BSDNow has Episode 8 out, containing an interview with Antti Kantee, a number of BSD news items (including some I missed entirely), and if you couldn’t tell from the purposefully misspelled title, a conversation about Tor and BSD.
Once again, doing this at the last minute:
- FreeBSD supports the FreeScale Fast Ethernet controller on a number of SoC systems.
- FreeBSD’s jemalloc has been updated to 3.4.1.
- FreeBSD has initial support for the RealTek RTL8106E PCIe Fast Ethernet chipset.
- FreeBSD has significant changes to the CAM subsystem.
- FreeBSD has initial support for the Rockchip RK3188 SoC.
- FreeBSD has an updated oce(4) driver, directly supported by Emulex, the vendor. (always nice to see vendor support.)
- FreeBSD now has a /usr/tests.
- There’s some NetBSD in your Mercedes.
- the safety of the internet is called into doubt
- OpenBSD supports the cubieboard and other allwinner devices.
- OpenBSD supports the XBox controller.
- A few packages are being retired from pkgsrc because of lack of DESTDIR support.
I am doing this one at the last minute. I had all the articles noted, but normally I build this post over the course of the week.
- FreeBSD has added the atse(4) network driver.
- FreeBSD has added iw_cxgbe, for Chelsio T4/T5 chips.
- FreeBSD has added (initial, minimal) AR9340 switch SoC support.
- PC-BSD has an interesting install-to-SSD option that disables atime and swap.
- NetBSD now has a Lua device driver to access.
- NetBSD has added Apple’s libunwind.
- NetBSD has added several different iic sensors from OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has added vxlan(4), a virtual LAN setup. (Layer 2 traffic over layer 3)
- “Vendor said so” is a reasonable excuse.
- OpenBSD has an altq replacement.
BSDNow episode 7 is out, with jails as a feature among a number of topics.
The October episode of BSD Magazine is out. I haven’t seen it in their RSS feed yet (is it running?), but noticed it here.
I’m a bit slow in posting this, but: BSDNow episode 6 is out. Theo de Raadt is interviewed, and a lot of other topics (including DragonFly) are visited. The page listing shows all the areas covered, plus the embedded video itself.
I got some PC-BSD items this week, too.
- Open Source Snapshot: GhostBSD.
- (Free)BSD and Dropbox.
- FreeBSD finally dumped rcs.
- FreeBSD’s igb(4) driver is updated to 2.4.0.
- FreeBSD’s binutils now has “support for assembling and disassembling Intel Random Number Generator extensions“.
- You can now use ‘athsurvey’ on AR5212 chipset ath(4) devices in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD branched version 11.
- FreeBSD has changes contributed by… Microsoft?
- PC-BSD has added a GUI version of their Life Preserver application.
- PC-BSD has a new ‘pc-zmanager’ program for managing ZFS and disks.
- PC-BSD has branched version 10, I think.
- NetBSD runs on the iMX233/OLinuXino.
- OpenBSD replaced rc4 with ChaCha20. No, I’m not sure what that means. (via)
- OpenBSD now has the vmwpvs(4) driver, for VMWare paravirtualized SCSI.
- OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.1 and Freetype 2.5.0.1.
- OpenBSD supports the AM335x EDMA3 controller.
- OpenBSD supports the RTL8106E and RTL8168G/8111G networking chipsets.
- Diffe-Hellman key size increased in OpenBSD. It’s from NIST Special Publication 800-57, which is unavailable as of this typing because of the stupid U.S. government shutdown.
Hiroki Sato posted to the users@ list about AsiaBSDCon 2014. It’s happening the 13th to 16th of March in 2014. Material from 2013’s convention should be going up soon, and the Call for Papers is already out.
BSDTalk 232 is 15 minutes of conversation with Thomas Cort about “Minix, NetBSD, and Summer of Code”.
Franco Fichtner recently received commit rights for DragonFly. This is so he could import mdocml, a OpenBSD-originating replacement for groff and man page display. Mdocml has been mentioned before on the Digest, and there’s a downloadable book. (See the more-interesting-than-it-sounds History of UNIX Manpages there too, but I digress.)
One advantage of using mdocml, as I understand it, is that groff is no longer required to view man pages. The only thing left in DragonFly that required a C++ compiler was groff. So, rebuilding could be a bit faster, and a bit less complicated.
