DragonFly has generally shifted over to dports for 3rd-party software management, away from pkgsrc. Because of that, I haven’t been building binary packages of the quarterly pkgsrc releases. Pierre Abbat asked why on users@, and here’s my explanation of the change.
If you’re around New York City on Wednesday, Boris Kochergin will be giving a talk at the NYCBUG meeting about how he and his employer, New York Internet, managed to be in the middle of Hurricane Sandy and survive without interruption.
That same announcement lets drop the news that NYCBSDCon will happen next February 1st 8th.
John Marino has put in a large patch to DragonFly 3.5, updating all sorts of language-related items. As he warns, you will need a full buildworld/buildkernel in a specific order to update. On the plus side, you can now probably use your native language for nvi and for git.
Moved 20 servers to new hardware this week. Normally my workplace doesn’t get very active until snow hits. Normally. Anyway, going for the long sentences this week.
- Why I moved away from Microsoft ASP.NET. I agree with everything in this. I’m overgeneralizing, of course, but there’s a certain diminishing return in how easy you make any programming language.
- In which I revisit the pastimes of my misspent youth. The last 2 sentences are a nerd experience I am sure we’re all had.
- The Floppy ROM. Software via record. If you ever wanted to be able to see a head crash as it happens on your storage medium, this is the way. (via)
- Chart of Electromagnetic Radiation. You’ll need to/want to zoom in. (via)
- The Practice of Network Security Monitoring. I’ve linked to a review of the book before.
- Paula Deen X Machine. Baked goods and graphs, two of my favorite categories of thing. (via I forgot, sorry)
- The new Amazon tablets are nice, but there’s no video out. You have to use their network service. This is what makes me leery of newer tablets and phones; as it becomes easier to use network bandwidth to replace physical connections, you become dependent on a separate company to use your own hardware.
- Vim documentation in PDF form. Maybe print it, maybe don’t. (via)
- Salesforce Architecture. I like seeing how the really, really huge server setups work, but I doubt I’ll ever have to handle one; how many are there outside of Google/Amazon/a couple other companies? (via)
- Obstacles to future proofing home automation. At that level of hardware, you can’t assume everything’s going to talk 802.11 or have an Ethernet port.
- Tape rescues big data. I need to set up a larger backup system at work, and it might be tape. I hate tape, but I hate it less than the alternatives.
Your unrelated link of the week: Proper Opossum Massage. Yes, it’s a serious video, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.
This week was relatively quiet, but also had the most cross-BSD work I’ve seen in a while. Look at the links and you’ll see.
- Here’s some encryption fallout in FreeBSD.
- MegaRAID Invader cards now work on FreeBSD.
- OpenSSH is at version 6.3p1 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has moved to Unbound as a BIND replacement.
- FreeBSD imported a newer version of NetBSD’s readline.
- NetBSD supports the AlphaStation DS15, ported from OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has updated le(4) to match NetBSD’s version.
- OpenBSD has also moved to Unbound – version 1.4.21.
- OpenBSD now has ldns 1.6.16.
Here’s more on Unbound, since it seems to be a trend.
If you want to boot from a Hammer 2 /boot volume, you now can. Hammer 1 never worked well as /boot, though it was technically possible. Hammer 2 will be just fine.
Note that you can’t turn on recently-added disk compression since the bootloader doesn’t understand it, and Hammer 2 is not ready for anything but being worked on. Don’t try it unless you’re ready to be submitting code changes to fix Hammer2.
When Sepherosa Ziehau decides to improve something, he goes all out. For example, he recently improved the mxge(4) driver for Myricom 10G network cards – which is for relatively older hardware – and improved performance by 150Mbps.
This will not be a surprise to anyone seeing the work being done, but: All 5 DragonFly/Summer of Code students for 2013 passed, as noted today in emails from Google. It was possibly our best year yet in terms of buckling down and just plain working.
More Summer of Code wrapups: Larisa Grigore has posted a final report on SysV IPC work, and Mihai Carabas has posted his on hardware support for vkernels.
(Mihai’s report was out several days ago and I didn’t realize it, sorry!)
Francois Tigeot posted his work on the KMS driver for Radeon video cards. He’s looking for help since he’s low on time for the immediate future, and this is a project that could benefit everyone. (Well, everyone with the right video card.)
Joris GIOVANNANGELI and Pawel Dziepak both have published final reports for this year’s DragonFly/Summer of Code experience. Both of them say they want to keep working on DragonFly, which is exactly the result I want. There may be more if the other students have time. A final report wasn’t required, but it is good feedback.
Related: Joris is working on Capsicum for DragonFly and published an API document describing how it has worked/will work.
Please welcome our newest committers: Joris Giovannangeli and Mihai Carabas. Joris has already updated bc(1) and dc(1) to match what OpenBSD has. You may recognize Joris’s name from his just-finished Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly, and Mihai Carabas from both this year’s and last year’s Summer of Code.
Matthew Dillon’s committed the work by Daniel Flores on Hammer 2 compression and Mihai Carabas’s vkernel hardware support – both Summer of Code projects. There’s a good amount of detail in the commit messages describing the work and what it changed; I expect more Summer of Code work to be getting committed…
Note: you’ll want to do a full update.
This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!
- Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
- Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
- The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
- The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
- A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
- The Walkman Archive. (via)
- Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
- The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
- Kickstarter for open source. (via)
- Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
- Atari box art.
- Atari box art parody.
Finally, a quieter week.
- pfSense (which I use at work; performs great) has updated to 2.1, and now offers a ‘Gold‘ subscription program.
- FreeBSD has a new iSCSI target and initiator. (World rebuild needed and again)
- FreeBSD’s bxe(4) now supports the BCM57712 and BCM578XX.
- FreeBSD now can build LLDB, though you have to do it on purpose.
- FreeBSD’s arcmsr(4) driver for Areca hardware has been updated. (Areca supports BSD; buy them)
- NetBSD has Renesas and ASIX AX88179 USB support.
- NetBSD has a preliminary NVIDIA Geforce driver.
- NetBSD has updated to dhcpcd-6.1.0.
- NetBSD has updated to tzcode 2013e.
- QNAP V200 boards all have the same MAC? Weird.
- OpenBSD updated a large number of xenocara windowing parts.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 freeze is on from now to the 29th.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has added a new rconfig script that automatically mirrors the installed disks with ccd(4). You don’t remember what to do with rconfig(8)? Automatically (and headlessly) install DragonFly, of course! There’s already other examples – they’re just shell scripts.
I put together a list of what I’m thinking could be in the next DragonFly release. Going by our regular schedule, that’s a bit more than a month off. Of note: Summer of Code material and defaulting to dports. Follow the thread for more.
Something I only just recently found out about: BSDNow. They’re planning weekly videos with BSD news and interviews. I say ‘planning’, but as of this writing, both Episode 1 and Episode 2 (which is much better quality) are already available. Another episode is planned this week. Episode 3 is out already.
ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.
(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)