Francois Tigeot wrote up a summary of DragonFly’s support for newer Intel video chipsets. (short summary: much better recently) KMS support is now the default in DragonFly. There’s still work ongoing.
DragonFly has two included compilers – GCC 4.4, and GCC 4.7. Traditionally, we switch from one compiler to the other as default, and then replace the old one with a newer release, and so on.
Until recently, dports built almost exclusively using GCC 4.4. John Marino’s switching to GCC 4.7, for a variety of reasons he lists in a recent post to users@. An interesting point that he raises: GCC 4.4 won’t necessarily be replaced with a newer GCC, but perhaps clang?
Michael W. Lucas needs tehcnical reviewers for his first draft of ‘Sudo Mastery’. If you know sudo, and know how to criticize (and who doesn’t, for this is the Internet), look at what you’d have to do.
We’re in the last week of what has been a very good Summer of Code for DragonFly, and here’s the last reports. (We’re missing two, but this is cleanup week, so not much to report)
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable (updated)
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (Joris, where’s your report?)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
I don’t think I saw it before, but there’s a list of speakers and events up for vBSDCon. There’s no DragonFly-specific talks, but there is a presentation from Baptiste Daroussin, one of the people behind pkgNG, which is used to create parts of DragonFly’s dports framework.
It’s positive to see a BSD conference sponsored by a company that’s not selling a BSD-specific product. It’s happening in about a month and a half, October 25-27, in Dulles, VA.
The September issue of BSD Magazine is out as a free download. The theme is BSD system administration, though there’s always other articles in addition to the issue topic.
(via freebsdnews.net, since I haven’t seen the announcement in the bsdmag.org RSS feed or by email)
I think I’m finally catching up on the backlog.
- Unix: Flexibly moving files with lftp. I usually copy and paste a shell script together.
- BANCStar source code. In that sort of environment, there’s no good or bad code. It has moved beyond such considerations. (via)
- The Lenna Story. About the 1972 Playboy centerfold image used to test image compression. I mentioned it once before in passing. (via)
- If you find regular expressions difficult, putting another layer of expression on top doesn’t help. (via)
- How not to check the validity of an email address. I had a similar experience at an old job in 1999, where a coworker set a site’s main page to get all news stories and then showed the 10 most recent. This started to really slow things down when we reached over 5,000 stories… (via)
- Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services. A PDF of slides. (via)
- It’s described as “the best programming fonts“, but it’s really the most popular monospaced typefaces. Who cares about correct language – it has visual examples. (via)
- Phone keypads could have been very different. (via)
- Sudo Mastery’s first draft is complete. You can buy it now and get updates as it gets polished.
- Have yourself a keysigning party. GPG is complicated. I know there’s reasons, but still, this is the sort of thing that would be better with as little barrier to entry as possible.
- The Internet, via Commodore64 and Neuromancer.
Your unrelated link of the week: The Alan Lomax recordings.
Barely getting this done in time for Saturday…
- FreeBSD can now download firmware for Samsung drives.
- FreeBSD has updated ipfilter to 5.1.2.
- FreeBSD has updated to OpenPAM Nummularia.
- On FreeBSD, clang means no gcc or libstdc++. (part of the switch)
- FreeBSD has new Hyper-V drivers.
- NetBSD has support for the ‘4G Systems XS Stick W14’.
- NetBSD has updated Postfix to 2.8.15.
- NetBSD has a pile of Broadcom chipset changes.
- NetBSD has support for the MPL115A2 pressure sensor.
- NetBSD has a start on xhci (AKA USB3) support.
- OpenBSD has support for the FreeScale i.MX6 SoC.
- OpenBSD enabled support for TLS/SSL Perfect Forward Secrecy.
- OpenBSD 5.4 is available for pre-order.
- OpenBSD used to build an MPLS network.
- PC-BSD is going to start building on FreeBSD-10.
- The pkgsrc-2013Q3 pre-release freeze starts tomorrow.
I know this is late; my schedule is a bit messed up. This is the penultimate week!
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace (no report)
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (no actual report; student is traveling)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
It’s now possible to use systat(1) to see per-connection speeds and pftop status, thanks to Matthew Dillon.
