This has nothing directly to do with DragonFly, other than this is a result from my trip to NYCBSDCon last year… I know I have a few New York City readers. I’m possibly making a short trip to NYC soon; any advice on where to stay/visit?
Sepherosa Ziehau makes commits almost daily to DragonFly’s network infrastructure, but I have a hard time quantifying it into Digest posts in part because it’s often very technical. His most recent commits come with an explanation, however. He has done plenty of work to improve overall transmission speeds in DragonFly, and now he’s working on ‘fairness’. Fair, in this case, means ensuring that packet transmitting and receiving happen without either one monopolizing the connection. In real world terms, this translates to much more constant speeds. His recent commit details what he’s doing and some numbers to prove it.
Remember I said he’s improved speeds? Note that in his example, he’s reaching stable peaks of 981 Mbps. This is on a line that I assume theoretically maxes out at 1000.
Ok, now posting this on the correct day…
- If you are familiar with 2d/3d animation, web apps, game design or graphics programming, look at my alma mater. They’re hiring teachers… I’m teaching an open source class there this spring.
- Kriegspiel, the board game. Kreigspiel, the computer game. Kreigspiel, the Avalon Hill game on my shelf, which is unfortunately not the same thing. Anyway, in the process of looking up that one game because I remembered the name, I found that one of the other games on my shelf might be available again. Silent Death is one of the the best miniatures games I’ve ever played. There’s still some continuation of those Avalon Hill games too. (Long chain of memories set off via)
- A noble goal.
- The 19A0s, visually somewhere between the late 1980s and the year 2000, with a Pinterest board to match. (via)
- Message in a Binary Bottle, secret messages stuffed into the ROM of console games, years ago. (via)
- For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade. I miss these. The closest thing to me that’s like these old arcades is this museum exhibit.
- Same source: Inside one of the last pinball factories in the world.
- This Thinkpad Chromebook actually gave me a ‘Shut up and take my money!’ gut reaction. My work laptop is a Thinkpad x220 and it’s one of the best laptops I’ve ever used.
- 30 Years of the Apple Lisa and Apple ][e. (via) Hey that’s neat I remember this oh my god I’m old.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Game, by Boulet. Goes with some of the links.
Based on this bug report on the recently updated m4, you may need to perform some extra steps to update m4 as part of a normal upgrade:
# cd /usr/src/usr.bin/m4 # make # make install clean
If you have a DragonFly 3.3 system with DPorts, can you install xorg, then ssh -Y from another machine to there, and see if you can remotely run an X program like xterm with local display? I’ve done this twice on two different machines with DPorts and it won’t work. xorg won’t write the security info to ~/.Xauthority, with ssh or xhost or whatever. It’s driving me crazy.
(Yeah, slow news day.)
Peter Avalos has updated m4 for DragonFly. This will bring us a little more in sync with the other BSDs. Also, John Marino has updated flex, which is apparently 17 years old? Meaning it hasn’t been updated in DragonFly ever, and then not in FreeBSD before that, for a long time. Looking at the timeline on the flex web page appears to match.
Dave Hayes asked for some “best practices” ideas for setting up a HAMMER (1) system. I replied, and the conversation turned to RAID, as these often do. If you’re thinking of purchasing disk hardware in the near future, this will be useful to you.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a generic form of support for multiple transmit queues in DragonFly. This means less contention when transmitting. It’s not done; he has drivers to set up and as he said, it’s “step 1 of many“.
If you are a brave soul and have an IPv6-only DragonFly installation, there’s now a git mirror of DragonFly that is available on IPv6.
I meant to post this a while ago; it’s a few days old but still useful. John Marino gave some stats on DPorts progress, plus he and Francois Tigeot also had some tips on xorg setup. The successful build count is higher by now, and I think KDE3 is done, though I haven’t tried it.
If you have a BSD Certification, and it’s nearing the end of its 5-year term, the BSD Certification Group has published the guidelines for re-certification. Has it really been 5 years since the first certifications happened? Geez.
I found this off of the NYCBUG mailing list, so hat tip to them.
It’s a very short week this week. I was on the road for work, so I didn’t see anywhere as much of the Internet as I may have liked. Count my dports writeup yesterday as part of this and it averages out to a good amount of reading.
- Favorite Linux Commands. Not all of them are Linux/bash specific. (via)
- Advanced Vim Registers. Or buffers, or clipboards, if you want to get messy with terms. (via)
- “I hate BSD so much!”, he yelled at his spittle-flecked monitor.
- TOME, a roguelike. Read through the comments for discussion of many other roguelike games.
Your unrelated link of the week: New Tokyo Ondo. via Jesse Moynihan, whose Forming comic on that site is an epic read. Epic, as in it’s actually telling a NSFW world creation story.
If you are on DragonFly 3.3, and you are running a kernel built after January 1st, there’s a bug in the way FP context is handled when the kernel supports AVX. (January 1st is when AVX support was committed.) Matthew Dillon has committed a fix and issued a note to update for everyone.
John Marino’s DPorts project, mentioned here briefly before, is interesting. I had two separate people ask me how it works, so a better explanation is in order. I’ve tried it out on a test machine over the past few weeks.
