If you are running DragonFly-master, there have been fixes for a wrong uname (my fault) and initrd image booting with encrypted drives. Update if you are running on the bleeding edge, if you haven’t already.
If you are sure you don’t need to look at your boot menu for very long in DragonFly, you can make it zip by quickly.
I managed to be on the road and so did not post about the milestone 100th episode of BSDNow, which has an interview with Sebastian Wiedenroth about both pkg and pkgSrcCon, along with all their other news.
I’m glad to see 100 episodes together of a video podcast for BSD; if you had asked me a few years ago if that was possible, I’d have dismissed the idea. Not for lack of news, obviously, but because I didn’t think anyone would have that level of dedication. Investing time and care is what sets people apart, and they’ve done it.
Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.
- Unix Meets Prime Numbers.
- The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up.
- Google INTERCAL Style Guide. (via)
- Before Spelunky and FTL, There Was Only ASCII. “Procedural Death Labyrinths” sounds fun. (via)
- How Pinterest simplified, compartmentalised and scattered the web.
- “actually a hat“.
- GMO biology transformed by “Inventor of Email”. There’s a reason that last part is in quotes.
- What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day. A 6-month interview. (via)
- Running TSS/8 on the DEC PiDP-8/i and SIMH. It’s not just a software simulation; it’s a Raspberry Pi inside a PDP-8 shell. The front panel actually works. (thanks, Remy van Elst!)
Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. (via an internet cult.) Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English. Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation. That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.
It’s an unexpectedly diverse list this week.
- The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t. The best explanation for the much-linked OpenSSH story last week: PAM is the problem.
- pfSense 2.2.4 is released.
- OPNsense 15.7.4 Released.
- A week of pkgsrc #11.
- The 2015Q2 FreeBSD status report is out.
- FreeBSD 10.2-RC1 Now Available.
- Introducing BSDHistory, and how it is set up.
- BSD Graphics.
- What BSD do you use, and for how long have you been using it and how?
- NetBSD on the Nvidia Jetson TK1 (via)
- A new fancy FreeBSD boot screen.
- Switching a static blog to OpenBSD’s new httpd server. (via)
- Three new c2k15 reports on Undeadly: one, two, three.
- HardenedBSD Completes Strong ASLR Implementation.
- FreeBSD on the c720. (via)
- Yay cross–pollination.
- Fixing the GPT booting bug with FreeBSD and some Thinkpads. Also, asking Lenovo for a BIOS fix. (thanks, Warren Block)
- pkgsrc-2015Q2 binary packages for illumos now available.
- Anyone here use DragonFly? Not an ‘other’ BSD, but this was a good place to put the link.
If your DragonFly machine can do it, it will now run an accelerated console by default.
A DragonFly machine with a lot of network traffic will have a significant amount of memory consumed by all the running network connections. (as with any system) It’s now possible to adjust the amount of memory set aside for those operations, live. This sort of fine-tuning will only matter if you run an extremely busy machine, but it’s worth it if you do.
Francois Tigeot has a new i915 video branch for testing, if you are running DragonFly-current. It will be especially useful for people on a Broadwell chipset.
I’m globbing these DragonFly updates together in a single post because I’m running behind:
ACPICA was updated to Intel’s newest version: 20150717.
GCC in DragonFly was updated to the 5.2 release.
DragonFly DRM (that’s Direct Rendering) now supports ValleyView chipsets.
hostapd, for creating a wireless access point, has been included in DragonFly along with wpa_supplicant, for a long time. Like wpa_supplicant, there’s a version in dports that is the latest version and is easier to update (e.g. no system update required to get a newer version.) Unlike wpa_supplicant, there’s no chicken-and-egg installation problem if it’s not in the base system – so out it goes.
If you’ve previously tried to install DragonFly using a USB thumb drive, and it would somehow not be found to boot from, there’s a potential fix.
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.
DragonFly now has the same math library (libm) as OpenBSD, replacing an earlier combined version of I think what NetBSD and FreeBSD ran. This doesn’t necessarily directly affect you, but it’s work worth doing; matching the underlying frameworks between BSDs helps everyone.
Short list this week – no particular reason.
- Profiling your file systems.
- Amiga Reloaded – A new Amiga motherboard using original MOS/CSG chips.
- Caves of Qud, a roguelike that even simulates greenscreen.
- And here’s 700 more roguelikes in a torrent.
- Web Design: the First 100 Years. (via multiple)
- The Mobile Web Sucks. Lots of good pull quotes here. (via)
- The story behind the world’s most ‘Elite’ computer escape key.
A lot of variety this week.
- tame(2) WIP, process sandboxing for OpenBSD.
- pbi vs pkg
- Is there a BSD that fits my needs?
- Which BSD is right for me?
- Hyperthreading + SMP + Intel graphics on OpenBSD
- EuroBSDCon 2015 Registration Is Open
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/07/20.
- Brute-force OpenSSH attacks. The default config is not vulnerable to this on DragonFly. FreeBSD’s config with PAM may be the only one. (via)
- Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style. (via)
- c2k15 reports on Undeadly: one, two, three, four.
- Here is a non-BSD containers explanation, and then here’s Docker on FreeBSD.
- Michael W. Lucas is giving a talk on August 20th at the Livingston County BSD User’s Group meeting. (That’s in Michigan, not the NY county where I work, darnit.)
- FreeBSD now has a Code of Conduct.
- Backgammon bug from at least 4.1a BSD, 3+ decades ago.
- Tag jumping in mandoc. (I like this idea)
- OpenBSD on Linode. Similar techniques might work for any BSD install. (via, via)
The 99th episode of BSDNow is about Gnome on FreeBSD, with interviews of Baptiste Daroussin and Ryan Lortie, plus more news that I was already planning to link to.
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)
Do you have a ValleyView GPU? It now works much better in DragonFly, and there’s a new accelerated rendering branch to try out, too, if you follow that link.
Hey, my stickers arrived! You can order your own.
