BSDNow 265 has a con report – the just-finished EuroBSDCon 2018 in Romania, plus the usual roundup of news items. One news item that will be useful someday: how to perform a BIOS update on a non-Windows computer.
I tried Hyper-V, and of course, I had to install a virtual DragonFly system. Sascha Wildner very helpfully pointed out that DragonFly on Hyper-V requires a legacy network adapter and a gen-1 image type; both changes you can make during initial setup. I’m noting it here for the benefit of future people walking down the same path.
Note: pick ‘legacy BIOS’ during the actual DragonFly install, too.
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
Reminder: the next KnoxBUG meeting is tomorrow, September 5th, with a demo of TridentOS.
There’s a social meeting for NYCBUG tomorrow, September 5th, at Suspenders. As far as I can tell, the only difference between “technical meeting” and “social meeting” is if there’s a presentation. Go, if you are near.
If you like pizza and BSD, and you are near Portland, Oregon, there’s an event you will enjoy tomorrow night. At least 2 of those 3 characteristics should match you. (via)
I have been meaning to post this for a while: gridgenerator.com, a painting web app, is running on DragonFly. I was told this on IRC and of course lost all details since then, but that’s fine – go draw something!
BSDNow 258 showed up a bit early this week: Among the normal news articles about technology and BSD conventions are notes about how HardenedBSD is setting up their non-profit board. I like seeing that sort of governance documented as it’s happening; it’s the right way to inform people.
As part of a larger conversation about HAMMER, Matthew Dillon noted that he is planning to work on master-to-multiple-slave for HAMMER2, which would function similar to HAMMER1 mirror-stream.
I’ve been remiss in noting new DragonFly mirrors, so here’s the most recent: 4 new locations in Ecuador.
A little while back I linked to an excellent deep dive into Ravenports, and added my own bit of statistical guessing at popular packages. John Marino wants to know what packages people find most useful/most required. If you have opinions, and I’m sure you do, post something on the Ravenports Google Groups page.
If you are saying to yourself “Gee, what packages did I install and what came in as a dependency?”, here’s an easy way to find out:
pkg query -a '%n %a' | grep 0 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | less
This lists all “vital” packages, which usually means ones installed with intent, rather than automatically. This might be a useful thing to post for Ravenports…
Tonight’s SemiBUG meeting is piggybacking on an Azure User’s Group meeting, same general location. (This is why) Go, if you are near.
Remember the upgrade for dragonflybsd.org machines? It completed, and it’s interesting to see that SSDs have become so easily available that “spinning rust” hard disk drives are only still useful for bulk storage, and even then probably not for much longer.
Another neat side effect: disk usage on developer system leaf.dragonflybsd.org was cut in half, thanks to HAMMER2 dedup/compression. It’s a ‘free’ half-terabyte.
Various machines in dragonflybsd.org are getting hardware upgrades this week. They aren’t time-consuming, so I daresay it won’t have much effect on uptime.
I’m pulling a quote off of IRC to show some of the testing on HAMMER2, specifically as the background for this commit:
14:22 <@dillon_> ^^^ hammer2 bug, could reproduce it around once a day doing a continuous rm -rf on hardlinked snapshots. reproduced about once every 500 million directory entries or so
I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after deleting half a billion directory entries.
I’ve tagged and built DragonFly 5.2.2. This is mostly so that our current release image includes the fixes for the LazyFP bug, CVE-2018-3665. My email to users@ has upgrade details.
NYCBUG is having an outdoors meeting in Bryant Park, today, 6:45 PM. Go, if you are near.
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.
I’ve tagged a x.x.1 release – DragonFly 5.2.1, available now. It includes the recently-mentioned fix for CVE-2018-8897 and some other minor updates. See my email to users@ for the details.