Even though DragonFly is not incorporated as a non-profit, there’s been a rash of unsolicited donations in the last few weeks, all of which are appreciated. For end-of-year – or start-of-new-year donations – there’s also the 501(c)3 organizations behind FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, too.
Francois Tigeot has updated DragonFly to match the video support found in the Linux 4.0 kernel. This will benefit you most if you are running Skylake, Cherryview, or Valleyview chipsets. Don’t ask me how to tell; the improvement has been so rapid I’ve lost track of which model codename is which.
The 32nd Chaos Communication Congress is running now, and is being streamed if you want to watch the talks as they happen. There’s a posted schedule.
Last of the year, and all the links are terse!
- How Tor Works: Part One. (via)
- Building Up Perlin Noise. (via)
- On choosing the Z80 over the 6502. (via)
- Ulix – a Literate Unix. (via)
- SSH Tips. (via)
- Selectric bug (via)
- Scripted Amiga Emulator. (via)
- Wakka wakka bang splat. (via)
- Perl 6 is out. (via)
- Geometric animated GIFs. (via)
- Search-oriented tools for Unix-style mail. (via)
- Things I won’t work with. Chemistry, not software. (via)
There’s some DragonFly links I snuck in here because why not?
- OpenBSD Innovation List. (via)
- How to block traffic based off country – pFSense (via)
- pfSense 2.2.6 is released.
- Orchestrating multiple FreeBSDs?
- Hacking the PS4, part 3: FreeBSD Kernel exploitation. (via)
- PIC32-RetroBSD Open Source Hardware Board running Unix like RetroBSD OS. (via)
- Is there a way to cite the FreeBSD handbook and other documentation in APA format?
- Newbie testing out new OS’s
- OPNsense 15.7.23 Released
- [PSA] 1920×1080 on DragonFlyBSD 4.4 under QEMU/KVM.
- The DragonFly 4.4 release article on linuxfr.org – always in-depth.
- Faces of FreeBSD 2015: Erin Clark.
- n2k15: bluhm@ on MP networking (out from under biglock)
- n2k15: vgross@ on deep surgery in TCP/IP stack code
- n2k15: krw@ on fdisk, installboot, dhclient, GPT fixes
- n2k15: reyk@ on hosting a hackathon, vmd, and the switch
- n2k15: mpi@ on MP networking progress
- n2k15: stsp@ on 11n mode wifi, testing
- OpenBSD’s sndiod: now with privsep
- Problems with Systemd and Why I Like BSD Init. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/12/21.
- AsiaBSDCon 2016 is happening March 10-13, 2016, in Tokyo. The call for papers is out and due by January 8th. Tutorial proposals are due at the end of the month.
Christmas doesn’t stop BSDNow from happening, and this week – along with the normal news summary – has an interview with Trent Thompson about virtualization on FreeBSD. Specifically, iohyve, the new management system.
(Linking directly to the broadcast site instead of the page with the full summary on the BSDNow site, because that summary page isn’t up as of me posting this.)
A number of people have reported problems with qemu and DragonFly, both running locally and on a host. It turns out to be a problem with the getcontext(), setcontext(), and swapcontext() functions, but Matthew Dillon fixed it in a way that doesn’t affect performance very much.
That apparently wasn’t good enough, so he added _quick versions of those same functions, so it became not just a fix, but an improvement.
In related qemu news: qemu-devel can use vknetd similar to a vkernel, now.
I was going to point at a new igb(4) update for testing, but Sepherosa Ziehau has already merged it. Try it if you have the right Intel networking hardware.
For those of you that are very bandwidth-constrained, or just impatient, there are xz-compressed images of DragonFly 4.4 available. (see ‘download live image’ area) The mirrors should have them too.
The latest episode interviews Robert N. M. Watson and George V. Neville-Neil for 36 minutes, about teachbsd.org. Also, BSDTalk has been running for 10 years! It’s been long enough I couldn’t remember if it started before the Digest.
Finally, a week of links you can get through in one sitting.
