Use wpa_supplicant only long enough to replace it

DragonFly ships with wpa_supplicant, for setting up WiFi.  However, there’s no guarantee it’s the latest version.  A solution exists: security/wpa_supplicant in dports.  However, this has a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need wpa_supplicant to get online and download the dports version of wpa_supplicant.  So, DragonFly still includes wpa_supplicant in the base system, but you should upgrade to the dports version when possible.

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/26

Short list this week – no particular reason.

In Other BSDs for 2015/07/25

A lot of variety this week.

Power statistics

Sepherosa Ziehau has been doing a lot of work with various processors states to save power on DragonFly.  He’s published a summary of how well the various P-state/C-state/mwait settings work.  He found that setting a lower C-state can perversely improve performance.

For those saying “but how do I set these lower power states?”:

sysctl machdep.mwait.CX.idle: AUTODEEP
sysctl machdep.cpu_idle_hlt: 1 (or higher)

	
Lazy Reading for 2015/07/19

No theme, though I’ve been thinking about IPv6 lately.  Mostly in a “oh man all that PLC equipment at work can barely do IPv4 this won’t be easy” sort of way.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Dr. Fun comic archives.

In Other BSDs for 2015/07/18

I seem to have In Other BSDs exactly 1 day off from the OPNsense release schedule, so far.

 

Eat and talk BSD in Scottsdale, AZ

Michael W. Lucas is having an “open dinner” tomorrow, in Scottsdale, AZ.  That means you get to talk about his tech books and BSD and conventions and whatever else enters collectively enters everyone’s heads, I assume, over dinner.  (you buy your own food; the talking’s free)  It sounds like a potential little mini-convention; you should go.

DragonFly 4.2.3 released

There was a newer release of OpenSSL (1.0.1p) last week, so there’s a new revision of the DragonFly release – 4.2.3.  There’s little major change other than the security fix for OpenSSL.

Those readers who can count past 2 may notice that there wasn’t a 4.2.2.  We went straight from 4.2.1 to 4.2.3.   That’s my fault.  I screwed up tagging and Git doesn’t like repeated, deleted tags.

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/12

This is Thoughtful Consideration week.

Your unrelated game link of the week: Compare Javascript frameworks by playing the same game (well, game mechanism) in each: Breakouts.  (via)

In Other BSDs for 2015/07/11

This is a week for unexpected BSD news – OpenBSD and Microsoft, a new 4.4BSD variant, and so on.