Background:
Dports is an effort to use FreeBSD’s ports system as a base for DragonFly, and the pkg tool as a way to manage binary packages built from DPorts. This is complicated, so I’ll explain each part in order.
- FreeBSD ports are a FreeBSD-specific collection of software installation files that automate building 3rd-party software on FreeBSD. You’ve probably already heard of them. (Note there’s no mention of DragonFly.)
- DPorts is a collection of files that map to existing FreeBSD ports, and contain any changes necessary to make that port also build on DragonFly. Many of those programs build without changes on DragonFly. DPorts builds from source.
- pkg is used for package management, and is usable on FreeBSD and on DragonFly. The binary packages produced from building with DPorts can be installed from remote locations and managed separately using pkg, so that software upgrades and installation can be performed with binaries only. (It’s much faster that way.)
Every port seen in DPorts is known to build on DragonFly. John Marino adds a port only after it builds successfully, using poudriere as a bulk software tool. Ports are only updated to a newer version when that newer version builds, too, so once something arrives in DPorts, it should never break from being updated at some point in the future.
Installing:
To use DPorts, you need two things:
- DragonFly 3.3 or later, though 3.3 is the most recent right now.
- You need to rename /usr/pkg so that your existing pkgsrc binary programs don’t get accidentally used while working with DPorts, causing confusion. If anything goes wrong with DPorts when you are installing it and you want to go back, remove all the DPorts packages and rename /usr/pkg back to normal.
(Don’t confuse pkg, the management tool, with /usr/pkg, the normal installation directory for pkgsrc. ) For the installation of the base port files:
cd /usr make dports-create-shallow
If you’ve already renamed your /usr/pkg directory, git won’t be in your path any more. You can instead download a tarball and unpack it, which also happens to be possible automatically via that same Makefile.
cd /usr make dports-download
Downloading via git is fastest, so if you do need to use the tarball via make dports-download, build devel/git, delete /usr/dports, and then pull it again with make dports-create-shallow. This all comes from John Marino’s Github site for DPorts.
Managing DPorts
DPorts doesn’t use pkg_info, pkg_add, and the other tools traditionally seen on DragonFly for pkgsrc. Instead, package management is done with pkg. Use pkg info, pkg install, pkg remove, and pkg update to list, install, delete, and upgrade various packages on your system. Packages built from source or downloaded as prebuilt binaries are managed the same way, using these tools.
See some of the other writing about pkg for FreeBSD for details on how it works.
Since DPorts doesn’t update a package until it gets a successful build, and installations are of successfully built binary packages, upgrades with prebuilt packages should always succeed. Since they’re binary, they should be fast. There’s a lot of ‘shoulds’ in this sentence, but these are reasonable suppositions.
What about pkgsrc?
Pkgsrc and DPorts shouldn’t be used at the same time, since one system’s packages may be at different versions but still get picked up during building for the other system. That’s about it for restrictions.
I intend to try building an experimental release of DragonFly with DPorts, to see if all the right packages can be added, but no guarantees. DPorts is brand new and does not yet have a repository for downloading packages, so the normal caveats apply; don’t install it on a mission-critical machine, and be ready to deal with any surprises from using it if you do try it out.
What packages are available?
Browsing the Github repo will show you all listed packages. More complex packages like xorg, openjdk7, and libreoffice install, as does xfce. Parts of KDE 3 and KDE 4 are in there. (I haven’t tried either.) I’m not sure about Gnome, but I don’t think anyone ever is. There’s no vim, but there is emacs.
That’s just what I see at this exact minute. It changes daily as more packages are built. Changes from DragonFly builds are sometimes relevant to the original FreeBSD port, so there’s benefits for everyone here.
What next?
Try it now if it has all the packages you need, or wait for a binary repository to be created to speed things up. Remember, this is a new project, so a willingness to deal with problems and contribute to fixes is necessary.
It’s actually been out since the start of January, but the release announcement is available now.
Stéphane Russell, on the users@ mailing list, pointed out an in-depth article about DragonFly’s 3.2 release, on linuxfr.org. It’s in French, which means I’m just going to have to trust his word about the contents.
January’s issue of BSD Magazine has something I didn’t expect: an article on panoramic photography on BSD – among other material.
Venkatesh Srinivas and Tim Bisson have been working for some time on a port of FreeBSD’s virtio and virtio-block drivers. (see man page commit) They’ve now been committed. This should make your virtual disk perform better, if nothing else.
If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly. One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”. I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the missing ingredient. DragonFly now scores the same as Linux.
Tangentially related, this cache coloring is happening in nmalloc, which is now used on 64-bit DragonFly systems. The previous one, dmalloc, had problems in long-running programs.
I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.
- Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
- The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
- An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
- In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via)
- 2600, from 1985, in free collected form. (via)
- Russ Cox’s writing. I’ve linked to some of it before. It’s all fun reading.
- IRC is dead, long live IRC. Shows the first IRC server.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Some very good tutorial videos. Don’t worry, it’s just electrostatic discharge, wire safety, fun with capacitors, and how to make a Windows shortcut (via/via)