- Old stuff that rocks. (via)
- The itch.io app for indie games. It’s open source – could run on BSD, maybe? (via)
- How I Paid My Rent by Publishing the Most Disgusting Things on the Internet. I remember PoE! The ‘Chet’ he refers to is 1/2 of Old Man Murray. (via)
- Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. (via)
- Chw00t: Breaking unices’ chroot solutions. (via)
- Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss. (via)
- Works that Work, a magazine. Cabinet-ish. (also via)
- Six months with a dumbphone.
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics. (Thanks, Siju)
- Procedural Castle Generation, which I find compelling for some reason. (via)
Yet another week that I started 2 weeks ago; this end-of-calendar-year is full of BSD goings-on.
- FreeBSD on the desktop? Am I crazy? (via)
- lists.freebsd.org holy jeebus….
- I am a newbie trying to switch from pfSense to OpenBSD.
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Windows Operating System Family. (via)
- You Make FreeBSD Possible.
- Adventures in Open Source Software: Dealing with Security. A pkgsrc talk.
- TrueNAS templates are now included with a number of monitoring tools.
- Michael Lucas’s SSH talk on YouTube. Not necessarily BSD-specific, but still good.
- BSD for the desktop user: A review of PC-BSD.
- What makes the BSD family more secure than GNU/Linux?
- SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT, a BSD-origin explanation. (via)
- The pkgsrc-2015Q4 freeze has started.
The DragonFly installer has been modified to produce disk arrangements that will generally match between UFS and Hammer installs, plus directories where you usually don’t want Hammer history or backups (like /tmp or /usr/obj) are now under /build and null-mounted to where you’d expect, since null-mounting works transparently well on DragonFly. Matthew Dillon has a note explaining the whole thing.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new version of drivers for em/emx(4) and igb(4). The initial versions had trouble, but testing is ongoing. Try it if you have the correct hardware.
Update: never mind.
The official title for BSDNow 120 is “I’m talking about the man in the middle” which is too long for an article title here. It’s a Michael Jackson reference and a type of attack against encryption, if you are unclear. Anyway, the episode has the usual news roundup and an interview of Pawel Jakub Dawidek.
For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
If you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4), Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to try out his Intel NIC driver update. He’s already updated the ix(4) driver to support more hardware.
As mentioned previously, Sepherosa Ziehau is printing up some DragonFly T-shirts for WeChat users. He’s going to have a few left over, so he is sending them to me to hand to non-China people. If you want one, leave a note saying so in the comments. Here’s the front and back.
You need to provide some way for me to contact you – preferably email, and the size you’d want. (Use the Land’s End Men’s Shirts chart for sizing, because why not.) I’ll only have a few, so no guarantees.
Update: I have more responses than probable shirts at this point – sorry! I’ll get in contact with each of you once the shirts come in and arrange delivery.
It’s tonight at 7 PM, with the details found on the NYCBUG mailing list. RSVP as soon as you can if you are near enough to go – and you should go.
A good chunk of this is brought over from last week, cause there was so much.
- Ramsey Theory in the Dining Room. Not the shouty chef. (via)
- Superpersistent bootkit. (PDF, via, via)
- Raspberry Pis stuffed into classic computer shells. (via)
- I Dreamed of a Perfect Database. “This is a risk of working alone, without anyone to tell you you’re insane.” A Paul Ford article. (via)
- Project: Keyboard Conversion. More ambitious than I expected. (via)
- It’s called fdisk because…
- Computer Man [Extended Version]. Very 1980s. (via)
- The story of one latency spike. (via)
- Peering into inodes.
- After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6. (via)
- Big Data? No Thanks! Even if you don’t agree with the position, the images are neat. (via)
- Roll your own toy Unix-clone OS. (via)
- King’s Hand, which turns Go programs into utility scripts. (via)
- Why doesn’t findstr use the standard regular expression library? Another grep variant.
Your unrelated game link of the week: Freecol. Runs on all the BSDs (thanks Thomas Klausner), as far as I can tell. (via)