In addition to the already-mentioned ipfw per-CPU state tracking, Sepherosa Ziehau has added per-CPU state tables to ipfw, and his commit documents the improvement in performance/latency. He’s also added ipfw support to sshlockout(8).
HAMMER2 is now available by default in DragonFly, and can be used in the installation process. (It was possible, but manual, before.) The next DragonFly release should be soon.
Whee!
- Save 418. (Thanks, Tim Darby)
- this code very fast. (via)
- An early (earliest?) Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
- books chapter eleven
- The Zork CPU. The software engine turned into silicon. Can that be done for SCUMM? Does that even make sense? (via)
- An Introduction to Managing Secrets Safely with Version Control Systems. (also via)
- Every Programmer Should Know. (via)
- Rochester vs. Cupertino. I live in Rochester, and the portrait it paints is accurate. Kodak made a lot of lives better in ways we don’t expect of tech companies today. (also via)
Already overflowed to next week.
- New story: Savaged by Systemd. Lucas, what hast thou wrought?
- A few questions about BSD
- FreeBSD package management with Pkg (1/2). Applies to DragonFly, too.
- OpenBSD Community goes platinum.
- OPNsense 17.7.1 released.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA3 Available.
- A Brief History of Solaris (SunOS) Ports. Technically a BSD. (via)
- My first patch to OpenBSD. (via)
- Getting acme.sh to renew certs via cronjob on FreeBSD
- GSoC 2017 Reports: Add SUBPACKAGES support to pkgsrc, part 1. (via)
- Best BSD for Kaby Lake w/ Integrated Graphics.
- FreeBSD – what processes in what jails are using swap?
- LLVM libFuzzer and SafeStack ported to NetBSD. (via)
- OpenBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5th Gen). There’s a cost-saving tip in there for anyone planning a purchase.
- Solaris reported dead again. Illumos is working fine, though.
Matthew Dillon’s been using a Kabylake NUC for a DragonFly workstation and it’s generally working out well. It’s tiny enough to lose on a desk, in my opinion. He added performance details and a screenshot. The Specific Configs page has his notes, recorded, too.
Related laptop tip: If you have a Lenovo Yoga and can’t mount the drive after install, various sdhci modules may be the answer. Update: definitely the answer.
BSDNow 210 turns the tables and interviews the moderators, along with the normal news summary.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some improvements to ipfw in DragonFly, moving it to per-CPU state tracking among other things. (I haven’t mentioned just ipfw in foreeeever.)
His commit message describes the improvements. Of most interest: it reduces the performance impact of running ipfw in his tests to almost nothing. Does this translate to ipfw on other BSDs? I don’t know.
John Marino has assembled a new packaging and building system. It’s called Ravenports, and he wrote a short intro, and has a filled-out site to go look at.
This is big news, in part because he knows what he’s doing (John worked on dports and created synth) and because it’s cross-platform. The prior work on synth is part of the reason DragonFly works so well under pressure – the “build everything as fast as possible as complete as possible” strategy makes a great stress test.
There’s no need to change software management strategies yet. It can be used at the same time as dports, so it doesn’t necessarily change anything for the next DragonFly release.
Francois Tigeot is going to be giving a talk about the DragonFly graphics stack at EuroBSDCon 2017. (14:00 September 21st in Paris) Registration is already closed because I didn’t realize how soon it was happening – sorry!
Seventies/Eighties computing, this week.
- books chapter ten
- Eclipses and decibels.
- Twenty-plus years on, SMTP callbacks are still pointless and need to die.
- Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons. First comment in the source link is great.
- The Icewind Dale Problem. Related to previous link. (via)
- The Enduring Legacy of Zork. (via)
- Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading. (via)
- Noticed in the same place, in an article about VERB and NOUN buttons: People are patching the code for the Apollo 11 guidance computer. People apparently can’t help patching code.
- Interface, a decent non-serif, non-monospaced font. (via)
- So You Want to Read… A Guide to Sci-Fi and Fantasy Subgenres. (via I lost it, sorry!)
- The Return of the Cray files (2013-2016) (via)
- Arithmetic for Beginners. (via via)
- 1976 word processor error messages. They sound exactly right. (via)
- Having Played Every Adventure From the 1970s, Some Thoughts. (via)
- 6502cloud – Bringing the 80’s to the cloud. (via)
- Software development 450 words per minute. (via)
- The Light Phone. (via)
Lots of links this week – so many I’ve already started next week’s post.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA available. I’m prewriting this part of the post so there may be a new beta by the time this publishes.
