DragonFly – Page 34 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2018/03/032018/03/02

In Other BSDs for 2018/03/03

The first link about TorBSD is important: many of the major security issues in computing trace back to having only one vendor or product or whatever, used by everyone.

An Open Letter to BSD-powered Companies and Projects. (via)
NetBSD GPU support (Intel HD 4400).
Device Driver Development for BSD.
Hypervisor on dfly?
Unfortunately, StackOverflow is a difficult-to-avoid site nowadays… Man pages don’t have this issue. (via)
“Virtual machine templates for BSD flavours“. Includes DragonFly. (via)
Mac OS versus FreeBSD: A Comparative Evaluation. Might be paywalled. (via)
44CON 2018 CFP Is Open. A security conference in the UK, later this year – not a 4.4 BSD conference that has somehow lasted multiple decades, darnit. However, the source link notes a need for OpenBSD material.
A long two months. “On Friday we saw the patches Matthew Dillon put together for DragonFlyBSD for the first time. These were the first patches for KPTI that were very straightforward to read and understand, and applied to a BSD-derived kernel that was similar to those I’m accustomed to working on.” Hey, nice credit. (via)
Pledge: OpenBSD’s defensive approach to OS Security. (via)
NetBSD proposal for stop-the-world syscall. (via)

2018/02/28

gpt init option, for DragonFly

If you are using gpt(8) to format a disk, Matthew Dillon’s added a “init” option. It’s similar to ‘fdisk -Ib’, though don’t ask me how to use it because I have always been bad at manual disk formatting.

2018/02/27

Note for numpy users

The default options on the math/py-numpy port slowed it down. Francois Tigeot noticed, and committed a change that takes advantage of all processors. Read his note to users@ for details.

2018/02/26

Never too many cores

For your Monday entertainment: the boot log from DragonFly on a system with 11 sockets, 10 cores per socket, for 110 CPUs. Plus 8 TB of RAM.

(Skip past the control codes at the start)

2018/02/242018/02/23

In Other BSDs for 2018/02/24

Another across-the-BSDs week.

- What’s Next for Feature Development in FreeNAS/TrueNAS?
- Description of the 1969 proto-Unix system based on a 2812 line PDP-7 assembly kernel. (via)
- The Known Costs of Security Embargoes.
- Military Grade Data Wiping In FreeBSD With BCWipe.
- “Has Linux lost its way?” comments prompt Debian developer to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years. (via)
- Christos Zoulas’s recent NYCBUG talk on reproducible builds in NetBSD is now available as video.
- How do I make quiet build/compile server for home ?
- Libreoffice failing to start after upgrade to 5.4.4.2 40m0(Build:2) (on NetBSD).
- Question about a distro.
- Every Journey Starts with a FAIL. (via)
- Meltdown fix committed by guenther@. Note the DragonFly cross-pollination.

2018/02/20

A note about vkernels

Oh, hey, that’s a nice thing to say. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

2018/02/192018/02/17

DragonFly porting notes, again

Remember: there’s a separate document about porting FreeBSD drivers to DragonFly. I note it cause it’s useful and because Rimvydas Jasinskas just updated it.

2018/02/13

DWARF in your DragonFly

This isn’t really a dramatic event, but Rimvydas Jasinskas has added support for DWARF-4 line number tables in binutils 2.27. I am linking it to remind everyone that a little bit of Tolkien, in the form of elves (elfs?) and dwarfs (dwarves?) lives in your computer. We need a ORC standard. Oh. Hobbit? Hobbit.

2018/02/12

exFAT support in DragonFly

Tomohiro Kusumi has brought in exFAT support to DragonFly from FreeBSD. Useful for cross-platform drives when FAT32 isn’t enough, and NTFS brings its own problems.

2018/02/07

HTTP, Spectre, Meltdown

Sepherosa Ziehau published a PDF that shows the impact of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on network performance. It’s as bad as anticipated. If this is a problem for you, remember the sysctl machdep.isolated_user_pmap turns these changes on and off.

2018/01/31

Microcode updates for AMD too

If you don’t have an Intel CPU, but still want to perform microcode updates, cpucontrol(8) now supports more recent AMD CPUs.

2018/01/30

Default kernel config changes

The default kernel config for DragonFly has changed: Sascha Wildner has added the acpi, gpio_acpi, gpio_intel, smbus and smbacp devices. If you are using a custom kernel, you’ll probably want to add these. If you aren’t using a custom kernel – you should have no negative effect.

2018/01/29

em(4)/emx(4) update in DragonFly

Sepherosa Ziehau’s updated the em(4) driver for Intel network cards, with the 7.6.2 release directly from Intel. For once, Intel news not related to CPU hardware bugs.

2018/01/26

Coffee Lake support in drm/i915

The title really says it all – if you have a Coffee Lake series Intel chipset, your video is accelerated on DragonFly.

2018/01/24

Loader hint to stop attachments

Rimvydas Jasinskas created a loader.conf(5) hint that keeps various nata(4) devices from attaching during boot. This is super useful if it’s a device that screws up your boot process. and I think it’s also great if you get irritated having something in your dmesg every time about the device you never use, like a CDROM.

2018/01/23

Adaptec 1420 support in DragonFly

DragonFly now has support for the Adaptec 1420. “Now” means since last month, cause I am working through my link backlog.

2018/01/22

Nanotime in your file listings

The ls(1) command has a lot of options (Look at the man page synopsis!). So much so, that the most recent option added in DragonFly is “_”. That’s to show nanotime as part of the -l output. This will be most useful when you have multiple files being created within the same second of time, and you want to see which came first.

2018/01/19

Forwarding rate changes

I’m still catching up with the pre-2018, pre-Meltdown commits, so here’s one: Changing the staged packet count in DragonFly changes forwarding rate, for the better – up to a point. There’s probably some specific ratio in the change that makes sense, though I don’t know it.

2018/01/17

rcmds recently removed

The commands rcp(1), rlogin(1), rlogind(1), rsh(1) and rshd(1) have been removed from DragonFly. There’s a net/bsdrcmds port if you still need them… though I imagine/hope ssh is filling the void for everyone.

2018/01/16

morse(6) now encodes and decodes

I’m sure this was needed by someone: morse(6) can now encode and decode Morse code, signified by . and – of course.