I for some reason set line height properties in the style sheet for dragonflybsd.org years ago, and it made scroll bars appear around all <pre> text. It’s taken me years, but I finally removed it. Anyone notice other effects than the lack of those odd scrollbars?
How many levels of plug-in can you find?
It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.
In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.
How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.
BSD.nrw meetup on 2019/12/20
The BSD.nrw Dusseldorf-Wersten BSD user’s group next meeting is on the 20th. Go, if you are near.
Where to find dports build results
Synth logs for dports are now located here on a new machine:
https://sting.dragonflybsd.org/dports/logs/Report/
If there’s only a short list, it’s because the most recent build was probably focused on retrying a broken-but-now-possibly-fixed package. I link both because of the utility and also because the interface is pretty.
Circular cross-pollination
I sorta like seeing these things ricochet back and forth.
A good time to update dports
There’s been a fresh binary build of dports – and then some more updates to cover a variety of security issues in some of those ports. Now is a good time for a ‘pkg upgrade’.
HAMMER2 emergency space mode
As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!
Pick your dsynth compression
It’s now possible to pick which sort of compression you want to use for dsynth packages – xz is the default, but you can go gzip for speed.
SeMiBUG meeting, tonight
SeMiBUG meets tonight, 7 PM, Altair Engineering. Go, if you are near.
(not sure about capitalization on semibug…)
BSD Now 319: Lack Rack, Jack
This week’s BSD Now is up, with a nice general range of topics, including the perennial Lack Rack idea.
BSD Pizza Night, tonight
If you are near Portland, Oregon tonight and like pizza, go. Of course you like pizza!
ChiBUG meeting, tonight
Are you near Chicago? ChiBUG meets tonight. Go, if you are near.
ABI breakage in DragonFly master
There’s commits being made in DragonFly that will break binary compatibility. If you are running DragonFly-master, that means you will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel when updating, and you will either have to rebuild packages or wait some days until a new set are built.
If you are running the 5.6 release, you are unaffected.
NYCBUG: Setting up a convenient working environment
Tomorrow’s NYCBUG meeting is “Setting up a convenient working environment“, with Ivan Ivanov. Go, if you are near. It will be streamed but I don’t have a link for that at the time I’m writing this.
Scrolling in X
I’ve seen a similar config other places, but it never hurts to note: scrolling in X requires just a few xorg config lines.
New servers, new tech
Following up on an earlier post, the new servers for DragonFly are in place. The old 40-core machine used for bulk build, monster, is being retired. The power efficiency of the new machines is startling. Incidentally, this is where donations go – infrastructure.
Boot environments and HAMMER2
Taken from IRC: “DFBEADM(1) A Boot Environment Manager for HAMMER2“. This could be fun! Here’s the users@ post to match.
Colo upgrade for dragonflybsd.org, plus future
Matthew Dillon posted an extensive writeup about the hardware changes for dragonflybsd.org; price to performance ratio has been improving so much for multiprocessor machines that we can jump forward both for hosting hardware and for a testbed.
He also mentions his immediate thoughts on what to tackle next, since SMP has been so relentless improved in DragonFly. It resulted in a very long conversational chain as people weighed in with opinions, so I’ve held off posting it until the conversation finished. (I chimed in too.)
DragonFly 5.6.2 released
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
Disk encryption and non-QWERTY keyboard layouts
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.