I found it via Google Search. Anyone know?
Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
- There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
- Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
- Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
- Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
- Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
- Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
- Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
As part of the ongoing work to support a lot of CPUs, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that have the side effect of benefiting virtual kernels. How much? I don’t have a benchmark, yet.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0c, to fix a recent security problem. The problem doesn’t sound too catastrophic to my untrained ear, at least.
Matthew Dillon has moved CPU support to 63 processors and 512G of RAM. This may cause issues, he warns. It’s also just barely working, so don’t expect to go into production with half a terabyte of RAM in the next few days.
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.
Matthew Dillon has made it possible to boot DragonFly on 24-CPU systems. Also, we’re currently limited to 32G of RAM. Oh, to have such limitations; I was considering myself lucky to have 4 CPUs.
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
There’s now descriptions for a number of the net.inet.* sysctls, thanks to Taras Klaskovsky as part of Google Code-In.
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.
Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link:
DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube
If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is — wait not a second longer!
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.
There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
Sascha Wildner has brought in the mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) drivers from FreeBSD, adding support for a number of different RAID controllers – including the Dell PERC 5 and PERC 6.