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.
If you are anywhere near KnoxBUG’s meeting place (mid-Tennessee, US), Joe Maloney will be presenting on OpenRC and TrueOS, tomorrow night. See the link for address and times.
Lots of storage this week.
- OpenBSD as a Multimedia Desktop
- Firefox 51 on sparc64 – we did not hit the wall yet (via)
- Current health of the BSD Certification Group?
- When did tar start auto-assuming -z? Mild GNU vs. BSD argument.
- Introducing pkg_comp 2.0 (and sandboxctl 1.0)
- FreeNAS/OpenZFS training.
- Michael W. Lucas at the Troy Public Library. Talking about his nonfiction writing.
- 2017 FreeBSD Storage Summit, coming up in 9 days. I’ll post a reminder. (via)
- Related: TrueNAS does S3.
- FreeBSD 12 Looking At Dropping SVR4 Binary Compatibility. Would anyone notice? (via)
- Choose as a contributor: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or other BSD
- Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names.
This week’s BSDNow has notes about the FOSDEM BSD Devroom, and a triple-shot of Brian Cantrill – all three interviews with him. If you’ve been watching BSDNow for a very long time, you may have seen one or several of them, but this is one long replay of all the interviews of an opinionated and lively speaker. (The first interview’s original episode is titled “Ubuntu Slaughters Kittens” for a reason.)
Rimvydas Jasinskas posted an extended description of what’s happening with dports. There’s a significant xorg reformatting coming in ports, which is going to be absorbed into dports, but it may take some time. There’s also an odd loss of commit rights for John Marino, who commits (frequently!) to both DragonFly and FreeBSD. (His followup) This all translates to some upcoming transition time for dports to accommodate these changes.
Note that if you are using dports binaries, especially on DragonFly 4.6 release, this won’t really affect you; the way dports is set up, binary sets always work. It is interesting to hear about future work, in any case.
A lot of the real content this week is buried in the comments, strangely.
- My BSD sucks less than yours. (via)
- I’m sort of a noob, so should I learn BSD or just go with Linux?
- Networkmgr: a FreeBSD/GhostBSD network connection manager. (via)
- a2k17 hackathon report: Antoine Jacoutot.
- openbsd changes of note 6
- Conclusions from the recent NYCBUG talk.
- Also, rump kernels, the free book, linked from previous.
- Need some help with simple PFSense OpenVPN routing
- pfSense discussion. Comments to note there.
- OPNsense 17.1.1 released.
- BSDploy, linked in comments on the Digest earlier this week, but the source link here has some interesting history, including that rsync.net came from the first VPS provider, which was… jails!
You’ll have to listen to understand how this 7 minutes of news summary was put together.
BSDNow is a day early, but it has an interview with Ken Moore about Lumina, TrueOS (nee PC-BSD) and desktop BSD in general.
Note the end this week of pc98, the most focused of niche platforms.
- The trouble with FreeBSD. Gets a lot wrong, though.
- Found this sitting on my dusty bookshelf.
- Video editing and the FreeNAS Mini.
- a2k17 hackathon report: Patrick Wildt on the arm64 port
- Goodbye FreeBSD/pc98 (via)
- OpenBSD wallpaper.
- Lessons learnt from adding OpenBSD/x86_64 support to pkgsrc
- OPNSense 17.1 released.
- New BSD Magazine issue
The title for BSDNow 179 is probably a takeoff on the same reference as archive.org. There’s some interesting notes about Wayland, of course, and POSIX, and also CyberChef which probably isn’t what you think from the name.