If you are like me and have a long weekend, dig into /usr/share/examples. Not all of it is necessarily up to date, but there’s examples there on running rconfig, diskless, different pf and ipfw examples, and so on. Actual documentation is in corresponding man pages – and there’s examples on how to write them, too.
I just wasted an hour trying to figure out why xorg had strange output but no errors on this laptop, and it’s because I had i915_load=”YES” in /boot/loader.conf instead of i915_load=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf. I’m almost nearly sure I’ve mentioned that before, but if not: here you go.
(though if you never plan to run X, you can put it in loader.conf and everything will just work.)
(Title updated for a more correct sentence)
Allan Jude went to Taiwan for BSDTW, so there’s a nice con report as part of this week’s BSDNow, along with the usual news summary.
The Areca driver, arcmsr(4), has been updated to version 1.40.00.00. This comes right from the company, too, which is very nice of them.
There’s several ‘lockmgr’ test programs in DragonFly that can be used to test locking performance. Matthew Dillon used them recently to test some locking optimizations.
No theme this week.
- Tennis for Two, a video game from 1958. (via)
- Two Minutes Hate, Twitter Edition and Facebook says “send nudes”. Social media is generally bad for everyone.
- The Case for RSS. The Digest would be several times harder to do without RSS. (via)
- Running the First Ever 1970s Dungeon Crawl With Old School-Inspired Rules in 2017. (via)
- No, it is not a compiler error. It is never a compiler error. Except that the author goes on to describe a bonkers compiler error he found.
- Another system software error. The followup to the previous link.
- I got my VT420 working. (via)
- The best laptop ever made. Arguable, but still possible. (via)
- cVim and Vimium (for Chrome), Tridactyl and Vim Vixen (for Firefox) – Vim inputs for your web browser. Replaces the no-longer-updated Vimperator. (via)
- Forsh – A Unix shell embedded in Forth. (via)
- SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies Trailer. (via)
- M-x backward-sexp-reboot-laptop. (via)
Whee!
- More p2k17 Hackathon: Anthony J. Bentley on firmware, games and securing pkg_add runs, Sebastian Reitenbach on Puppet,
Landry Breuil on Mozilla things,Florian Obser on network stack progress, kernel relinking. - Hyper V VLAN tag on pfSense?
- OpenBSD on G4 Cube. (via)
- FreeNAS ISCSI Luns & VMware; restricting lun visibility?
- FreeNAS vs. Server 2016 vs. unRaid?
- How’s the [Nvidia] driver support compared to Linux?
- Why are supercomputers all running Linux and not BSD?
- VMWare + FreeNAS, Encryption.
- OS X:Anyone using Xfce or other DE in place of Aqua?
- Switching from 1Password to Bitwarden.
- BSDTW ’17 Conference Recap.
- Moving Freshports.
- FreeBSD/EC2 on C5 instances.
Welcome new DragonFly committer, Peeter Must!
I’m a bit late linking to the new BSDNow episode, “Opening ZFS in 2017“, but here it is. You can guess at least one of the topics covered from the title.
Do you have a terabyte or more of RAM? You can boot DragonFly. In theory over 32 terabytes will require changes – but oh, to have such problems…
Noted from this commit: if you are routing over IPv6 directly to another address, the sysctl net.inet6.icmp6.nd6_onlink_ns_rfc4861 must be set to 1.
rdist has been removed. Does anyone mind? I don’t think so.
This is one of the more historical episodes of Lazy Reading.
- More links about TAOS, the odd operating system from last week, including its modern version.
- ZeroPhone, an open source cell phone you can assemble. Not off-the-shelf easy, but certainly a good idea.
- Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins. (via)
- Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983. (via)
- books chapter sixteen.
- A Net Before the Web, Part 3: Content and Competition. Continued from last week’s links.
- Encoded, Decoded. A history of USENET.
- Experiences from a Decade of TinyOS Development. (PDF, via)
- The underground story of Cobra, the 1980s’ illicit handmade computer. (via)
A good variety this week.
- Building software with Ravenports.
- “SSH Mastery, 2nd Ed” News, Sponsorships, and Cover.
- LISA 2017 Conference Recap.
- LibreSSL 2.6.3 released. (via)
- First Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition preorders available.
- GhostBSD 11.1 RC1 is ready! (via)
- p2k17 Hackathon reports: 1 2 3 4 5.
- Why did we build our solution on top of FreeBSD?
- Nearly Online Zpool Switching Between Two FreeBSD Machines.
- Upcoming SemiBUG workshop suggestion.
- Open source Visio-ish network diagramming. (From a BSD list, so I’m linking it here.)
- pfSense – Cisco Aironet AP’s (only 1 works, all identical).
- NAT through pfSense question.
- Ilja van Sprundel – Are all BSDs are created equally? Video, unfortunately picking “winners”. (via)
- 4.2BSD on SIMH vax with networking. (via)
- NetBSD on Allwinner SoCs Update. (via)
sys_pipe has been modified to avoid contention on DragonFly, which means better performance as tasks get handed between processors. See the commit message for details.
Matthew Dillon has added KVABIO, an API for avoiding the need to sync the TLB across all CPUs before continuing. What’s this mean? The more CPUs you are dealing with, the longer it takes to make sure all of them have the same cached view of the virtual memory. There’s a tradeoff – caching that view speeds up memory access, but the time cost of the synchronization can erase those benefits.
This API is now supported for NVMe and swap, HAMMER2, and tmpfs. Note that those last two links show a huge drop in IPI messaging. In the real world, this showed about a 5% improvement in performance for CPU-intensive work like complete synth builds. (Based on IRC conversations.)
This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but goes into in-depth explanations of ZFS caching, man page reading, and more – so there’s lots to keep you busy, just in the show description.
The ppp kernel module has been removed. It’s still possible to run ppp(8) in userland, with tun(4), so it’s only a change in strategy, not result.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an update for the Realtek re(4) network driver. Try it if you have the hardware, whether older or newer.