May 2016 – Page 2 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2016/05/142016/05/13

In Other BSDs for 2016/05/14

Some DragonFly links are sneaking in here just to get them cleared out.

May 17th: Ike Levy speaks at SemiBUG. Go if you are anywhere near; Ike’s a good speaker and passionate about BSD.
Speaking of scheduling: BSDCan 2016 is less than a month away.
Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me. (via)
BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code. (via)
FreeBSD PowerPC 32bit pkg repository (unofficial). ~19,500 packages, more to come. (via)
As a Linux user, where should I start with experimenting with BSD?
DragonFly i915 driver updated to Linux 4.3. (via)
DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/09.
Cons of staying on an old -RELEASE version ?
More p2k16: ajacoutot@ on Gnome, rc and rcctl improvements, krw@ on pdisk, softraid and more.
SROP mitigation committed. (OpenBSD)
The 50th Quarterly pkgsrc Release, pkgsrc-2016Q1. Also, stats.
Thomas Levine’s notes from the recent NYCBUG presentation on Urchin.
NetBSD on the Sega Dreamcast, presented on a Dreamcast.
How BSD was built, and how it lost the lead to Linux.
Running Tor in a NetBSD rump unikernel. (via)
Running FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD as a virtualised guest on Online.net.
Meet Joe Maloney – Lead System Architect for PC-BSD. I like the transition from volunteer to employee.
LinuxFest Northwest 2016: The Devil in the Details: Switching to BSD from Linux. Apparently one of the most popular videos.

2016/05/13

garbage[26]: We’re not a Linux show, either

I haven’t listened to it because I’m at work, but garbage episode 26 is up, along with news of shirts and stickers.

2016/05/13

Cleanup work is also good

I usually link to new features, additions, and so on. That’s fine, but there’s often necessary work that goes on which doesn’t correlate to a new function – just better code. Rimvydas Jasinskas just did one of those cleanups, and I’m mentioning it to give credit where’s it’s due.

2016/05/12

BSDNow 141: BSD likes .ike

I took some liberty with the spelling of the title, but it’s more accurate that way: The newest episode of BSDNow has a roundup of BSD news (some of which is pretty major) and an interview of Ike Levy, AKA ‘the guy at NYCBSDCon who showed me how useful pfSense could be’. Ike is speaking at a SemiBUG meeting on the 17th, too, which I’ll post about.

2016/05/112016/05/11

Acceleration for Skylake users

If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.

2016/05/102016/05/10

Benchmarks and tips nginx on DragonFly

Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.

Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.

2016/05/09

Another i915 update

The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.

2016/05/082016/05/05

Lazy Reading for 2016/05/08

Network tools and analysis is the accidental topic this week.

More open-source network management tools.
How do ISPs and modems actually obtain the right signal off of a phone/cable/optical fiber/whatever line? A layer-1 overview. (via)
A damp discussion of network queuing. (via)
How To Make Fossils Productive Again. (via)
Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence.
SSH for fun and profit. (via)
CV of Failures. I like the last one. (via)
Go best practices, six years in. (via)
PocketCHIP, hardware for PICO-8. (via)
Typewriter.
Circuit Classics — Sneak Peek!
An update on SSH protocol 1. Dead in a year, that’s the update. (via)
How difficult is the GVG-AI competition?
Deflecting it old school. From here.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: British tea consumption has been going down. (via) I like the additional charts about biscuits and cake, complementary to tea. Which reminds me: Welsh cakes are so good that the first time I made them, I was angry that I hadn’t tried them years ago.

2016/05/07

A late Garbage[25]

Episode 25 of Garbage went up yesterday and I forgot to check for it, so I’m linking to it now. Among other things, they mention Garbage merchandise. I’d pay for a shirt that pointed out most technology is garbage, to take it from the page.

2016/05/072016/05/05

In Other BSDs for 2016/05/07

Another trifecta week.

GNOME 3.20.1 on OpenBSD, the usual screencast; not too bad for a server OS. (via)
A comprehensive guide for OpenBSD desktop?
Tredly – Containers for Unix. Powered by FreeBSD. (via)
Bootstrap pkgsrc under ‘bash on Windows’. This should be on pkgsrc.org.
OpenHUB’s NetBSD Project Statistics.
Dru Lavigne Will be Speaking @ KnoxBUG.
New Release Schedule and Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 Released. (via)
OpenBSD Foundation Announces Gold Sponsor.
libcrypto errata – May 2016. Related: regarding embargoes.
.NET framework ported to NetBSD. (via)
DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/02.
GhostBSD 10.3 Alpha release! (via)
FreeBSD Quarterly Status report for 2016Q1.
p2k16 OpenBSD hackathon:

2016/05/06

autofs for DragonFly, a preview

Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.

2016/05/05

BSDNow 140: Tracing it back to BSD

This week’s BSDNow is the normal news roundup, plus an interview of Samy Al Bahra, about ‘backtrace‘.

I’m talking multiple times a week about BSD-themed podcasts/video/whatever these days. This is great! 5-6 years ago I was probably the only BSD source posting more than weekly.

2016/05/04

Interleaved swap for the curious

If you’ve ever wondered how having multiple swap devices can work, here’s your DragonFly-specific answer.

2016/05/042016/05/03

NYCBUG tonight: Urchin

NYCBUG is meeting tonight, and Thomas Levine will be there to talk about Urchin, a shell-based test framework. The announcement also has future meeting/speaker dates noted.

2016/05/032016/05/05

modules.local now possible

If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.

(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)

2016/05/03

bsdtalk264 – Down the Gopher Hole

BSDTalk 264 is out, and rather than an interview, it talks about a topic I’ve always enjoyed: Gopher, including ways to access Gopher resources even now.

2016/05/012016/04/29

Lazy Reading for 2016/05/01

Cinco De Mayo is coming up.

Why I run my business like an open source project. The contractors I use at work that take this approach are much easier to work with. (via)
Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side. Even more evidence of what a bad idea that strategy can be. (via)
Developer Certificate of Origin versus Contributor License Agreements. Boring, but I understand the reasoning. (also via)
Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM. (via)
The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem. Displaced by Winbuntu. (via)
What happened to _why.
Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At. I see so many people with this problem. (via)
Baby UNIX.
Dyson’s Maps & Cartography. Hand-drawn D&D maps. (via)
Related: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed. Buy here. (via)
5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script.
GEOS, an operating system I never really knew about.
when i wore a younger fool’s cap. GitHub uber alles.
O Reader! My Reader. I’ve gotten used to tt-rss.

Your unrelated link of the week: What was the weirdest 911 call ever received? (via)