Phoronix has another set of benchmarks that include DragonFly and PC-BSD, along with several Linux distributions. It’s interesting to see, though don’t take them as performance measurements. 7-Zip as a benchmark doesn’t describe much other than the program itself, and the Himeno benchmark results are because of the compiler in use rather than any underlying performance aspect of the operating system – for instance. The DragonFly benchmarks disappear after page 3.
Michael W. Lucas wrote a new edition to his Absolute OpenBSD book, and that second edition was published relatively recently. It’s a hefty book, nearly 500 pages in length, and I’ve needed to write a review for some time now. Not-necessarily-relevant-disclaimer: I contributed the IPv6 haiku/joke at the start of Chapter 12.
If you’re interested in OpenBSD, it’s an obvious purchase. It goes into detail for all aspects of OpenBSD, starting with a very detailed conversation about installation, then disk setup, and so on. This is not going to surprise anyone, of course. Past the initial overview, the book starts with a chapter that talks about nothing else but locating other resources to help learn OpenBSD. It seems a little counter-intuitive to start a book with advice on how to look somewhere else, but it makes sense in light of the topic.
What if you aren’t using OpenBSD, at least not right now? Something I didn’t realize until I had chewed my way through most of the book was that there’s several smaller books hidden inside. The book goes very far into individual utilities. So far, in fact, that it ends up creating mini-guides about the topics within the chapters. (or entire chapters, in the case of pf.)
There’s in fact 2 chapters for pf, initial and advanced. TCP/IP gets close to 30 pages just to itself, and topics like snmpd or chroot get an introductory section that assumes nothing about your prior knowledge. These are technologies you’re using already, no matter which BSD flavor you’re dealing with.
It works as a reference. I’m going to show the aforementioned chapter 11, on TCP/IP, to my coworker who makes a confused face every time I say “link-layer protocol.” I don’t know if he’ll make it from one end to the other, but it’s a lot better than waving a hand in the air and mumbling “You should look that up on the Internet sometime.” There’s enough detail that some of the smaller sections could probably be broken out into individual books, and I daresay that’s what is happening with Lucas’s Mastery series.
It’s comprehensive, it’s readable, and you’ll find something useful in it no matter your experience level. The book is available in printed and eBook form, from the usual online stores linked at Michael W. Lucas’s site, or directly from the publisher. It’s also available through the OpenBSD Project, which then gets a cut towards development.
There’s a new BSDTalk by way of the recently-completed BSDCan 2013 event, and it’s half an hour of talk with Matt Ahrens about ZFS and matters related.
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
PC-BSD now has a hardware store, with equipment known to work under PC-BSD. Chances are good that if it works for PC-BSD, it’ll work for other BSDs or could be ported to do so… (via)
The May issue of BSD Magazine is out with a number of pf articles, plus others.
vBSDCon, the newest BSD conference, happening in October and in Virginia, has a new website. (via)
There’s another BSDTalk episode up already, because Will Backman’s at BSDCan 2013 and talking to Scott Long, Alistair Crooks, and David Discher, about NetFlix. Apparently there’s streaming video available now from the convention, and some people’s presentation slides have shown up.
BSDTalk 225 has 12 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore about PC-BSD, recorded at BSDCan 2013, which is going on right now.
Ansible seems to be a configuration management system that’s lighter than puppet or salt. I had a student talking about it in my class tonight. BSD users Hubert Feyrer and Michael W. Lucas have both posted about it recently. Anyone want to repeat their experiences?
I am somewhat entertained by Michael W. Lucas’s most recent blog post about IP Sets. This is mostly because, as he points out, he could use one pf config file across multiple machines and BSDs for network management, but has to fiddle with ipsets to get different Linux machines to match.
For those of us still on IPv4 networks, the BSD-specific OpenGrok site bxr.su should now be available in general, not just on IPv6.
The April 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is all about FreeNAS. I mean, every article is FreeNAS related. If you’re curious about the product, this is the place to start. (The magazine is also now available in ePub format in addition to PDF.)
Does FreeNAS count as another BSD flavor, rather than an appliance? I’m not sure.
I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…
- For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
- Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
- Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
- Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
- On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
- Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
- Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
- Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
- Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
- The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
- The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
- A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
- Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
- Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.
Ivan Uemlianin expressed a desire to read about the boot process, and how BSD works in general. I made a short list of suggestions.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has a long writeup about using and creating ports on OpenBSD, which is apparently a reprint of an article he wrote for BSD Magazine back in 2008. I don’t remember if I read it, so it’s new to me, in any case. Port and package creation across the BSDs is juuuust close enough that reading about one version will leave you with a good guess about the others.
BSDCan 2013, which is happening in a few weeks, is going to have a “Documentation Lounge“, which is essentially a docs sprint, but with a much more relaxed-sounding name. Anyway, it’s a good thing to contribute to.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
This is interesting: Verisign is sponsoring a new BSD convention (PDF link) in October, in Dulles, Virginia, USA. Apparently the use of BSD systems at the company is increasing, and they want to host something for it. The pkgNG presentation may be very interesting for DragonFly users. See the announcement. A new convention to support increased BSD uptake is really a nice surprise.
We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.
- E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
- You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
- The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
- The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
- UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
- Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
- Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
- The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
- Workflow in Tmux. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)