There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will still be a functioning ld on the system. Use this along with NO_GCC41 (so only gcc 4.4 gets built) to speed up your buildworlds, if you like.
The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.
There’s a new DragonFly mirror, in Colorado, USA – at dragonflybsd.mirrorcatalogs.com. It’s on the mirrors page on the DragonFly site, too.
The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month. This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.
If you’re looking to use IPMI and remotely watch the console of another system, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to help with that.
I do this almost every year, with a little bit more every time. Check those previous years for non-comics/books, cause that’s most of what I’ve seen lately. I’ve recently seen a number of comics lists:
Comics/books: Wondermark gift guide – Wondermark store and cards – Dr. McNinja store – Schlock Mercenary guide – Spacetrawler (scroll down) – Secret Headquarters 1, 2, and 3 (via).
Other lists: Matthew Baldwin’s Good Gift Games list, plus his followup. (The defectiveyeti site is funny, too.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added updated the ‘ecc’ device, for Intel E3-1200 series systems. What’s it do? It will report on memory errors, and potentially fix them.
You should have ECC memory in your server already. If not, you oughta.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, ecc(4) already existed, but didn’t support Intel controllers. Also, the Xeon X3400 series is supported now too.
Last week was low on links, but this week is great! I hope you have some time set aside.
- This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11. I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before. (via)
- Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
- Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonfly)
- nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently. Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
- This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point. Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run. (via)
- Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
- “Don’t Be a Free User” (via) The last paragraph is the best.
- An expanded grep and diff. ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds. Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult. (via)
- A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright. This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference. It doesn’t.
- So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like. You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI. (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
- I like this indicator light setup. (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too. I wish there still were computers like these.
- While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station? Here’s some pictures. (via)
Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?
BSDTalk 209 is out, and it’s a 16-minute conversation with Jim Brown about BSD Certification. (who I think I met at NYCBSDCon 2010; a pleasant guy)
The December issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the title “Rolling your own kernel”, though that’s just one of the articles there. No article from me this month.
The December issue of the Technology Innvation Management Review is out, with the theme of Intellectual Property Rights. Patents get used for Internet Outrage – read this and be better informed.
The FreeBSD Foundation is putting out their end of year donation notice. Donate if you can; the support for active developers there helps everyone.
Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :
- You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
- You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.
I’ve had a bunch of posts like this so far, but that’s not a bad thing. Sepherosa Ziehau has a pair of optimizations that appear to make performance with big pipes (1G) and tiny packets (18b, if I read correctly) reach near the physical maximum for 1000-base-T Ethernet.
Another week, another linkpile.
- Here’s some old software. I’ve got something older sitting on my shelf here, though.
- A patch to DragonFly, taken from OpenBSD, submitted by Loganaden Velvindron and committed by Venkatesh Srinivas. The patch isn’t that exciting, but it makes me feel cool to namedrop non-Americanized names. If only I could pronounce them!
- Speaking of which, there isn’t always a lot of comments on this Digest (which is good; a long series of comments on the Internet tend to be the result of trolling or inanity.), but the recent strlen() story led to some juicy details.
- Man, I wish this NoteSlate device existed. There’s the BoogieBoard, but it’s not quite the same.
I’ll make up for my relatively low number of links by asking a question: Where do you go for your end of year gift giving? Where do you wish people would go to buy you gifts? I’m looking for suggestions for a gift guide.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Gun Show. This one and that one are my favorites.
I think a lot of people don’t realize rcrun exists, and run files in /etc/rc.d directly. If you’re one of those people, read the rcrun(8) manpage. Then, notice that Sascha Wildner has extended rcrun to work with the etc/rc.d in /usr/local and /usr/pkg too.
Francois Tigeot has been working for quite a while on a VFS accounting system. It doesn’t restrict to a quota (yet), but it will give you byte totals for each mounted filesystem. It has been committed, so it looks like a good way to tell which PFS is eating your disk.
Update: Francois pointed out he’s still adding parts for this. So it’s not quite done yet, but soon.
Buildworlds are now much faster, because they can run themselves in parallel. Invoke it using the -j option to make. Matthew Dillon saw a 25% reduction in time when using ‘make -j 12 buildworld’ on a 4-core system. You may need to manually update xinstall and mkdir:
cd /usr/src/usr.bin/xinstall make clean; make obj; make all install cd /usr/src/bin/mkdir make clean; make obj; make all install
It’ll also use more memory than a non-parallel build, but heck, that’s cheap these days.