A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.
DragonFly has moved from the old USB stack to USB4BSD by default. That means:
- If you are already using USB4BSD, you will want to remove WANT_USB4BSD from your kernel config.
- If you have trouble, switch back to the old USB.
- There’s some drivers that are not yet converted; help with them would be appreciated.
- A full kernel/world build and ‘make upgrade’ will be needed in either case.
Sascha Wildner’s announcement email has all the gory details, including the kernel config changes to move back to the old USB setup. This is of course in master; 3.6 users are unaffected.
This week blew up with links fast.
- An 8-bit integer overflow turns Mahatma Gandhi into “255 points of pure nuclear rage“. That’s one of the more entertaining sentences I’ve ever typed here.
- “DevOps” is one of the new buzzwords lately. The most shallow approaches seem to equate it with automated deployment, but it really seems to be about project management within IT. It’s probably of most use within larger companies that have enough staff to build up department-internal silos. I don’t know if it’s a new strategy or a way to deal with the rigidity of larger corporate IT groups. (via)
- mosh: the answer to ssh annoyances. (via)
- Why I use Emacs. I like “retrogrouch.” (via)
- The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks. You know your system/program has really made it when it starts it own plugin/theme/library/mod/extension/app store collection. (via)
- Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. “DHTML was the Twitter Bootstrap of the time.” (via)
- What is a web framework? A temperate description. (via)
- Reflections on Eric Raymond’s “Myth of the Fall”. Makes a good point: open source is the best when it’s for architectural, interoperational reasons.
- Bitrot and atomic COWs. Will make you worried about your already-RAIDed data. (via #dragonflybsd)
- Thoughts on style, the TLS, and errors. I agree with the note about ‘affirmative
conformationconfirmation’. - Technology has changed. Tech items from a decade ago. Everything was silvery and round back then. (via)
- A little farther back in time, Thomas Dolby Explains How Synthesis Works To Kids & Ghosts. 1989, and yes, he plays that song. (via a mailing list for yetis)
- Related to nothing: it’s odd to see your great-grandfather mentioned in a random place on the web.
- The 2014 7-Day Roguelike Challenge has started. (via)
- Ow my eyes.
Your unrelated video of the week: This trailer for Crawl. This is a roguelike multiplayer cross-platform game, though I don’t know if it would work on BSD. The important thing: the voiceover narration is fantastic.
Links everywhere this week!
- ZFS 101. This might be the same material presented at NYCBSDCon; I’m not sure.
- Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script.
- The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/03.
- PC-BSD Weekly Digest 20.
- Theo De Raadt questions for a Slashdot interview.
- OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 is released.
- Introduction to FreeNAS development.
- GhostBSD activity. (via)
- FreeNAS is now 64-bit only. (via)
- OpenBSD package building on larger machines.
- pkgsrcCon 2014 is happening June 21-22 in London, UK.
- The schedule for BSDCan 2014 is out.
- Merkletrees. Don’t know what it’s for; just like the name.
- NetBSD has a versioning system called ‘bikeshed’. It appears to mostly be plans at this point.
- OpenBSD has added qlw(4), a driver for QLogic ISP SCSI HBAs.
- Apparently some quirks from decades ago still survive.
- Random is more random on BSD than on Linux. (see last paragraph) (via)
- If you keep an emergency towel, you may get this joke.
Hammer’s ability to stream to remote disks is great, but what if you have storage that uses some other file system? Antonio Huete Jimenez put together a shell script that will dump out the contents of a Hammer PFS, for upload to whatever. Read the README for the details.
If you are upgrading packages on your DragonFly 3.6 system, and you have docbook installed, there’s an extra step needed because of the moving around of several docbook packages. If you don’t have docbook installed – nothing to see here.
Episode 27 of BSDNow is an interview with Will Backman of BSDTalk. It is unfortunately a straight-ahead interview, and not an Epic Rap Battle.
Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
I followed up with Google on why DragonFly isn’t in Summer of Code this year. It is exactly as I suspected: they want to get new organizations in. DragonFly’s been doing it for 6 years, so they are picking new orgs over returning ones. This is apparently the same reason NetBSD isn’t in this year, either.
(Honestly, I can use the break.)
Sascha Wildner has updated arcmsr(4), which brings in support for the Areca ARC1214, ARC1224, ARC1264, ARC1284, and ARC1883 models, from FreeBSD. Please test if you have the appropriate hardware.
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
Coretemp is now in the default kernel configs for DragonFly, so you can use coretemp to see your Intel CPU temperature.
If you’re using the i915 driver for xorg, and xorg dies with a “No monitor specified for screen” error, there’s a config change to fix that, or you can just update.
A public service announcement: Check your backup power systems when the weather is bad. It has been so cold that the always-running heater blocks cooked away the coolant in my workplace’s backup generator in between the weekly inspections, and when the power died a few days ago, the generator failed to start. This led to the paradoxical sensor warning: “High coolant temperature” when the outside temperature was below freezing.
- Scott Hanselman wrote “Microsoft killed my Pappy“, where he attributes dislike to Microsoft to being old anger from antitrust suits, etc. Those were more the outcome of frustration over Microsoft quality, as I recall. Microsoft is doing some things right nowadays – generally using open source techniques and sorta working with standards – but then again, so are all the other large tech silos.
- Those who do not know jails are doomed to reinvent them. That’s my description of these container/docker/etc ideas floating around Linux. Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying. (via)
- speaking.io, about public speaking. Posted mostly for my own future edification. (via)
- UNIX: Making better use of the find command.
- More history on stpcpy(3) than you ever knew.
- Unix: How to get along with your coworkers.
- James Iry’s History of Programming Languages. Some the jokes aren’t exactly new, but it made me laugh. (via #dragonflybsd)
- The End of Facebook. I know I should have the Digest on Facebook, but I’m not sure how much of an audience I’d be able to reach without paying to play. (via)
- I Still Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem. I find the lack of adherence to standards – or even agreement on common formats – very frustrating. (via)
- Twitch Plays Pokemon, the explanation.
- A brief history of one-line fixes. Written in honor of Apple’s recent blunder. The conclusion is good, too.
Your unrelated link of the week: Muppets, NYC, and tea. I know it’s an ad, but it fits my interests perfectly.
Another week where I barely need to look up source code commits.
- PC-BSD Weekly Digest 18 and Digest 19.
- OpenBSD’s signify tool has been backported to OpenBSD versions < 5.5.
- Video of an OpenBSD install.
- xorg, unprivileged on OpenBSD. (via)
- This is a good idea: FreeBSD 10’s release.sh mapped out.
- bcrypt() updates in OpenBSD and what it means for you. (also)
- iXSystem’s NYCBSDCon 2014 recap. (via nycbug-talk)
- A description of those expensive/busy WhatsApp FreeBSD servers. (via)
- FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis. (via #nycbug)
- NetBSD is bringing in BIND 9.10.0b1. (a beta?)
- NetBSD is also in the process of moving from gcc 4.5 to 4.8.
- Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord. I still haven’t set up the Netflow system that I want to set up, dangit.
- pkg will require libucl. This affects FreeBSD and will affect DragonFly too.
- OpenBSD has an experimental USB installer. This may be new to the upcoming release – I don’t know.