I should have linked this yesterday: a description of kcollect and its uses from Matthew Dillon, complete with example graph of a very busy machine.
New mechanism: kcollect
There’s a new facility in DragonFly: kcollect(8). It holds automatically-collected kernel data for about the last day, and can output to gnuplot. Note the automatic collection part; your system will always be able to tell you about weirdness – assuming that weirdness extends to one of the features kcollect tracks. Here’s some of the commits.
In Other BSDs for 2017/07/22
It’s accidental how-to week!
- OpenSMTPD under OpenBSD with SSL/VirtualUsers/Dovecot (via) and
- OpenSMTPD and Dovecot under OpenBSD with MySQL support and SPAMD. (via)
- Introducing anvil – Tools for distributing ssl certificates, plus examples of usage on FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD on the Huawei MateBook X.
- Add vmctl send and vmctl receive.
- openbsd changes of note 625
- BSDTW is in Taiwan, in November – and the call for papers is out. (via)
- Watch out for wxallowed.
- pfSense 2.3.4-p1 RELEASE Now Available!
- Blog about my blog. Self-hosting and dogfooding, both good ideas.
NeedsHas RSS! (via) - BSD Pizza, a meetup in Portland, Oregon, on the 27th.
AsiaBSDCon 2017 and DragonFly networking
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.
Network performance comparison
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.
Lazy Reading for 2016/03/13
I had too many links for this as early as Tuesday.
- A perspective on the state of the SSLiverse as of early 2016. (via the author on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- In defense of Unix. (via)
- The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science. (via)
- SIGGRAPH 2016 – Computer Animation Festival Submissions. (via)
- An interactive and audio history of interactive fiction. This can eat some hours. (via)
- A Configuration Management Rosetta Stone. 1 program, 4 systems. (via)
- An explanation of database indexes. Using PostgreSQL, but probably near-universal. (also via)
- I knew but I didn’t really know there were so many named maneuvers in chess, and here’s a whole lot of visualization of them. (via)
- Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors: “you take it for granted that someone, somewhere is breaking everything he possibly can” (via)
- Announcing SQL Server on Linux. It was this, or losing relevancy within 5 years. (via)
- A Robot That Has Fun at Telemarketers’ Expense. Similar to Lenny. (via)
- Is group chat making you sweat? A good point on attention as a limited resource. (via)
- @Play 84: The Rescue of Meta-Zelda. Randomized Roguelike Legend of Zelda is a somewhat crazy, exciting concept to me.
- There’s a third game in the Infinite Space series out – Sea of Stars. The first game is one of the best space-theme roguelikes out there.
Your unrelated video link of the week: Rotoscoped Horse. Taken from the old Muybridge photos. (via)
Lazy Reading for 2016/01/31
I am proud of finding some of these links this week; they are not the usual “here’s what everyone else linked to” that you see.
- Evolution of Ethernet Speeds: What’s New and What’s Next. I did not know about 2.5G/5G speeds over existing cat5. (via)
- Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government” (via)
- #screensaverjam.
- Most off-putting introduction to a new technology.
- Sanos PDP-11 Simulator with UNIX V7e. Boot SanOS which runs a PDP-11 simulator, which then runs UNIX v7. (via)
- best idea ever
- ***** – Five star cron job. Will run again. (via)
- The Amiga Graphics Archive. (via)
- The Bear Essentials: Developing a Commodore 64 Game, Part 1. (via)
- The anatomy of an ssh session. (via)
- Go 1.7 planning. I like peeking into other open source groups’ release planning.
- The New Sound Of Music 1979 (Part 1) The fun part of computer history, and it talks about the Radiophonics Workshop! (via)
- Your Development Environment is Probably an Eldritch Horror. (via)
Your unrelated graph link of the week: Visualizing HipHop trends from 1989 – 2015. (via)
Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14
I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.
- Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
- Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
- The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
- Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
- How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
- The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
- In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
- Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
- Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
- The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
- The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
- “I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
- Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)