June 2019 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2019/06/302019/06/29

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/30

I’m going to be very busy over the next week, so I am not sure how consistent my posting schedule will be, or how much I will be able to build up for next weekend. We’ll find out together.

Getting 2FA Right in 2019.
The TTY demystified. (via)
Ranger, a console file manager with VI keybindings. Linked to show how vi keybindings are another common item. (via)
Into the Personal Website-Verse. (via)
The Simple Genius of Checklists. (via)
A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans.
“Free with DRM is not the same thing as free.” Microsoft-purchased ebooks stop working next month. (via)
Adventures In Interactivity. Text adventures!
Some UNIX humor. Puns, not humor.
Seattle Mechanical Keyboard Meetup, later this month. (via)

2019/06/292019/06/29

In Other BSDs for 2019/06/29

Last minute, again.

2019/06/28

Shut up, ACPI

You’ll all be happy to know ACPI errors are less noisy now. (And it was updated to 20190509, before the 5.6 release.)

2019/06/27

BSD Now 304: Prospering with Vulkan

This week’s BSD Now talks about the normal assortment of news, including DragonFly’s release, and an explanation of the Vulkan framework in OpenBSD; something I hadn’t read about yet.

2019/06/26

TCP keepalive change in DragonFly kernel

Matthew Dillon’s made a change to the DragonFly kernel that could be disruptive, but will help make sure chromium runs. If you update after this point, make sure to update your dports, too, just to be sure everything is in sync. This applies to 5.6 and 5.7.

2019/06/25

Gaining memory back in DragonFly

Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.

2019/06/252019/06/25

retpoline, SMAP, SMEP in DragonFly

DragonFly now has retpoline turned on (stats included in that link) as a side effect of having gcc-8 as default, and SMAP/SMEP are also supported. I enjoy just saying these words out loud. SMEP SMEP SMEP SMEPSMEPSMEPSMEP.

2019/06/242019/06/25

MDS mitigation added, a while ago

I’m still backlogged, so here’s a May 14th mitigation in DragonFly for MDS attacks possible with Intel CPUs from 2011 onward. It’s in the current release.

2019/06/232019/06/21

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/23

Lots of topic range this week; no theme grew out – but that’s better in some ways!

On Dat://
There’s a Relational Database in Your Unix CLI. (via)
xsv, a command line tool for CSV tables, via comments on previous.
Amiga BBS Online in 2019. (via)
Notes from the quest factory, a followup on that autogenerated story I linked to a few weeks back.
Some notes on Intel’s CPUID and how to get it for your CPUs.
The Edible Games digital cookbook is arriving for backers now.
The joy of offline walking.
ISA history.
GEOS history.
Jan Svankmajer: The Animator of Prague.
Death of a robot. (via)
Using the TRS-80 as a journalist. (via)
Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War.
Sufficiently advanced software.
Work on foundational software.

2019/06/222019/06/21

In Other BSDs for 2019/06/22

Done at the last minute!

Porting NetBSD to the RISC-V. (via)
FreeBSD 11.3Beta3 available.
What’s in there in BSD for a Ubuntu user?
pkgsrcCon 2019 in Cambridge, UK. (via)
Sponsor Sudo Mastery, second edition, in print or ebook form.
Celebrate UNIX50 and SDF32. (via)
First Taste of DragonFly BSD. (via)
Firewall appliance comparable to Netgate pfSense.
ZFS vs. OpenZFS.
Open ZFS vs. Btrfs | and other file systems.
Lenovo and non-Windows operating systems.

2019/06/21

End-of-week cross-pollination

A happy note for the end of the week: I like seeing cross-BSD work. (and POSIX)

2019/06/202019/06/20

BSD Now 303: OpenZFS in Ports

This week’s BSD Now talks a whole lot about ZFS, which is no surprise given the OpenZFS events going on. There’s other news, of course.

2019/06/19

5.6.1 tagged and built

Shamelessly copied from my own users@ post: I tagged 5.6.1 and built it earlier today. This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm. The ISO should be showing up on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org in the next 20 minutes or so, or you can rebuild using the normal process on an existing 5.6 system:

cd /usr/src
git pull
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
make upgrade

If you are still on 5.4 or earlier, you need to bring in 5.6 sources, which is noted in the 5.6.0 announcement.

