Justin Sherrill – Page 60 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/03/032020/03/05

DragonFly 5.8 released!

DragonFly 5.8.0 has been released. This version brings dsynth, with matching optimizations to fit dsynth running many parallel builds of ports.

My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading, as do the release notes.

Note that you will get some noise in dmesg until you remove opie from where it’s mentioned in /etc/pam.d/ files. It’s cosmetic unless you use opie, and you probably don’t. I mention it because I noticed it. Check /usr/src/UPDATING after pulling in the 5.8 source to see details of this and other changes.

2020/03/022020/02/15

NYCBUG, Vixie: “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes”

Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. It’s tomorrow. Go, if you are near; this is one of the people who built basic blocks of the Internet’s infrastructure.

2020/03/022020/02/06

BSD Stockholm meeting, tomorrow

If you are near Stockholm, go to the Stockholm BUG meeting, tomorrow. I’m posting it a bit ahead of time to account for time zone difference.

2020/03/012020/02/28

Lazy Reading for 2020/03/01

Tab-clearing links!

Have You Played… SimCity 2000? Not really about the game, but the music involuntarily associated with it. Elektra:Assassin and MARRS is the same for me.
Prosthetic synthesizer. (via)
Cable standards history. More interesting than I make it sound!
Kermit, a history. Not just a summary; the source documents. (via)
Old CSS, new CSS. (via)
Evoboxx, uneasy retro synth. Game of Life as dedicated hardware.
A love letter to the fantasy airship. (via)
What is a traditional roguelike? (also via)
byNWR, streaming restored fringe films, plus a talk about it. (also via)
Stickers for the RSS massive.
Rooibos. Technically not tea.
Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet. And that’s awesome. (via)
Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses. (via)
Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation. (via)
The ‘sextortion’ Scams: The Numbers Show That What We Have Is A Failure Of Education. I like the deep dive.

Your unrelated music link of the week: KUTMAH – New Appliance. (via)

2020/02/292020/02/28

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/29

Happy leap day!

RSVP to the ChiBUG mailing list if you are attending the March 10th meeting, in its new location.
The Vixie talk at NYCBUG is this week; this is worth making an extra trip for.
Critical OpenSMTPd update.
FreeBSD 12.0 EOL.
A Q&A with the FreeBSD Foundation.
Valuable News – 2020/02/10, 2020/02/17, and 2020/02/24. Clearly I am behind.
FreeBSD Enterprise Storage at PBUG.
dig(1), host(1) and nslookup(1) moved to /usr/bin.
a2k20 Hackathon Report: Ken Westerback on xhci(4),dhclient(8), and scsi.
OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup.
FOSDEM 2020 videos available.
OPNsense 20.1.1 released.
Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates.
Full name of root account in BSD. A chunk of history I had never heard.
Managing a database of vulnerabilities for a package system: the pkgsrc study case. (PDF, via)
Low power BSD-based AP/router?
HashLink port for running Dead Cells. (via)

2020/02/28

More optimizations for package building

One side effect of repeated package builds is that you start looking at ways to optimize for intense, repeated, parallel software compilation.

2020/02/282020/02/28

BSD Now 339: BSD Fundraising

I am running a bit late posting about it, but BSD Now 339 is out, with conversations about recent different releases, plus as the title says, fundraising.

2020/02/26

Massive random improvement

Yes, that is ambiguously phrased for fun. Matthew Dillon committed some benchmarks inside rdrand() code to show the actual performance improvements.

2020/02/24

Excessive rdrand harvesting on DragonFly

This recent commit changes how random number provision is seeded on DragonFly. It sounds interesting, but I don’t know if the performance improvement translates to real-world activity.

2020/02/232020/02/21

Lazy Reading for 2020/02/23

Still backlogged, which means one of these weekends I’ll catch up and you’ll have about a zillion links to click.

vt100.net. (via vttest)
Another post on open source civility.
How thick is an hour?
Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?
ENIAC, 74 years old and printable in 3D. Yes, the whole room. (via)
MIDI 2.0, 37 years after the 1.0 release. (via)
Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers. (via)
Age of Invention: Where Be Dragons? Why no ancient D&D? (via)
42 years ago, the first BBS. (via)
136 INTERNET VIDEOS THAT BLEW MY MIND. A Google Doc. (via)
Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate.
A curated list of command line apps.
building a note-taking system with vanilla vim.
The worst of time64 breakage. (via)
NEXTSPACE, another NextStep revisit. (via)
i3wm 4.18 released. Useful to at least a few readers. (via)
Bunnie Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. PDF. (via)

2020/02/222020/02/21

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/22

No theme this week cause I think I hit everything.

Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk on March 3rd at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. I’ll post a reminder.
NetBSD 9.0 is out, in case you missed the late update last week.
Related: NetBSD 2020 Fundraising Campaign.
What started as investigating /opt on FreeBSD.
FixedMisc [MirOS] 20200214 released, for “I ? Free Software” day. Tangentially BSD.
Approaching the end of work on ptrace(2).
LLDB now works on i386.
A day as an OpenBSD developer. How do people discover ports?
Daily life with the offline laptop. (Running OpenBSD) I like the “What do I like to do?” breakdown approach.
An emulator for a Sun 2 workstation. I think that dates to the BSD timeframe.(via)
HamBSD Hardware Wanted. Scotland. (via)
Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD’s hypervisor. (via)
Pine64 February Update: Post CNY and FOSDEM Status Report. The Pro runs NetBSD, so it applies, along with fitting my small computer fetish. (via)
Can You Use FreeBSD for a Developer Machine in 2020? I’d argue that a ‘developer machine’ needs only a text editor and a file transfer program to qualify. (via)
Stanford 1967 PDP-6 logbook, a PDF. (via)
“SNMP Mastery” leaking out. BSD-first author, of course.

2020/02/21

tmpfs paging speedups

tmpfs on DragonFly now clusters writes better, so performance is improved in high-activity environments… which is probably why you are using tmpfs anyway. The post says 2-4x improvement when paging out.

2020/02/212020/02/20

Writeups of problem solutions are the best

If you post about a problem and later solve it, you will help many people in the future if you summarize the problem and (very important) the fix. In this case, Nelson H. F. Beebe installing DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on his Dell Precision 7920 workstation.

2020/02/20

BSD Now 338: iocage in Jail

BSD Now 338 is up, which strangely is listed as the “100th episode” on the site, but I think that means it’s only indexed through #239. Anyway, it has the normal ingredients – a ZFS article, a convention note, and a link into a conversation about OpenBSD, among other things.