I have been meaning to post this for a while: gridgenerator.com, a painting web app, is running on DragonFly. I was told this on IRC and of course lost all details since then, but that’s fine – go draw something!
BSDNow 258 showed up a bit early this week: Among the normal news articles about technology and BSD conventions are notes about how HardenedBSD is setting up their non-profit board. I like seeing that sort of governance documented as it’s happening; it’s the right way to inform people.
As part of a larger conversation about HAMMER, Matthew Dillon noted that he is planning to work on master-to-multiple-slave for HAMMER2, which would function similar to HAMMER1 mirror-stream.
I’ve been remiss in noting new DragonFly mirrors, so here’s the most recent: 4 new locations in Ecuador.
A little while back I linked to an excellent deep dive into Ravenports, and added my own bit of statistical guessing at popular packages. John Marino wants to know what packages people find most useful/most required. If you have opinions, and I’m sure you do, post something on the Ravenports Google Groups page.
If you are saying to yourself “Gee, what packages did I install and what came in as a dependency?”, here’s an easy way to find out:
pkg query -a '%n %a' | grep 0 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | less
This lists all “vital” packages, which usually means ones installed with intent, rather than automatically. This might be a useful thing to post for Ravenports…
Tonight’s SemiBUG meeting is piggybacking on an Azure User’s Group meeting, same general location. (This is why) Go, if you are near.
Remember the upgrade for dragonflybsd.org machines? It completed, and it’s interesting to see that SSDs have become so easily available that “spinning rust” hard disk drives are only still useful for bulk storage, and even then probably not for much longer.
Another neat side effect: disk usage on developer system leaf.dragonflybsd.org was cut in half, thanks to HAMMER2 dedup/compression. It’s a ‘free’ half-terabyte.
Various machines in dragonflybsd.org are getting hardware upgrades this week. They aren’t time-consuming, so I daresay it won’t have much effect on uptime.
I’m pulling a quote off of IRC to show some of the testing on HAMMER2, specifically as the background for this commit:
14:22 <@dillon_> ^^^ hammer2 bug, could reproduce it around once a day doing a continuous rm -rf on hardlinked snapshots. reproduced about once every 500 million directory entries or so
I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after deleting half a billion directory entries.
I’ve tagged and built DragonFly 5.2.2. This is mostly so that our current release image includes the fixes for the LazyFP bug, CVE-2018-3665. My email to users@ has upgrade details.
NYCBUG is having an outdoors meeting in Bryant Park, today, 6:45 PM. Go, if you are near.
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.
I’ve tagged a x.x.1 release – DragonFly 5.2.1, available now. It includes the recently-mentioned fix for CVE-2018-8897 and some other minor updates. See my email to users@ for the details.
SemiBUG‘s having a hands-on server workshop tonight. Go, if you are near, and bring something networked to type on.
NYCBUG is having a social (i.e. no presenter) meeting this month – tonight, in fact. Go, talk BSD, drink.
There’s a social meeting for KnoxBUG tonight – go, if you are near.
Reduce, the “second oldest computer algebra system”, has been ported to DragonFly (and there’s work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you’re a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.
There’s a plugin for pkg, called pkg-provides, which will tell you what package(s) contain the filename you provide – installed or not. I didn’t even know pkg had a plugin system. Anyway, it works on DragonFly, as the author notes.
DragonFly 5.2.0 has been released. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are in there, along with improvements for HAMMER2, accelerated video, and ipfw. My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as does the release notes.
BSDNow 239 does not have an interview, but it does talk about using OpenBSD to prevent unwanted traffic out to the internet, plus a ‘poetic license’.