SemiBUG‘s having a hands-on server workshop tonight. Go, if you are near, and bring something networked to type on.
NYCBUG is having a social (i.e. no presenter) meeting this month – tonight, in fact. Go, talk BSD, drink.
There’s a social meeting for KnoxBUG tonight – go, if you are near.
Reduce, the “second oldest computer algebra system”, has been ported to DragonFly (and there’s work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you’re a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.
There’s a plugin for pkg, called pkg-provides, which will tell you what package(s) contain the filename you provide – installed or not. I didn’t even know pkg had a plugin system. Anyway, it works on DragonFly, as the author notes.
DragonFly 5.2.0 has been released. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are in there, along with improvements for HAMMER2, accelerated video, and ipfw. My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as does the release notes.
BSDNow 239 does not have an interview, but it does talk about using OpenBSD to prevent unwanted traffic out to the internet, plus a ‘poetic license’.
Jim Keenan is speaking tomorrow at the NYC Perlmongers meeting about testing on non-Linux platforms. i.e. BSD. Go, if you are near.
Welcome the newest committer to DragonFly: Aaron LI!
If no surprises happen, the release candidate for DragonFly 5.2 will be built this weekend.
Aaron LI wrote a tool to update a running DragonFly system from an existing image – release or snapshot. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s very promising. It’s up on Github so if this gets you excited, you know what to do.
A new DragonFly user found setting keybell=”visual” in rc.conf caused a crash on the next terminal beep. In this case, the user is Deaf and so prefers something other than an auditory bell. The issue is fixed in development and release, but I always like seeing variations on “many eyes make bugs shallow“.
Oh, hey, that’s a nice thing to say. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Another BSD User Group event tomorrow, the 7th: HELBUG, a brand new BUG starting in Helsinki, Finland. The announcement has details on where to find it and what they’ll be doing. Go, if you are near.
This Wednesday, NYCBUG has Christos Zoulas speaking on “Reproducible Builds on NetBSD“. See the announcement for details. Go, if you are near New York City.
I say “one more” like I know when this saga will end. If you are using the devcpu-data port to update your processors, you’ll need to add
microcode_update_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out.
Are you tired of hearing about Meltdown/Spectre yet? Doesn’t matter! The two sysctls for controlling mitigation in DragonFly have been renamed:
machdep.meltdown_mitigation machdep.spectre_mitigation
They go to hopefully sensible defaults, but Matthew Dillon has done some testing to show the effects of each in various combinations. (Update: more changes and tests.) Note that this is not the final mitigation work; compilers (i.e. gcc) are being updated to include workarounds for this, so new gcc -> new compiler in DragonFly -> new defenses. No silver bullet there, though.
More user group news: Helsinki, Finland, has a new BSD User Group: HelBUG. First meeting is February 7th. There’s no mailing list/site that I know of, yet.
I’m posting this waaaay ahead of time: next NYCBUG meeting is tomorrow. It’s a porting session, and here’s some of what to expect.