Sepherosa Ziehau presented on DragonFly’s network stack at the just-concluded AsiaBSDCon 2018. He posted a link to the badges, his paper, and his slides.
Old games – but not too old, for this week’s theme.
- Those pesky Makefiles.
- Star Control lead devs fire back at Stardock lawsuit. I link to this just to point to the excellent open source game Ur-Quan Masters, which is available on every BSD.
- Liberating a X200. (via)
- The Worlds of Ultima.
- Anime Floppy Discs. (via)
- Fashion shows are better at the future than movies, according to this jwz post – and I agree.
- The Basic Toolbox. A good checklist.
- SPHINX, 1987.
- Adding Colors to man. (via)
- Freedombox. Not necessarily endorsing this setup, but running your own server is an excellent, excellent idea.
- Shaolin Chamber 36. Soundtrack music. (via)
- Related: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, one of the best kung fu movies.
- Shell readability: main and Shell readability: function parameters.
- The world of Linux Handhelds in 2018. That and the source link comments take you to some tiny hardware, which is my reason for reading.
- Wing Commander II.
- What free software is so good you can’t believe it’s available for free? A good chunk of what’s named here is immediately available to you via ports/dports/pkgsrc, without advertising or nagging, or the need to register in some megacorporation’s app store. Think about how nice that is, for a minute.. (via multiple places)
- How to tell when a company thinks they dominate part of a market: they drop interoperability with other protocols.
It’s a week for good quotes to pull from linked stories.
- Interview with MidnightBSD Founder and Lead Dev Lucas Holt. (via)
- Meltdown-mitigation syspatch/errata now available. For OpenBSD.
- a2k18 Hackathon Report: Ken Westerback on dhclient and more.
- John Carmack on OpenBSD, C++ & machine learning. “Linux is a lot of things, but cohesive isn’t one of them.” (via)
- A Year Away From Mac OS. “It turns out that when a huge portion of your system is open source your perspective changes.” (via)
- Found in comments in previous link’s source: OpenBSD game report on gog.com. I’ve wanted a BSD gaming site for years; I don’t have the time to do that too.
- Also found, a Reddit OpenBSD gaming group.
- OpenBSD vmm/vmd Update. (via)
- OPNsense 18.1.3 released.
- How do the different BSDs differ with regards to jails?
- AsiaBSDCon 2018 poster. (via)
- Sndio: a small audio and MIDI framework part of the OpenBSD project. (via)
- syspatches will be provided for both supported releases.
- Stack-register Checking.
- A week of NetBSD #1.
BSDNow 236 has a very eclectic range of items this week, including talk about pledge, cd, Bitcoin, Lua, Salt, SMTP, and so on. No interview, but I’m not sure how you’d even fit that in.
If you are using virtio drivers, there’s no longer a need for ‘device virtio_pci’ in your kernel config. It’s autoloaded as a dependency. If you run a custom kernel, remember to take it out. You’ll want to do that now if you’re on 5.1, or later at the next version upgrade if you are on 5.0.
The cdce(4) driver has been ported to DragonFly from FreeBSD, by Markus Pfeiffer. It’s for networking over USB, whether it’s USB on both ends or Ethernet on one.
There’s no speaker scheduled, but NYCBUG is having a meeting this Wednesday at 6:30 PM. Go, if you are near.
Overflow that started 2 weeks ago. Maybe I should go intraweekly for Lazy Reading?
- The Multics history of Unix. I link it for the Dennis Richie anecdote. (via)
- Unix: Building a Development Environment from Scratch. (PDF, via)
- A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification. Outlook.com is huge and poorly configured – it’s the AOL email of the 2010s!
- Whatever Happened to the Desktop Computer? (via)
- bhgv/Inferno-OS_Android – an Android port of Inferno OS. Phones seem a natural location for this. (via)
- What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications. Uses Debian, but applies to any packaging system. I like the “strong guarantee” language. (via)
- Analysis of SSHFS performance for large builds.
- Keyboard notebook – sized to fit under your keyboard, a good/simple idea. Kikkerland is like the U.S. version of Atypk.
- The Remarkable Number 1/89. (via)
- VF-1, a commandline Gopher client. (also via)
- Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. A Rolling Stone article from 1972 that ends with code. (via)
For some reason, BSDNow 235 wasn’t available on its normal Thursday, but it’s up now, with an interview of Goran Mekic, responsible for CBSD.