2019/06/18

5.6.1 on the way

A last-minute drm change in DragonFly 5.6 turned out to cause a reproducible lockup, so there’s changes in place for it. This means 5.6.1 will need to be rolled, which I will do in a day or two. If you want to update now, the normal buildworld/buildkernel process will get you this change.

2019/06/182019/06/17

OPIE removal in DragonFly-master

OPIE was disabled recently in DragonFly. Now that the 5.6 release is out, it has been removed. This may require manual intervention if you are on DragonFly-master (i.e. 5.5. or 5.7) and update in the next day or two. This need to fiddle with it will go away soon with changes to ‘make upgrade’; I will mention it when I see it.

This won’t affect anyone running 5.4 or 5.6. It’s only in development.

2019/06/17

SEMIBUG: Matt Parnell – Asterisk+FreePBX on FreeBSD

Matt Parnell is presenting Asterisk and FreePBX on FreeBSD at SEMIBUG’s monthly meeting, tomorrow, in Troy, Michigan. Go, if you are near.

Credit goes to SEMIBUG for creating a Google Calendar which makes it slightly more likely I’ll catch the meeting and post about it. Also, a nostalgia moment about the bad old days: I am so glad specialized hardware is no longer needed just to get on the phone network, since VoIP is widespread these days. I hated dealing with flaky PRI lines.

2019/06/17

DragonFly 5.6 released!

DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released. This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2. Matthew Dillon did some informal testing of the VM improvements, and posted results to the users@ list.

My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading (pay no attention to my 5.4 typo), as do the release notes.

2019/06/162019/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/16

Inadvertent theme this week: games. Yet somehow I didn’t include a roguelike? Dang.

Why USB plugs aren’t/weren’t reversible.
10 Awesome Ways to Upcycle Old Devices With a Raspberry Pi. Some nice connecting of analog controls on these projects. (via)
A bug so cool that the development team was reluctant to fix it.
Open Source Game Clones. I seem to link to this every two years or so. Still iffy on it. (via)
Notes on recent games: nifty little experiments.
The fate of an archive. Linked cause I still have a pile of CRO2 bootleg music cassettes that I don’t think exist digitally, anywhere.
The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent.
The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons. (via)
A Gopher server in sh. (via)
Textreme. The Most! Exciting! Text! Editor! EVER! (via)
tokyo60 keyboards. (via)
HHKB layouts, related to the last link.
Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Vol.6. (via)
Day of the Tentacle, a history.
A Very Brief History of Gamebooks (up to 1979).
Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002). Also, the 2015 followup. It may surprise nobody that the average answer is “bunch of terminals and a web browser”. (via)
Advent of Computing: Episode 5 Notes – How much has UNIX changed? (via)

2019/06/152019/06/14

In Other BSDs for 2019/06/15

I linked to some other BSD link roundups, so the joy of clicking can continue.

SNI support added to relayd(8) in -current.
Call for testing of ntpd(8) automatic mode.
RabbitMQ Cluster on FreeBSD Containers.
FreeBSD+ZFS Without Drives. Crazy, DWIMmy. (via)
blacklistd(8) with NPF on NetBSD. UnitedBSD is a new forum, at least to me. (via)
Routing versus Streaming throughput using FreeBSD at 10Gbps and over.
OpenBSD as an IPv6 router.
BSDCan 2019: The Future of OpenZFS and FreeBSD by Allan Jude. (Video, via)
AsiaBSDCon 2019 DevSummit: We don’t see a problem. Suggestion of Project Governance additions. For FreeBSD. Follow the thread where this was mentioned.
AsiaBSDCon2019:
Manage Photography the UNIX Way.
Valuable News – 2019/06/10.
BSD Link Roundup 6.13.
OPNsense 19.1.9 released.
g2k19 Hackathon Report: Stefan Sperling on Access Points and Ghosts.
TrueCommand Brings Single Pane of Glass Management to TrueNAS and FreeNAS Fleets. I know it’s a press release, but it is a useful thing.
why off-the-shelf routers don’t use BSDs (or OpenBSD)? But they do?

2019/06/142019/06/14

ttm and radeon DRM updates in DragonFly

Francois Tigeot updated ttm and radeon DRM in DragonFly to match what’s in I assume the Linux 3.18 kernel. Please try if you have the appropriate hardware. This was at the start of May, so you may have already done so without realizing if you run -current. It’ll be in the 5.6 release, too.