Here’s the part that makes me happy: Changes made in DragonFly promptly made it back into NetBSD’s mdocml. Other changes rolled from DragonFly back into OpenBSD, too, and mdocml is in FreeBSD 10, though I don’t have a src change to point at right now. It all circled back around to DragonFly, too. It’s really neat to have a BSD-grown cross-BSD product.
(Incidentally, if you have a Thinkpad and keyboard issues, Franco has a patch for you to try.)
Less straight source links this week.
- FreeBSD 9.2 is out.
- FreeBSD no longer has GNU ar or GNU ranlib, or BIND.
- FreeBSD has an Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution update. (OFED info) (helps DragonFly)
- NetBSD has initial support for the OMAP1-183 board.
- NetBSD has updated terminfo to 20130607.
- NetBSD has imported FreeBSD’s new implementation of NFS – does not run yet.
- NetBSD 6.1.2 and 6.0.3 are out.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is over, and here’s the branch announcement.
- There’s some discussion of long-term support in pkgsrc, an idea I like.
- EuroBSDCon 2013 presentations for OpenBSD are online.
- OpenBSD now has a built-in snmp client. Undeadly has a description.
- OpenBSD now has ntpctl(8), for querying ntpd.
- There’s a new MaheshaBSD video on YouTube. (it’s a custom FreeBSD setup, though DragonFly versions exist too.)
Related to DragonFly: Patrick Welche updated glib2 in pkgsrc, and is interested in hearing how it works for DragonFly users. If you have pkgsrc on your system and it’s not a quarterly release, try building t.
There’s 30 days left to register for vBSDCon… except that 30 day mark was a week ago, but I didn’t get it posted. So now there’s 19 days. If you were thinking of going, go for it. This is I think the only east coast BSD convention in the US other than NYCBSDCon.
The BSDNow video series put out another episode already: Stacks of Cache. I didn’t realize this before, but they broadcast their episodes live as they are done on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC.
If you’re around New York City on Wednesday, Boris Kochergin will be giving a talk at the NYCBUG meeting about how he and his employer, New York Internet, managed to be in the middle of Hurricane Sandy and survive without interruption.
That same announcement lets drop the news that NYCBSDCon will happen next February 1st 8th.
This week was relatively quiet, but also had the most cross-BSD work I’ve seen in a while. Look at the links and you’ll see.
- Here’s some encryption fallout in FreeBSD.
- MegaRAID Invader cards now work on FreeBSD.
- OpenSSH is at version 6.3p1 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has moved to Unbound as a BIND replacement.
- FreeBSD imported a newer version of NetBSD’s readline.
- NetBSD supports the AlphaStation DS15, ported from OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has updated le(4) to match NetBSD’s version.
- OpenBSD has also moved to Unbound – version 1.4.21.
- OpenBSD now has ldns 1.6.16.
Here’s more on Unbound, since it seems to be a trend.
This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!
- Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
- Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
- The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
- The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
- A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
- The Walkman Archive. (via)
- Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
- The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
- Kickstarter for open source. (via)
- Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
- Atari box art.
- Atari box art parody.
Finally, a quieter week.
- pfSense (which I use at work; performs great) has updated to 2.1, and now offers a ‘Gold‘ subscription program.
- FreeBSD has a new iSCSI target and initiator. (World rebuild needed and again)
- FreeBSD’s bxe(4) now supports the BCM57712 and BCM578XX.
- FreeBSD now can build LLDB, though you have to do it on purpose.
- FreeBSD’s arcmsr(4) driver for Areca hardware has been updated. (Areca supports BSD; buy them)
- NetBSD has Renesas and ASIX AX88179 USB support.
- NetBSD has a preliminary NVIDIA Geforce driver.
- NetBSD has updated to dhcpcd-6.1.0.
- NetBSD has updated to tzcode 2013e.
- QNAP V200 boards all have the same MAC? Weird.
- OpenBSD updated a large number of xenocara windowing parts.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is on from now to the 29th.
Something I only just recently found out about: BSDNow. They’re planning weekly videos with BSD news and interviews. I say ‘planning’, but as of this writing, both Episode 1 and Episode 2 (which is much better quality) are already available. Another episode is planned this week. Episode 3 is out already.
ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.
(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)
Michael W. Lucas needs tehcnical reviewers for his first draft of ‘Sudo Mastery’. If you know sudo, and know how to criticize (and who doesn’t, for this is the Internet), look at what you’d have to do.