The first link about TorBSD is important: many of the major security issues in computing trace back to having only one vendor or product or whatever, used by everyone.
- An Open Letter to BSD-powered Companies and Projects. (via)
- NetBSD GPU support (Intel HD 4400).
- Device Driver Development for BSD.
- Hypervisor on dfly?
- Unfortunately, StackOverflow is a difficult-to-avoid site nowadays… Man pages don’t have this issue. (via)
- “Virtual machine templates for BSD flavours“. Includes DragonFly. (via)
- Mac OS versus FreeBSD: A Comparative Evaluation. Might be paywalled. (via)
- 44CON 2018 CFP Is Open. A security conference in the UK, later this year – not a 4.4 BSD conference that has somehow lasted multiple decades, darnit. However, the source link notes a need for OpenBSD material.
- A long two months. “On Friday we saw the patches Matthew Dillon put together for DragonFlyBSD for the first time. These were the first patches for KPTI that were very straightforward to read and understand, and applied to a BSD-derived kernel that was similar to those I’m accustomed to working on.” Hey, nice credit. (via)
- Pledge: OpenBSD’s defensive approach to OS Security. (via)
- NetBSD proposal for stop-the-world syscall. (via)
If you are using gpt(8) to format a disk, Matthew Dillon’s added a “init” option. It’s similar to ‘fdisk -Ib’, though don’t ask me how to use it because I have always been bad at manual disk formatting.
The default options on the math/py-numpy port slowed it down. Francois Tigeot noticed, and committed a change that takes advantage of all processors. Read his note to users@ for details.
For your Monday entertainment: the boot log from DragonFly on a system with 11 sockets, 10 cores per socket, for 110 CPUs. Plus 8 TB of RAM.
(Skip past the control codes at the start)
10 months until Christmas!
- Five ways to instantly improve blah blah your productivity blah. Useful techniques, described with humor. I need to use the “Analogue Day” one.
- Be Newsletters, the archived index.
- What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death. It used to be Moore’s Law that drove replacement, not the choices of the manufacturer.
- Vim Anywhere. (via)
- We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms.
- Ex Libris, about the New York Public Library. (via)
- Fall of Voodoo. So that’s what happened to 3dfx.
- Custom game system hardware.
- An Introduction to Digital Computers, a film. Digital as in “not analog”, 1969. (via)
- https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/ – I am entertained by the URL, and I understand why this applies to most package managers… but it doesn’t take into account the metadata leakage that https would prevent. (via)
- Aaaand here’s the counterpoint, which I agree with: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories. (via)
- Futures of distributions. (also via)
- Predictive command line usage, a PDF. That seems odd. (via)
Another across-the-BSDs week.
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- What’s Next for Feature Development in FreeNAS/TrueNAS?
- Description of the 1969 proto-Unix system based on a 2812 line PDP-7 assembly kernel. (via)
- The Known Costs of Security Embargoes.
- Military Grade Data Wiping In FreeBSD With BCWipe.
- “Has Linux lost its way?” comments prompt Debian developer to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years. (via)
- Christos Zoulas’s recent NYCBUG talk on reproducible builds in NetBSD is now available as video.
- How do I make quiet build/compile server for home ?
- Libreoffice failing to start after upgrade to 5.4.4.2 40m0(Build:2) (on NetBSD).
- Question about a distro.
- Every Journey Starts with a FAIL. (via)
- Meltdown fix committed by guenther@. Note the DragonFly cross-pollination.
BSDNow 234 is up, and has an interview with Benno Rice of FreeBSD. There’s also chatter about jails, Summer of Code, FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct, libhijack, and so on.
Here’s everything I know about it.
A new DragonFly user found setting keybell=”visual” in rc.conf caused a crash on the next terminal beep. In this case, the user is Deaf and so prefers something other than an auditory bell. The issue is fixed in development and release, but I always like seeing variations on “many eyes make bugs shallow“.
Nick Holland is giving a talk tonight on “Scripting Tips & Hacks” at SemiBUG. “Nick has been scripting roughly since scripts were hard-coded into
plugboards.” Go, see, if you are near Michigan.