As Matthew Dillon works on supporting his new 48-core system, he’s written some notes on power usage and scheduling/drivers that may be worth a read.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.8.4. The commit message has details on what’s changed (for us). This is good, since the libarchive site release notes seems to not be up to date.
Update: Peter helpfully pointed at contrib/libarchive/NEWS.
Sepherosa Ziehau fixed a clock issue with the JMicron JMC250/JMC260 chipset, used with the jme(4) driver, and apparently JMicron helped out with hardware for testing this fix. So, thanks, Sephe, and thanks, JMicron! (buy their stuff)
Bleeding-edge DragonFly may suffer some instability issues; Matthew Dillon is making scheduler changes to accomodate larger numbers of CPUs. On the other hand: yay, better performance!
Francois Tigeot figured out how to get it to work.
Jan Lentfer’s got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT – all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that’s all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.
I never really noticed this before, but it’s possible to include your own patchsets into pkgsrc and have them picked up as part of the build process, using $LOCALPATCHES.
Peter Avalos has updated zlib to version 1.25, and appears to have done some work with tnftp, though this is the only message I saw.
Ironically, I get a “this site is using an unsupported form of compression” error when browsing to the zlib web site.
Tim Darby asked some questions about setting up an encrypted root disk; Alex Hornung answered them. They apply to people running current DragonFly, not 2.8, but if you’re wanting to try it, why not?
If you were dying to have less behave like more, it’s possible to do so with these tips from Oliver Fromme. I don’t know if it’s that desirable, but it’s an interesting thing.
I found it via Google Search. Anyone know?
Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
- There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
- Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
- Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
- Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
- Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
- Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
- Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
As part of the ongoing work to support a lot of CPUs, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that have the side effect of benefiting virtual kernels. How much? I don’t have a benchmark, yet.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0c, to fix a recent security problem. The problem doesn’t sound too catastrophic to my untrained ear, at least.
Matthew Dillon has moved CPU support to 63 processors and 512G of RAM. This may cause issues, he warns. It’s also just barely working, so don’t expect to go into production with half a terabyte of RAM in the next few days.
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.