If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure. Check the mirrors page for details.
Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others. He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.
Have you ever tried to run a service and realized you forgot to make an entry in rc.conf to enable it? It’s mildly annoying. There’s now a “one’ keyword (via NetBSD) that lets you enable a service, once. It still apparently performs sanity checks, unlike the otherwise-similar ‘force’ keyword.
The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as always. It’s a real grab-bag of topics this time, so there should be something to interest you. This time, it might be an article on DragonFly and Beowulf clusters. (I was totally not expecting that.)
A few days ago, I posted about Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 leaving pkgsrc – it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer, at least for the 2.5 version. This means the Zope packages will be gone too, since they depend on Python 2.4. This won’t affect you if you aren’t using these packages, of course.
Notice how the 2.12 release never really happened, and 3.0 came out about 6 months later than usual? A lot of that delay was caused by a vigorous search for a weird bug. Multi-threaded buildworlds would crash, seemingly randomly and rarely. It turns out we have confirmation from AMD that it is, indeed, a CPU hardware bug.
The organization application for DragonFly is in for Google Summer of Code. If you are thinking of working as a mentor or as a student, please let me know soon! We will know if we’re accepted (for the 5th time!) on the 16th.
Whee!
- “Entropy is a programming langauge where data decays as the program runs. ” (via) It was used to write Drunk Eliza, a form of the famous Eliza program that uses Rogerian-therapy-style interaction. That led me to find Esolang, the esoteric programming languages wiki. You will be amused/horrified, perhaps simultaneously, by some of the languages described there. (Did I link to Esolang before? I recall something like that but can’t find it…)
- Here’s someone asking for an implementation of DragonFly’s swapcache, for Postgres. The response, quite correctly, is “No.” I can’t imagine how painful it would be to support a database-specific disk caching system across multiple platforms, on top of whatever each platform did on its own. (Thanks, Jan Lentfer)
- Surrealist humor mixed with typographical humor.
- SSH Mastery is now available on Amazon, in hardcopy form.
- Cat vs. Router.
- Armenia has abolished summer time. It’s just a time zone update, but I like the phrase.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Friends With Boys. The whole comic is available online starting with the first page here and going on for about 200 more. The full comic is only going to be online for a few days – hopefully enough for people to see it – and then you have to buy it. (There will still be a preview.) It’s a good story.
If you said “Yes!”, you’re in luck. Markus Pfeiffer got ghc to compile on DragonFly, and his fixes (for DragonFly at least) to enable it are already committed.
I’ve seen notices in the past 24 hours for 2 different BSD events: BSD-Day, at UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 2012, and EuroBSDcon 2012, in Warsaw, Poland, October 18-21. The Call For Proposals is out for EuroBSDcon, for submission by May 20th.
The default version of Python in pkgsrc is going to become 2.7. This will mean the 2012Q1 release will use that version by default. Older versions, meaning Python 2.4 and 2.5, may be going away. At least, that’s how the linked thread started but I’m not totally sure about it as I read farther through.
Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.
Is it possible to boot with only 48M of RAM in a DragonFly system? Probably not. 128M would be better. I usually talk about the lower memory limit for Hammer, since it’s so relatively low for a snapshotting file system, but the converse applies here. 128M is probably the comfortable lower limit, though it’s pretty hard to find a system that would limit you that way without doing it on purpose. 128M sticks of RAM are practically disposable these days, really.
Thanks to John Marino’s work, it’s now possible to build the DragonFly kernel and world using gold, and have it work. You just have to set WORLD_LDVER to make it work. I don’t think there’s any user-visible change from this, other than a tiny speedup in building. I don’t know if any other BSD is using gold yet.
Alex Hornung added support for rdrand(4), the random number generator built into some Intel CPUs. That would be Ivy Bridge CPUs, which aren’t released yet, so it hasn’t been tested… but you’re covered for that day in the future when they arrive.
Take a look at the schedule if you’ve been thinking about going… (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
That’s exactly what Michael Lucas talks about in this recent post; using ssh to browse from a different machine, but using a local web browser. He uses it to get around a network problem, but I imagine there’s a number of other applications. This is one of the valuable tips from his recent book.
Hello new DragonFly 3.0 users! This is my not-about-DragonFly weekend link roundup. I’ll be back to regular DragonFly-ish stuff tomorrow.
- Vim anti-patterns, Gnuplotting, and Computing History At Bell Labs. I’m combining what would normally be 3 separate points because I stole them all from Christian Neukirchen’s blog. I wish I had found them first.
- I mentioned Dungeons & Dragons last week, which led Michael Lucas to point out Dungeon Crawl Classics in the comments. Along that same theme, here’s some 70’s role playing game illustrations. (via) There’s a parallel between computing in the late 1970s and fantasy; expert programmers were called wizards, understanding computers was an esoteric art… I could develop the heck out of that thesis, but let’s just look at the pictures and feel nostalgic instead.
- And then everything got a lot more weird-looking, 20 years later! (via)
- Hey, that time zone lawsuit mentioned here before was dismissed. That’s good news. (via lots of places)
- Hyperpolyglot: Scripting. Look for your favorite scripting language and compare it side-by-side with others. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The text of the DragonFly 3.0 announcement gets copied around to a lot of sites, far more than I’m linking here. However, I found this one entertaining because it kind of makes it sound like DragonFly is just what I happened to come with.
- Custom 3D printing is becoming accessible enough that I’m trying to think of things I could get printed that way, even though I don’t need it. (via I lost it, sorry)
Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet. Read her books if you have a fascination with old dead things.
See the release page for details. This release took longer than normal because of a crazy bug hunt, but the payoff is that this version performs better than ever.
Note: The x86_64 GUI ISO image had a problem due to file size (over 2G); redownload if you’ve had trouble booting it.
I was reading an article about how Tumblr scaled to handle the huge amount of data it’s regularly pushing out. Apparently, it started life as a traditional LAMP stack, but they’ve since moved on – to software packages I have not yet needed to ever use. Being open source software, it all has crazy names. Some of these packages are perfectly familiar to me now, but others are completely new.
Anyway, for fun, I decided to see how many of these sometimes new-to-me packages were present in pkgsrc. I’ll reproduce a paragraph from the story that lists the software they use, and link each one that I found in pkgsrc.
- Apache
- PHP, Scala, Ruby
- Redis, HBase, MySQL
- Varnish, HA-Proxy, nginx,
- Memcache, Gearman, Kafka, Kestrel, Finagle
- Thrift, HTTP
- Func
- Git, Capistrano, Puppet, Jenkins
That’s actually more than I thought I’d find, though I can’t articulate why. Anyway, if any of the names are unfamiliar to you, now is the time to follow up. Redis, for example, looks more interesting to me at a casual glance than the normal NoSQL models I’ve heard about.