DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 126 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2016/05/242016/05/24

Huge wifi resync

Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd have updated the wifi setup in DragonFly, incorporating Adrian’s FreeBSD changes (and merging back some of Matt’s from DragonFly). This affects the ath, rum, iwm, iwn, run, bwn, urtwn, wi, ral, iwi, ndis, and wpi drivers. The ‘an’ driver has been removed, too. I’m not going to even try to link to all the commits.

If you’re on DragonFly master and are using one of these devices, now is the time to update and try. Note that this removes the separate network interface that’s specific to the device and creates only a wlanX device.

Update: Matt reminded me that at least half the work came from Imre Vadasz; I missed it because I was only looking at the commit email names – mea culpa.

2016/05/23

Mounting as non-root

Read this email thread for how to mount devices (e.g. USB drives) in DragonFly when you aren’t root.

2016/05/222016/05/20

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/22

A nice wide range of topics, again!

Bletchley Park computers. (via)
LITCAVE – one-man recreations of cc, vi, troff, x, and so on. (via)
50 Shades of Open. My pet peeve is when it’s used for a API to a closed source service. (via)
Browsix – A Unix-Like Operating System for the Browser. (via)
Clicky keyboard links.
Unix on a…. ti-83+? (via)
file considered harmful
Pointer Overflow Checking.
Keynotes from OSCON in Austin 2016.
More details on hardware time protocols than you may ever have thought of.
Dear Mommy Blogger. Some of that applies to this blog, too. I get some stupid offers for essentially paid articles here, and I avoid them. If I’m selling something, it’s cause it’s good BSD-related material or because I know the person. (via)
Programming the ENIAC: an example of why computer history is hard. (via)
Ask HN: What is an open-source alternative to Google Home?

2016/05/212016/05/20

In Other BSDs for 2016/05/21

Summer convention season is coming; start scheduling!

Implementing pledge on linux using seccomp. (via)
pkgsrcCon 2016 is in about a month and a half (July 2-3). They’re accepting talk proposals now, for lightning talks or extended presentations. (via kamil on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A review of FreeBSD 10.3’s new features. (via)
BSD OS’ include GNU tools re-written for BSDL?
Practicing ZFS storage failure quickly and easily with QEMU. On Linux, but could probably work the same on FreeBSD. (via)
pfSense 2.3.1 is out.
pkgsrc-security@ has a new GPG key.
KnoxBUG’s next meeting is May 26th and Dru Lavigne is the guest speaker.
OPNsense 16.1.14 released.
p2k16 hackathon: pirofti@ on octeon and TPM and jasper@ on gnome, puppet and more.
DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/16.
FreeNAS vs TrueNAS.
Hubert Feyrer’s recent NetBSD news roundup.
*BSD on laptop, anyone?

2016/05/20

DragonFly and xorg/xwayland

karu.pruun managed to get xwayland working on DragonFly, and also took notes while doing it. That means you can try it out, too.

2016/05/19

BSDNow 142: Diving for BSD Perls

BSDNow 142 is out. You might think the title is about Perl, the language, on BSD, but it’s because there’s an interview with FreeBSD developer Alfred Perlstein. I’m sure he gets that a lot. Among the other news on the episode is a note about ordering BSDNow shirts: do it today because it’s the last day they will be available! Also, you can order now and pick it up at BSDCan if you’re going to be there.

(I’m linking to the jupiterbroadcasting site because the bsdnow.tv site isn’t updated as of this writing.)

2016/05/17

Remember: join the ‘video’ group for direct rendering

If you get “libGL error: failed to open drm device: Permission denied” when using direct rendering, make sure to add your user id to the ‘video’ group.

2016/05/17

BSD Magazine for May 2016 out

The May issue of BSD Magazine is available now. There’s articles on ZFS, OpenBSD’s arc4random, an interview of Fernando Rodríguez of KeepCoding, and more. It’s a free PDF download if you didn’t know.

2016/05/172016/05/13

SemiBUG tonight

The SemiBUG presentation with Ike Levy speaking is tonight – go if you can!

2016/05/16

TeX, clisp, and DragonFly

DragonFly versions of TeX have been available for some time now. However, Nelson Beebe, who is part of the TeX project, is having trouble building some related binaries – asymptote and clisp. He could use help from anyone interested, to match up with this summer’s release of TeX 2016.

2016/05/152016/05/13

Lazy Reading for 2016/05/15

I have some links I meant to post weeks ago, so lots of variety this week.

