Michael W. Lucas’s next topic in his Mastery series is ‘Sudo‘.
It’s 24 minutes with Chris Cappuccio, talking about nsh and flashrd for OpenBSD.
Everyone passed their Summer of Code midterms! Not that this was a surprise; all the students have been consistently working and overcoming problems, but a 100% pass rate makes me happy.
Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
On August 10th, Michael W. Lucas will be giving a talk on DNSSEC to the Metro Detroit Linux Users Group, and it’ll be livestreamed for everyone to see. His talks are energetic and entertaining, and it’s worth making time to see.
Joris Giovannangeli, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, posted his thoughts on credential descriptors – have a read. He is working on capsicum and DragonFly, so this is a natural thought process.
These have been very easy to create over the last few weeks; there’s been a torrent of reading. Can I say torrent without making it sound like this is all downloaded large files? The word is overloaded. Anyway:
- How emacs changed my life, from I think the creator of Ruby. (via)
- Autodesk uses Creative Commons right.
- British kids in the early 80’s, using computers. Might induce nostalgia for some.
- Forth – The Early Years. (via)
- The Collapse of the Animal Crossing Economy. I am entertained by the intersection of games and economics. (via)
- Tagsistant, a tag-based filesystem. Works via command line, which is unexpected. (via Tim Darby on users@)
- Git and GitHub Secrets. (via)
- IE vs. murder rate. Correlation, rather than causation, but still funny. (via)
- toybox, a BSD-licensed command line environment for Android. I mentally said “so what?” until I saw the “Why is Toybox?” presentation. It’s an excellent talk that makes a sequence of good points about many topics on licensing and utility, and I recommend making time for watching it. (first link via)
- The Confused Deputy, an explanation of capabilities. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
Your unrelated link of the week: What goes on when you are not there!
How many tags can I fit on this post? I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts. In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.
- BeagleBone systems are getting popular.
- Distributed chrooted pkgsrc bulk builds. Very necessary documentation.
- …And a script to do all the setup for those builds.
- The VBSDCon site has more details on the upcoming convention. (via)
- The cxgbe(4) device has hardware dedicated to sniffing packets?
- FreeBSD has switched to the BSD-licensed version of patch.
- FreeBSD has an updated ACPI implementation.
- FreeBSD is importing OpenBSD’s rsu(4) wireless Realtek driver. Needs firmware.
- What’s new in pkgsrc-2013Q2. With screenshots!
- NetBSD now supports 2 new Centrino Wireless-N devices.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.9.3-p2
- PHP 5.5 has hit pkgsrc.
If you have a computer with one of the very-very-new Haswell processors from Intel, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that will interest you. They shave off (in the example given) about 20% of CPU power usage without much effect on performance.
killall -T will now kill all processes associated with the current tty, except parents of the killall process itself. It’s a shortcut to “kill all these runaway items I started by accident”.
Thanks to the effort of a number of people, DragonFly (-current) now supports KMS and accelerated video on Intel 915 chipsets. It’s 2D and x86_64 only for now, but it’s much, much better than just using the vesa driver.
Every year, people ask “Why can’t writing documentation be part of Summer of Code?” (Not necessarily for DragonFly, but in general) Google has a “Doc Camp”, where a whole lot of documentation gets produced in sprints, and anyone can participate – not just Summer of Code students.
If this sounds interesting to you, your application has to be in by August 7th 9th. (URL and date updated)
Please welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Johannes Hofmann. He earned this by coming up with a significant chunk of DragonFly’s upcoming KMS/915 support, and it’s now easier to just have him work directly than to be constantly committing for him.
It’s week 6, I think, and the midterms are coming up. Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Since there’s a newer set of dports binary packages uploaded, I thought I’d spend my weekend upgrading, to catch up.
‘pkg upgrade’
And that was it. Well, not really. I had to dump and restore my Postgres databases, cause of the switch from 9.0 to 9.2 as default. I had to build php5 from source to get the Apache module. Those two things together took longer than the entire download and upgrade of the rest of my system – some ~200 packages?
Michael W. Lucas wrote a blog post about pkgng and Ansible on FreeBSD. Will it work on DragonFly? We already have pkgng on DragonFly in the form of dports, and Ansible… might work? Please, someone try.
So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.
- The FatMac cooler. Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
- I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
- Note the embroidered dragonflies.
- Early mobile and video phones. Decades early. Look at the slideshow.
- Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
- Best Open Source games. Dunno how many work on any BSD. (via)
- The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
- The GREP test, an excellent standard for code. (via)
- What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky? (also via)
- Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
- People are really starting to pile on Microsoft. (I already started) Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market. Maybe ubiquity is a better word?
Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!
In part of a long thread about dports packages on the users@ list, Matthew Dillon notes that a new set of packages for i386 and x86_64, for 3.4 and for “3.6” (meaning bleeding-edge DragonFly, even though that’s numbered 3.5) is mostly uploaded. He also notes that a Haswell-processor-based blade server for DragonFly is in the works, so much of the dragonflybsd.org infrastructure is going to move from his house to a datacenter, with the benefits that provides. It’ll also help automate binary package building.
Sepherosa Ziehau added SO_REUSEPORT to DragonFly. I don’t know how the mechanism works, because he didn’t include a description, but he did include a explanation of just how much it reduces CPU usage during as-high-as-physically-possible network load. He even wrote tools to test it more heavily.
Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
- pkgsrc now has Ruby 2.0.
- NetBSD now has wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and dhcpcd 6.0.3.
- NetBSD supports Nanjing QinHeng Electronics devices via puc(4). No idea what that is.
- NetBSD also supports Intel 8 Series SMBus devices, which I mention just because finding the right drivers for SMBus devices always frustrated me on Windows.
- NetBSD’s hostname has some new options.
- FreeBSD supports Coleto Creek devices: SATA, SMBus, and Watchdog. Not sure if that’s a brand name or a special type of construction. Also, AR934x and the Qualcomm Atheros DB120 development board, and the Broadcom BCM5725 network controller.
- OpenBSD now has sshd supporting encrypted host keys. I can’t find an open mail archive with OpenBSD source-changes as an archived list, so I don’t seem to be able to link to it directly.
I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.
The Observe, Hack, Make 2013 festival is coming up at the end of the month in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, it’s already sold out, but there’s going to be at least one DragonFly developer there. (credit to Matthias Schmidt for letting me know about the festival)