- Introducing sandboxfs.
- “TIL GhostBSD has a patreon” (via)
- OpenBSD rtables and rdomains. (via)
- Setting up OpenBSD’s LDAP Server (ldapd) with StartTLS and SASL. (via)
- Ansible OpenBSD Cookbooks. (via)
- This crazy hardware porting example thread led me to some new hardware, some of which may run a BSD? The Pinebook is apparently bootable but I don’t know if that means usable.
- Also: using the audio port for serial? First time I heard of that. (referring to previous crazy hardware links above)
- Eventually all packaging systems eat an operating system. And then they aren’t packaging systems any more. (via)
- DFS with Freenas for data replication between multiple sites?
- openbsd changes of note 627
- yet another introduction to yacc
- OpenBSD 6.1, a an overview.
For your audiovisual pleasure: BSDNow 209: “Signals: gotta catch ‘em all“, and garbage[42]: Interview with Purism’s Todd Weaver are both available now. Watch/download and listen on your (in the US) extended weekend.
Here’s a detailed writeup from Aaron LI on how to get a DragonFly system onto an IPv6 network.
Update: He also supplied an example pf ruleset that solved some IPv6 throughput problems for his VPS.
Pulled from a longer thread: x.x.1 update instructions for DragonFly.
Probably old hat to most readers, but I like to see this documented, and the hw.ncpu ‘trick’ is nice.
I finally used up my overflow links.
- Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software. (via)
- Moore’s Law, from Rodney Brooks and from ACM. (via)
- All you need to know about Unix environment variables.
- A Unix Person’s Guide to PowerShell. (via)
- Nodes of Yesod: ZX Spectrum Next – developer blog episode 2.
- Steve Jackson’s Ogre rumbles onto PC in October. Linked solely because I found the original asymmetric board game fascinating. And never played it.
- Getting an Amiga 1000 Online. (via)
- How to Hand Letter Like an Architect. I took several technical drawing classes … 20 years ago? It still affects my handwriting.
- Debugging DNS. (via)
- Best option for modern X server on Windows?
- books chapter nine
- Carry a Little More to Waste a Little Less. Good advice, but get a folding utensil set; it’s much easier to deal with.
- The HERE IS key. (via)
Your odd video link of the week: what if the Doctor Who theme was composed by John Carpenter, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, or Tangerine Dream? (via)
The new look on undeadly.org sure is nice.
- RETGUARD, the OpenBSD next level in exploit mitigation, is about to debut.
- Can a BSD system replicate the performance of high-end router appliance? Benchmarking would A: show the answer and B: I bet show that the throughput needs of the poster were not as high as they thought.
- Which Unix had the first package manager?
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA1 Available.
- subversion via ssh passphrase-less key. Really about capturing DNS changes.
- deraadt@ moves us to 6.2-beta!
- t2k17 Hackathon Reports: Daniel Jakots on updating ports, Nagios OpenBGPD plugin and…, Ian Sutton on ARM progress, My first time (Aaron Bieber), Philip Guenther: locking and libc, Andrew Hewus Fresh on Perl and Coffee, and No lock no cry… with CTF! (Martin Pieuchot).
- Kernel syspatches will soon be smaller thanks to KARL.
- PFsense <-> EdgeOS IPSec tunnels.
- Faster forwarding.
- AF3e status, 22 August 2017. That’s ‘Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition’.
- The Manifest – A podcast all about package management. I’m sure this will include BSD packaging systems at some point. (via)
- BSDCan 2017 videos have started being uploaded. (via)
No interview this week, but BSDNow 208 notes a certain recent software release and also links to something I’ve always wanted to see – a BSD games site. It’s OpenBSD oriented, but it probably applies pretty evenly across all the BSDs.
I was reminded of this thanks to the Google Calendar entry: SemiBUG is having their monthly meeting tomorrow night (the 22nd, in case that’s tonight by the time you read this), and it’s one of my favorite formats – a series of lightning talks with 2 slides, 5 minutes.
There will be a bootable, single-image version of HAMMER2 in the next DragonFly release. Matthew Dillon has a note about what will be in place at that point, and you can always look at the recent commits.
A new episode of garbage has heaved forth, with an interview of Patrick Wildt from the recent Toronto hackathon.