SeMiBUG meets tonight, 7 PM, Altair Engineering. Go, if you are near.
(not sure about capitalization on semibug…)
This week’s BSD Now is up, with a nice general range of topics, including the perennial Lack Rack idea.
If you are near Portland, Oregon tonight and like pizza, go. Of course you like pizza!
Are you near Chicago? ChiBUG meets tonight. Go, if you are near.
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.
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.
I’ve seen a similar config other places, but it never hurts to note: scrolling in X requires just a few xorg config lines.
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.
Taken from IRC: “DFBEADM(1) A Boot Environment Manager for HAMMER2“. This could be fun! Here’s the users@ post to match.
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.)
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.
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.
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one. It’s apparently similar to usched(8).
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
I’ve mentioned dbus and DragonFly a few times; here’s one of those “you will eventually do this” tidbits: if for some reason you are installing it for the first time, remember to start it with the rc script.
Who can recommend a dynamic DNS service? (I’d like to know from direct experience, not Googling.) I’ve been using Dyn for years, but they’ve been unintelligibly merged into the Oracle behemoth, and I need to change.
- Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar. (via)
- Trajectories for the future of software. (also via)
- Chain Letter Evolution. (via)
- The PDP-7 Where Unix Began. (via)
- Decoded: Rogue. This is strangely … readable? (via)
- fern: a curses-based mastodon client. (via)
- ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception, ARPANET, Part 2: The Packet, and ARPANET, Part 3: The Subnet. Another very readable article. (via)
- A generation of hip-hop was given away for free. Can it be archived? (via)
- Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer: 10.3 seconds per hash. More important, that’s the only AGC in the world.
- Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Eighteen – Drubbings In The Deep.
You’re probably used to the ‘make buildworld; make buildkernel; make installkernel; etc etc’ dance on each upgrade at this point. ‘Tse’ has created a script that rolls that all up into a single action.
In a larger users@ thread about multiple BSD development systems and how to set them up, I spied this tip on making multiple local virtual machines all reachable via SSH.
Shamelessly copied from my own users@ post: I tagged 5.6.1 and built it earlier today. This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm. The ISO should be showing up on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org in the next 20 minutes or so, or you can rebuild using the normal process on an existing 5.6 system:
cd /usr/src git pull make buildworld make buildkernel make installkernel make installworld make upgrade
If you are still on 5.4 or earlier, you need to bring in 5.6 sources, which is noted in the 5.6.0 announcement.