I’m just going to roll all these updates from Sepherosa Ziehau together into one post, because it’s a lot: He’s updated igb(4) to 2.3.10, updated em(4) to 7.3.8, merged the hardware abstraction layer of those two drivers, enabled TSO on all PCI-E em(4) chipsets, and added support for a whole slew of Realtek chipsets in the re(4) driver. Whew!
If you’ve got a MCP79 NVIDA-chipset board, Sascha Wildner’s commit of Ed Berger’s port from OpenBSD has you covered.
By the time you read this, I’ll have already been sitting on an island for a few days. There’s so much stuff to post lately I’m scheduling material a week out.
- Have you used the grep replacement ‘ack‘? There’s a Twitter feed of tips for it.
- A horrible programming idea, so bad I can’t tell if it’s trolling. (via multiple places)
- Links at the previous item led me here: Breaking Systems for Fun and Profit.
- A tiny fatmac. It’s adorable.
- Beautiful Code, from Rob Pike, described by Brian Kernighan.
- That previous link was found via this reimplementation of Pike’s grep in Go. The “Practice of Programming” book mentioned is one of my favorites.
- The SCUMM Diary. The SCUMM engine could arguably be as big an influence as the Quake engine on game history. (via)
- This is a very nice keyboard.
- Managing sshd in Ansible, cross-platform. A sequel to last week’s Ansible/Lucas link.
- UNIX pioneers remember the good times. These anecdotes seems to illustrate the personalities of their tellers/perpetrators. Or at least I imagine they do. (via)
- NTP reference clock statistics. (also via) When milliseconds matter. Also, yay graphs!
- WTF Visualizations. A counterpoint to the previous well-illustrated link. I read through a bunch of the nonsensical graphs and started to feel disoriented. (also also via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Scout, by Malachi Ward. A self-contained sci-fi story.
There’s been a lot of commit activity across the BSDs, but my list doesn’t seem to reflect that. A lot of incremental work, I suppose.
- FreeBSD has imported the multiqueue VirtIO driver
- FreeBSD has added support for the BCM20702A0 chipset, for Bluetooth adapters.
- FreeBSD can now reach single user mode with Digi i.MX53 / Wi-i.MX53 boards
- FreeBSD supports Synaptics touchpad middle and extended buttons. (Breaks ABI)
- FreeBSD has improved disk encryption speed with AES-NI.
- FreeBSD has updated bmake to 20130904.
- FreeBSD has added support for the DLINK DWA-127 wireless adapter.
- NetBSD has updated to llvm/clang r189662.
- Joyent has put together potential SMF support for pkgsrc.
- PC-BSD has been synced with FreeBSD 9.2.
- NetBSD has bare support for the Cubieboard 1 and 2.
- NetBSD has updated to version 458 of less.
- NetBSD has the beginnings of a Synopsys DWC2 (USB controller) driver.
- OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.0.
- OpenBSD has added the ugold(4) temperature sensor driver.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has committed his work on “dirfs”, a filesystem that lets you mount directories from your host machine within the running vkernel environment. It’s a sort of shared folders for vkernels. See the commit message for usage details.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made a number of improvements to TCP in DragonFly – specifically, nonblocking and blocking connect(2) performance. See each of his commits for statistics on how much this has reduced processor use under high load. He has also written up an extensive description of how all this TCP stuff works in DragonFly.
In similar news, he has a nginx patch that delivers a significant performance increase. It may go into nginx itself.
I tagged it last week, but it took me a while to build the images. See the tag commit for a list of the bugfixes. The big thing for me is the fix for amrd and the virtual machine performance fix. Either update via git, or download an image.
You may have trouble switching back to a vty if you’re running a recent Intel video chipset and using KMS. It’s a side effect of the new KMS support, but it is being worked on.
All the machines in dragonflybsd.org should now be available over IPv6.
Also, Matthew Dillon did something weird to the DragonFly IPv6 network stack.
Almost done with this year’s GSoC. It’s been astonishingly… easy? The students are working and the problems are difficult, but there’s been very little in the way of crisis.
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature (includes performance graphs)
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum (no actual report; student is traveling)
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels