It’s been a very slow news week, but at least there’s a new BSDNow episode: The Fresh BSD Experience. There’s an interview with the FreeBSD Foundation intern, Drew Gurkowski, and a lot of ARM news.
Accidental nostalgia theme!
- Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. Did I post this before? (via)
- A History of Early Versions of Adventure. (via)
- Colossal Cave Adventure, linked in comments to the previous.
- A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot.
- “If you’re a fan of something, tell the creator.“
- The One-Second Dash.
- Bus1: a new Linux interprocess communication proposal. Here we go again. (via)
- Bare-metal writing. Important for the collaboration of Jim Henson and Raymond Scott for IBM.
- On the history and justification of the C programming language. (via)
For once, I’m not working on Saturday, so even though this is last minute, at least I’m not in a race with the clock.
- ZFS High-Availability NAS. (via)
- Steam on FreeBSD. (via)
- Reminder: Next SemiBUG meeting is on the 23rd.
- Want to help move a cabinet of BSD User Group equipment, in NYC?
- “results-oriented and non-ideological“.
- BSD, guava. (via)
- OpenSSH is/has been deprecating DSA keys. This affects FreeBSD, and probably DragonFly too.
- The third “Hosting files using ZFS” class is available.
- connect doesn’t restart. OpenBSD pkg_add.
- OPNSense is at version 16.7.2 and gained a team member.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/08/15.
- Linux kernel, the port. (via)
- MidnightBSD 0.8 out. (via)
- UEFI multibooting: FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.
There’s been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.
BSDNow 155: no Allan, but an interview with Myke Geiger about using FreeBSD in an ISP role, and a bunch of news items.
There’s been a number of commits lately around higher optimization levels for your DragonFly kernel. It looks you can even set it systemwide. Boot code remains at -O; any higher level will make it explode. Is this safe? I have no idea!
If you are on DragonFly-current, AKA DragonFly 4.7, make sure to perform a full buildworld on your next upgrade. Tomohiro Kusumi changed a Hammer ioctl, and the buildworld is needed to keep everything in sync.
A manageable batch of links this week.
- Hackers Make the First-Ever Ransomware for Smart Thermostats. IoCrapT.
- A Brief History of Email Apps. I like the layout. (via)
- Chinese Hunting Chinese Over POP3 In Fjord Country. Long and worth it.
- Ring Message Bus on RS-232.
- it’s hard work printing nothing.
- The lost infrastructure of social media. (via)
- Quadrilateral Cowboy’s Code Is Now Open Source.
- Simplenote now open source. Except that’s the only client, not the server. Being allowed to repaint someone else’s house is not home ownership.
- The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol. (via)
- Mental Models. (via)
- HPE Acquires SGI For $275 Million. Linking for SGI nostalgia. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Spaceplan. A clicker game, and very pretty. (via)
The Lumina release is the highlight of the week.
- Lumina 1.0.0 released. It’s a BSD-first desktop environment, hooray!
- OpenBSD Gaming Resource. I’ve wanted this for all BSDs – just hopping through ports/pkgsrc/dports. (via)
- OpenBSD binpatches and package updates.
- xautobacklight.
- FreeBSD Core statement on recent freebsd-update and related vulnerabilities.
- OpenBSD removes armish support. (via)
- n2k16 hackathon report: guenther@ on RELRO support in binutils and arch specific cleanup.
- tmpfs on its last legs. For OpenBSD.
- 200 packages with the greatest number of patches. In pkgsrc.
- Anyone used a TrueNAS system?
- Enlightenment on OpenBSD! Dunno about those last steps…
- When BSD and Ubuntu meet on the dance floor, magic should happen.
- new shadow passwd functions.
- FreeBSD on a tiny system; what’s missing. (via)
- Ha!
It’s a good week to learn: BSDNow 154 has no interview, but a lot of tutorials, including ones on GhostBSD, Enlightenment, Steam on FreeBSD, and so on.
The last bits of Linux emulation have been removed from DragonFly. It’s 32-bit, so it’s been unsupported since DragonFly went to 64-bit only with the 4.0 release. Also, some other 32-bit only items are gone, including the cs, ep, ex, fe, and vx network drivers. It’s almost impossible that anyone was using it, but it’s notable because that’s some… 15-20k lines of code gone? Removal of unused code is also positive.
Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was “improved IPI signalling”. He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.
Because this always happens just after I create a DragonFly release, there’s a new version of OpenSSL. However, this is for version 1.0.2. 1.0.1 is what’s in the release, and it’s supported through the end of the year.
OpenSSH has a major version bump in DragonFly, to 7.3p1. This means some features – specifically patches for High Performance Networking – are no longer there, and you’ll get an error if your config file requires them. Either remove the options from your config, or install OpenSSH from dports.
Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal ‘coding language’, called AML? I did not, but it’s in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.
Getting esoteric this week.
- Oh… That’s why the servers are down every night! (via)
- Terminals Are Weird. (via)
- Making industrial controls network highly available/redundant. An often untouched area of system administration.
- The Inner JSON Effect. (via)
- Notes on Post-Post-Modern-Modern Programming. (also via)
- GCHQ: Boiling Frogs.
- How not to fix Government IT. (this and previous via I think?)
- Restoring Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto, day 4: What’s running on the system. (via)
- Surprises of the Faraday Cage.
- 51nb’s Thinkpad X62 with Broadwell i7 available as complete laptop. (via)
- Protecting Networks with SATAN. I remember this! (via)
- Ops School Curriculum. (via)
- Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices. Computer on a swappable card. (via)
- random failures. Entertaining links to RNG usage failures.
- Typefaces for Source Code Beautification. (via)
- The Blog That Disappeared. Why I self-host. (via)
Slightly calmer this week.
- A slow / low-end system capable of running most modern BSDs. (via)
- FreeBSD Myths, with discussion on Hacker News and lobste.rs.
- Why don’t companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?
- pfSense questions.
- OpenBSD release song for 6.0: “Another Smash of the Stack”. (via)
- Hello FreeNAS! Goodbye Drobo and Iomega… (via)
- n2k16 hackathon report: Ken Westerback on dhclient, bridges, routing and more
- OPNsense 16.7.1 released
- Resources on the BSD Make System.
- powerd++, a replacement for powerd on FreeBSD. The port is “powerdxx”. (via)
- Should I use doas instead sudo?
- The BSD Daemon feature in mexican candy packaging.
- NetBSD removes last RWX page in amd64 kernel.
Garbage 37 is out, with talk about their format and timing, OpenBSD material, and more Chromebook discussion.
Here is some coverage of the DragonFly 4.6 release, which may be interesting to read because of the comments: Hacker News, Hacker News again, and lobste.rs.
A reaction to the initial creation of DragonFly I never saw before, and Matthew Dillon’s followup. (via)
I like the summary in the very first comment of this story on DragonFly removing page-zeroing.
It’s Thursday, so that means BSDNow 153, with a title inspired by the lead news item, “my int is too big”. (No, not spoon, int.) No interview this week, but lots of links.