Tim Darby is looking for motherboard recommendations. Specifically, mini-ITX with 4 SATA ports and at least one decent network link. Who’s got hardware to recommend? There’s already one set of suggestions.
By the time you read this, I will have already been at my second job for 5 hours.
- Integrating FreeBSD w/ FreeIPA/SSSD.
- UbuntuBSD, mentioned here, here, here, here. Best reaction here.
- RocketGraph FreeBSD commits on Github for 2015.
- Why OpenBSD? (via)
- KnoxBUG: A new BSD User Group in Knoxville area. (via)
- Install OPNSense on the Monowall Appliance box. (via)
- OPNSense 16.1.8 released.
- FreeBSD – a lesson in poor defaults. Some axegrinding going on. (via and via)
- MidnightBSD with Lucas Holt.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/03/21.
- Using Firefox to watch Netflix on FreeBSD/PC-BSD. (via)
- Larry the BSD Guy’s BSD summary for the week.
- New routing table code (ART) enabled in [OpenBSD]-current.
- Can’t control screen brightness in Broadwell.
- fractal cells – FreeBSD-based All-In-One solution for software development startups. (via)
If you have a Radeon video card in your DragonFly system, and are running bleeding-edge, there’s an update for you. This is a partial sync with Radeon code for Linux 3.18, with no additional notes in the commit but you can always check elsewhere.
unzip has been added to DragonFly, making it present in every BSD but I think OpenBSD.
Imre Vadasz has added the ability to create a UEFI bootloader in DragonFly. Can you use it? I don’t know; I haven’t tried it yet and I can’t tell from the commit.
John Marino has added the starting framework to use clang as the alternate base compiler in DragonFly. Note that it’s not hooked into the build yet. This is the first non-GCC compiler added into DragonFly, so there’s some work yet before you can have an all-clang system. This should replace GCC 4.7, which is the current alternate compiler. GCC 5.0 is the default, if you didn’t know.
Note that clang is present in dports, so it’s already been available for general use, for some time. This framework is for building DragonFly itself.
If you somehow have a device with multiple SD/MMC card slots, you can now access all of them under DragonFly. (Apparently done to make a tablet run DragonFly better, going by IRC conversation)
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau has made some networking changes that both reduce CPU usage in high-traffic situations and change some underlying network structures. This means a full buildworld is needed on your next update.
If you’re using DragonFly 4.4.x or older, you are unaffected.
If you find yourself using gpt and disklabel64 for a new disk, and aren’t quite sure what order to type everything in to create a disk slice, why not crib from Tim Darby’s notes? (note that the archive has added some line breaks to it.)
The ‘hammer show’ command can be used to dump the B-Tree structure of a Hammer volume, and CRC errors can be spotted. It’s rare that anyone would need it, but if you do, this dumped information will include file hierarchy information.
If that makes you a bit nervous to repost any of that information when talking about it in public, Tomohiro Kusumi has added an ‘obfuscate’ option to ‘hammer show’ that does just that – it hides path information from the debug output.
Sepherosa Ziehau has continued his quest of making large-scale data transmission on DragonFly effortless; his latest change has cut the kqueue contention rate by two-thirds when dealing with a connection rate of nearly 400,000 connections per second. Note that’s number of connections, without even tracking the bandwidth used by each.
John Marino rearranged how GCC5 handles CPUTYPE settings. If you are specifically setting the target CPU when compiling, his commit will give you an exact list of what to target.
Note that I am not saying another architecture – this is all x86_64. I also don’t recommend doing this unless you have a specific use for it – compiler overoptimizations often create more problems than they fix.
Daniel Bilik has found there’s an issue with i915 acceleration, Baytrail CPUs, and some AUTODEEP low-power states. This will only affect you if you are using that specific hardware combo and setting certain low power modes. Interestingly, it affects other platforms, too, as it appears to be a symptom of how the video is addressed, not a DragonFly-specific bug.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
Francois Tigeot has again updated Intel i915 video support in DragonFly, bringing it even with what’s in Linux 4.2. This will be very useful for Broadwell and Skylake users, and even Broxton, apparently the newest Atom platform.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
BSDNow 129 is available. Along with the normal news summary, it has an interview with John Marino, the fellow behind DragonFly’s dports system, and author of recently-noted-here synth, which has reached version 1.0.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.
I have DragonFly shirts, helpfully printed up by Sepherosa Ziehau in China. I have a list of people that are interested in shirts, most of whom remembered to give a shirt size. I don’t have anyone’s email address or mailing address on that list.
If you are on that list, send me your mailing address.
The shirts are marked L/XL/XXL/XXXL, but they run smaller than U.S. versions of those sizes. I usually find a U.S. XL shirt baggy, but “XXXL” is the one that fit me, for instance. I’ll do my best to place the appropriate one. This is just an advance apology, since it’s too late to change anything if it turns out tight.
I’ll mail these out as I have the spare cash and time on hand. (I hope most of you live in the continental U.S.)