks about cardboard boxes.
- NetBSD will be in Google’s Summer of Code 2017.
- FreeBSD will be in Google’s Summer of Code 2017.
- Can you run BSD packages on OSX
- Java development on BSD?
- Upcoming SemiBUG presentations. (March 21st, April 18th)
- TrueOS Stable update released 2/22/17. (via)
- Switch and FreeBSD. Only a rumor at this point, cause the license could be most any component. (via)
The longstanding practice is to load kernel modules in loader.conf, as early as possible. That’s good, for anything that needs them.
However, that also can be bad. Your machine can be unbootable if there’s a problem with a module or loader.conf is messed up, since that file is read long before the startup process finishes. Enter the new alternative: modules can be loaded in rc.conf, and the only loader.conf modules needed are those required by / to mount.
The again-early BSDNow episode this week has an interview with Tom Jones about BSD Sockets, plus a number of news items that include something new to me: playonBSD.
The normal monthly meeting for NYCBUG for March 1st (tomorrow) is canceled; next month’s meeting is still on.
BSD author Michael W. Lucas is talking at the Troy Public Library (Michigan, not New York) tonight, about his nonfiction writing. Go, if you like his books and/or if you are thinking about technical writing for yourself. He has another appearance coming up on March 11th.
Reminder: the 2017 FreeBSD Storage Summit is tomorrow.
I measure the success of In Other BSDs by how many different BSD flavors I can reference. This is a good week.
- Was thinking of switching to a BSD on my Thinkpad 11e, do you think this is a good idea?
- Adblock on Pfsense
- pfSense 2.3.3 RELEASE Now Available!
- Review of RaspBSD (FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi computers)
- NetBSD fully reproducible builds (via)
- mandoc-1.14.1 released.
- OpenBSD kernel lock removal for IPv4 forwarding. (via #dragonflybsd)
- OPNsense 17.1.2 released.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising.
- What happened to my vlan? (OpenBSD network performance, via)
- GhostBSD version 11 Alpha 1.
- NetBSD at the upcoming AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- Now available: video recording of the recent “OS : The underlying overhead of computation” presentation at NYCBUG. (via)
- Options to rid ourselves of MS Windows “servers”.
- Easy pkgsrc on macOS with pkg_comp 2.0.
- NetBSD 7.1_RC2 available.
- The Heirloom Project. Chunks of that code are probably still present in all the BSDs. (via)
- features are faults redux. Pseudo-transcript of a tedu speech not exactly about OpenBSD, but has plenty of funny one-liners.
- “Hi, I’m jkh and I’m a d**k” I don’t 100% agree with the idea, but it’s still a good plan.
This week’s BSDNow runs across a wide range of topics, so it’s worth browsing through. There’s no interview this week, but there is a report on an interview, if that’s meta enough for you.