John Marino updated libm, bringing a large quantity of functions. This may be a stopgap measure for now. As a positive side effect, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder now.
Chris Turner got it working on i386, at least, and his post will help you do the same. I don’t know if these changes have made it through to pkgsrc or for x86_64 yet.
That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts. MSI is what deals with all that traffic. High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance. Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.
There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.
BSDTalk has 20 minutes of interview with James Nixon of iXsystems, from LISA 2011.
Are you going to Chaos Communication Congress 28? There’s going to be a number of DragonFly developers there, so it’s a good time to meet up. They’re in EFNet #dragonflybsd IRC, so speak up there if you want to find them.
The recently discovered telnetd vulnerability has been fixed in DragonFly, thanks to Peter Avalos. Apparently it’s been around everywhere forever. (last link via xhr) Hopefully there aren’t that many people that still need a telnet daemon; SSH has run it out of town for the most part.
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.
There’s been a rare segfault present in DragonFly for quite some time. It’s been difficult to reproduce, and the 2.12 release due some months ago was held up specifically to fix it. Matthew Dillon was, after many days (months?) of work, able to replicate it reliably and eventually find a way around what appears to be a new AMD-specific bug. Read his very detailed explanation of what he did to get to this point.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked his accounting work with blogbench, and posted a PDF with the results. Dmitrij D. Czarkoff made a simpler graph, which can be used to draw the conclusion: blogbench didn’t work well for estimating the impact of VFS accounting. If you want to try accounting yourself, put vfs.accounting_enabled="1" in your /boot/loader.conf.
(The normal DragonFly mailarchive isn’t updating because it feeds from DragonFly NNTP, and that’s not updating, so I’m using Gmane for post links.)
I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.
The links are sheer entertainment this week. No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.
- I greatly enjoyed this history of personal computer mishaps and blunders. Of course, nothing like any of that has ever happened to me. Ever. Ever ever ever.
- Nintendo Entertainment System stories. (a comic) Also familiar to anyone of a particular age.
- This is good advice about env(1) – use it.
- “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos“, a video via matthiasr on EFNet #dragonflybsd.
- “What’s the strangest language feature you’ve ever encountered?” (via) Some of these are mind-boggling. I’ve also never seen APL before, yeesh.
- My Year in Roguelikes. I think a few of the games mentioned are in pkgsrc.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions. Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me. I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.
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?