Termux. Turn your phone effectively into a VT100.
The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, By Ants. (via)
The void left by the parallel port. Well, I don’t miss it. (via)
The invisible language of trains boats and planes. (via)
Teaching C. Lots of good links to follow there.
SDF Plan 9 boot camp. Here’s your chance to try Plan 9. Or maybe not yet. (via)
Oh dear, we’ve all been made redundant…
Remote serial consoles.
Will the NSA Finally Build Its Superconducting Spy Computer? Mostly about cryogenic computing. (via)
Remotely Interested, a podcast. Interesting guests.
Shiva Ayyadurai Wants My Emails (via)
It sounds like NTPsec is to NTP like LibreSSL is to OpenSSL.
How browsers render emoji. (via)
Curio. The “modern demoscene”. (via)
this week in astounding defaults.
Submarine Cable Map. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The GLOG. The Goblin Laws of Gaming, a homebrew RPG. I love just reading the rules on these sorts of things.

2016/05/142016/05/13

In Other BSDs for 2016/05/14

Some DragonFly links are sneaking in here just to get them cleared out.

May 17th: Ike Levy speaks at SemiBUG. Go if you are anywhere near; Ike’s a good speaker and passionate about BSD.
Speaking of scheduling: BSDCan 2016 is less than a month away.
Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me. (via)
BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code. (via)
FreeBSD PowerPC 32bit pkg repository (unofficial). ~19,500 packages, more to come. (via)
As a Linux user, where should I start with experimenting with BSD?
DragonFly i915 driver updated to Linux 4.3. (via)
DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/09.
Cons of staying on an old -RELEASE version ?
More p2k16: ajacoutot@ on Gnome, rc and rcctl improvements, krw@ on pdisk, softraid and more.
SROP mitigation committed. (OpenBSD)
The 50th Quarterly pkgsrc Release, pkgsrc-2016Q1. Also, stats.
Thomas Levine’s notes from the recent NYCBUG presentation on Urchin.
NetBSD on the Sega Dreamcast, presented on a Dreamcast.
How BSD was built, and how it lost the lead to Linux.
Running Tor in a NetBSD rump unikernel. (via)
Running FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD as a virtualised guest on Online.net.
Meet Joe Maloney – Lead System Architect for PC-BSD. I like the transition from volunteer to employee.
LinuxFest Northwest 2016: The Devil in the Details: Switching to BSD from Linux. Apparently one of the most popular videos.

2016/05/13

garbage[26]: We’re not a Linux show, either

I haven’t listened to it because I’m at work, but garbage episode 26 is up, along with news of shirts and stickers.

2016/05/13

Cleanup work is also good

I usually link to new features, additions, and so on. That’s fine, but there’s often necessary work that goes on which doesn’t correlate to a new function – just better code. Rimvydas Jasinskas just did one of those cleanups, and I’m mentioning it to give credit where’s it’s due.

2016/05/12

BSDNow 141: BSD likes .ike

I took some liberty with the spelling of the title, but it’s more accurate that way: The newest episode of BSDNow has a roundup of BSD news (some of which is pretty major) and an interview of Ike Levy, AKA ‘the guy at NYCBSDCon who showed me how useful pfSense could be’. Ike is speaking at a SemiBUG meeting on the 17th, too, which I’ll post about.

2016/05/112016/05/11

Acceleration for Skylake users

If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.

2016/05/102016/05/10

Benchmarks and tips nginx on DragonFly

Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.

Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.

2016/05/09

Another i915 update

The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.

2016/05/082016/05/05

Lazy Reading for 2016/05/08

Network tools and analysis is the accidental topic this week.

More open-source network management tools.
How do ISPs and modems actually obtain the right signal off of a phone/cable/optical fiber/whatever line? A layer-1 overview. (via)
A damp discussion of network queuing. (via)
How To Make Fossils Productive Again. (via)
Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence.
SSH for fun and profit. (via)
CV of Failures. I like the last one. (via)
Go best practices, six years in. (via)
PocketCHIP, hardware for PICO-8. (via)
Typewriter.
Circuit Classics — Sneak Peek!
An update on SSH protocol 1. Dead in a year, that’s the update. (via)
How difficult is the GVG-AI competition?
Deflecting it old school. From here.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: British tea consumption has been going down. (via) I like the additional charts about biscuits and cake, complementary to tea. Which reminds me: Welsh cakes are so good that the first time I made them, I was angry that I hadn’t tried them years ago.

2016/05/07

A late Garbage[25]

Episode 25 of Garbage went up yesterday and I forgot to check for it, so I’m linking to it now. Among other things, they mention Garbage merchandise. I’d pay for a shirt that pointed out most technology is garbage, to take it from the page.