The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is “Security and Cryptography”, but there’s plenty else.
I’m late for this, even though the students weren’t. Mea culpa! There’s been a lot of discussion on IRC, in EFNet #dragonflybsd, between the students and various DragonFly developers.
- 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
Last week was relatively light, but somehow this week I read a zillion interesting things. It’s been too dang hot to do much else, other than flop in a chair and point a fan at my head.
- Chopping up CSV files. Tabular format will never die, and for good reason.
- Reanimated: The story of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. I like this idea that someone can just keep working on a project long after the originating company disappeared, just to improve it for their own benefit – no mention of open source or even a plan for it. See also Oblivion Lost or Complete for some of my personal game fix/improvement modification favorites. (via)
- I don’t think this systemd/Debian news is accurate in its reasoning, and they don’t say what’s going to happen with non-Linux Debian. However, it’s still crappy, any way you slice it. (via)
- The paranoid #! Security Guide. Lots of details that won’t necessarily apply to your BSD system, but the descriptions of various attacks are neat. (via)
- Another reminder of how easy it is to deal with a lot of text data at a Unix-ish command line. (via)
- Those ssh password attempts are still going, and have been for a decade. (via)
- Don’t care about the story, but I like the dragonfly illustration.
- Linus Torvalds swears a lot. The problem is not ‘office politics’ as he sees it, but that if you swear all the time as the leader of a project, it becomes commonplace. Linus really has to really freak out for people to notice something new. There’s other issues, like how other people emulate the behavior, but I’m pointing out the ‘verbal base sweariness’ of a project affects the entire tone.
- Quine Relay, where programming languages write each other. The Ouroboros illustration is appropriate. (via many places)
- History of emacs and vi keys. I like how this shows that the command styles in both editors was shaped by the available hardware. (via)
- Fear and Loathing in Debian^H^H^H^H^H^H/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd). A wonderful rant about the creeping complication of operating systems. Let’s place bets on when people start complaining about Linux bloat. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Your unrelated link of the week: Bones Don’t Lie. An anthropologist who blogs about various discoveries of human remains. I really enjoy blogs where someone is talking about a subject they care about – not to sell a product, not to be paid (directly), but just because they like the topic and they want to share it with others. Of course I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly. This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.
Do you have a Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC? Well good news! Sascha Wildner brought in updated the oce(4) driver from FreeBSD to support Skyhawk models in DragonFly.
(My bad; looked at the wrong oce(4) commit originally and re-reported the import instead of the update.)
I made a hesitant attempt to keep an eye on other BSD source changes over the last week. I complain about needing coverage for the other BSDs, so I’ll see what I can do:
- (Parts of?) full-disk encryption support in NetBSD.
- esp (the SCSI board) support for NetBSD/acorn.
- SipHash support in FreeBSD
- SYN Cookie support in FreeBSD.
We’ve never had a group of student post progress this regularly. It’s great!
- 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
Busy, busy week.
- An in-depth programming language comparison. These can be fun for reinforcing your language choices, but also interesting just for the depth of comparison. Spoiler: Java can be crazy slow; Perl can be crazy fast. The page has lots of charts which always make me happy. The quotes at the end per-language are enjoyable. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- PC-BSD is using a content delivery network for their image delivery – that’s a good idea. It’s very hard to get people to consistently use mirrors, even if they are consistent and local.
- A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts. Nerf guns are fun, charts are great, so that whole article is the bestest. (I think via)
- 1,200 computer interfaces from the movies. See this link for the story, and this link for more details and some new interfaces to that huge quantity of visual information, about visual information.
- 80’s childhood. It’s linkbait, but I like the sort of burst of how personal electronics looked at that point in time.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan fight scenes.
Something new and odd: A port of the Hammer (1) filesystem into Go, for go-fuse. As the author has said, it’s more for the practice of learning Go and Hammer than for producing anything useful. Still, an interesting way to learn.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
Michael W. Lucas auctioned off his first copy of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition some time ago, with the proceeds going to the OpenBSD Foundation. It was to be signed by OpenBSD developers – which is neat enough, but apparently it was annotated by the developers, too.
Apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has been improving DragonFly’s route table performance under extremely heavy load. (e.g. run efficiently; don’t die) I don’t have a definitive commit message to point at, but looking at his recent commits are a good start.
Encryption seems to be the accidental theme tonight. A question about Hammer 2 and encryption prompted this list of possible solutions from Matthew Dillon. Hammer 2 is still months out, so these features both require time and someone interesting in doing them – though they sound quite possible.
Still not sure if I should be writing Hammer or HAMMER.
If you were wanting to encrypt your /home directory, Pierre Abbat has written up the explicit steps he took to do that very thing.
Week 3 is underway, and the students are starting to get into the meat of their projects:
- 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
The pkgsrc-2013Q2 branch has been out for some days, but the official release announcement has now been published, with details on the number of ports. You should be able to pull it down from dragonflybsd.org via git, by the way.
A U.S. holiday and very warm weather has made this a less intense week. At least for links.
- Someone help. A problem I never anticipated. (via)
- Git Cheat Sheet. This one’s for printing. (via)
- Real Life Tron on an Apple ][gs. (via)
- Neocities, an excellent idea. Follow the suggested links. (via)
- Mandelbulber, a cross between Electric Sheep and Xaos. (via I forget)
- A drawing of the Internet (ARPANet) in 1977. The whole thing. (via)
- Bunnie Huang’s making an open laptop. Won’t be cheap or easy, but it’s still neat.
- Vim 7.4a hits beta.
Your unrelated link of the week: A new Cyriak-animated video, this time for the band Bloc Party.
The official announcement has gone out. You should be able to pull pkgsrc-2013Q2 via git from dragonflybsd.org within the next 24 hours.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their second week 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
There’s a lot of progress for the second week, which is wonderful!