While Matthew Dillon was testing the new up-to-256-processor support for DragonFly, he added a few sysctls, one of which helps qemu performance when emulating a lot of processors. I note it here in case it’s helpful to someone else.
There’s an open source meetup at a hackerspace near me, happening tomorrow. Well, today by the time most people read this. Anyway, it’s at Interlock, starting at noon. I don’t think I’ll make it, but I’m always happy to see this stuff happen in my own town.
BSDNow 046 interviews Brian Drewery, talks about tunneling through DNS ports (an useful trick to get around network paywalls, if it’s what I think it is), and of course more general discussion of BSD topics.
HOPE X starts tomorrow in New York City and runs through the weekend. There will be some BSD people there. (see first line of link.)
DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.
Thanks to Nicolas Thery, there’s a POSIX semaphore test suite on DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD. Anyone want to integrate it into dfregress?
There’s a recently talked about bug in SYSRET that apparently affects a lot of operating systems, including Linux and several BSDs. It looks like DragonFly is not affected, but Matthew Dillon has put in changes just in case.
Francois Tigeot has been working on making i915 video support work better; with his latest update, it’s worth trying the Intel-specific driver instead of vesa if you have both the 915 chipset and are running X.
Matthew Dillon changed powerd on DragonFly so that the system is set to max performance if powerd is killed. Now you’ll know why your fans turned on!
Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device. You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.
It’s a manageable list this week.
- Markov Chains Explained. It’s useful to at least know what Markov chains are, because there are some silly text tricks that can be done, and it’s a good term to use so that you sound smart. (via)
- Rob Pike’s 5 rules of programming. (via)
- Similar: Epigrams in programming. (via)
- snowdrift.coop, a new funding service for open source projects. It’s not launched yet, but it appears to be using a ‘shares’ approach which could be interesting. (via IRC)
- Unix: never go topless.
- On the cruelty of really teaching computing science. Good quote where I found it, too.
- Don’t tell people to use VIM (because) You’re Using It Wrong. Notes how trendy “use Vim!” articles have become. (via)
- The levels of Emacs proficiency. (via)
- The genre-defining video games we forgot. A surprisingly in-depth documentary.
- Eulerian Video Magnification. Heartbeat reading with common cameras. (via a newsletter)
- Sometimes you think of something that should exist, and then you immediately find out it does exist – foot switches for emacs.
- Explaining X11 for the rest of us. (via)
- Awesome-awesomeness. Curated lists of resources for various languages. Two things struck me: one is that Github is being used more like a document repository than a code repository, sometimes, and the other is that this is such a huge list, it almost overwhelms the original purpose of showing what to use next. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Formicapunk. Boulet’s version of analog technology.
Finally, a much more eventful week. I already noted LibreSSL’s release.
- DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/07/07.
- PC-BSD Digest 31 – there’s now a PC-BSD IRC channel.
- Your server can probably tell you the temperature.
- Future of pf in FreeBSD? Follow the thread. (via)
- DragonFly’s pf alterations discussed for OpenBSD. It wouldn’t be easy without some of the underlying DragonFly architecture, but something for everyone to remember: Henning Brauer is generous with his time and will help people updating pf.
- mfiutil on FreeBSD.
- ia64 processor support is gone from FreeBSD.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.10.0-P2.
- FreeBSD now has bmake-20140620.
- OpenBSD now has lynx 2.8.8rel2.
- OpenBSD’s relayd now has a new filter language.
- pkgsrc 2014Q2 binaries are out now for several platforms.
- FreeBSD has a new core team.
- More cross-pollination – also from Android?
- OpenBSD-current users will need to update their kernel.
The portable (meaning ready to be brought into other operating systems) version of LibreSSL is out.
BSDNow episode 45 is up. This one is an interview with Josh Paetzel of iXSystems. No tutorial this week because Allan Jude is at the devsummit in the UK, an event I totally did not know existed.
Some dports packages can’t be installed in combination with others. The easy way to find the conflict without doing the install? Look for CONFLICTS= in the Makefile. If you don’t have the dports tree on disk, you can always look online.
If you’re looking to use LDAP on DragonFly, follow this thread (read the first, keep going) as people talk about implementing it, what they installed, etc. I haven’t tried it myself, yet.
The mfi(4) driver has had some data corruption problems on “Thunderbird” series RAID controllers. There’s a newer driver, mrsas(4), that replaces mfi(4) for these controllers and does not have these issues, but switching may mean new drive locations and therefore some work to get booting correctly again. Sascha Wildner has an extensive writeup about what this entails, and how to switch now if you have that hardware (recommended).
ACPICA has been updated by Sascha Wildner to version 20140627, which as you can guess from the version, is the most recent. See the included changelog for what’s different.
I was out sick for a few days this week (Norwalk virus ain’t fun), and so there’s a whole lot of links to follow.
- The History of the Pocket Knife. I link to it because the pictures are pretty, and because a multitool is one of the more useful physical tools you can have. (via)
- “Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler” Scott Hanselman’s keynote at Velocity 2014. I would like the reaction GIF to die out as a presentation tool, but the talk is funny. (via)
- Ooh, a new James Mickens video! This is a sort of antidote to the overoptimistic Scott Hanselman video. Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure. (via)
- Book review: The Art of Unix Programming.
- Computing Across America.
- Again, not DragonFlyBSD.
- Some interesting thoughts and actions on copyright. I bought the bumper sticker the author’s talking about, directly from him.
- Uh oh.
- Multi-process architectures suck. Yet that’s everything we work on these days. (via)
- The March Towards Go. I keep meaning to sit down and actually try a project in Go. (via)
- UNIX Tricks. Some Linuxisms in there, but oh well. (via)
- Vim as Language. Not a bad description. Related by association: I get tired of seeing the little-avatar-plus-name-plus-job-title that gets stuck on so many blog posts. (via)
- An interview with Damien Conway. He’s a very smart and direct person, so the interview is worthwhile. (via)
- Patching the Newton. Some interesting early history. I remember holding a Newton and saying “This should work like a phone.”
- BOOTSTRA.386 – A Bootstrap theme that will entertain you, or maybe give you painful flashbacks. (via multiple places)
Your unrelated link of the week: The 1987 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. Imagine there was no Internet access other than what you can telnet to, and nothing on TV other than this. That’s 1987.