If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.
Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
NYCBUG is meeting tonight, and Thomas Levine will be there to talk about Urchin, a shell-based test framework. The announcement also has future meeting/speaker dates noted.
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
Posting it now, because it’ll be too late by this weekend’s In Other BSDs: The inaugural meeting of KnoxBUG is tomorrow night. That’s Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The speaker is Kris Moore, of PC-BSD. The website has directions.
BSDNow 138, “Rushing into BSD”, has an interview with Benedict Reuschling, about the FreeBSD Foundation and Europe. There’s the usual news roundup, plus some notes about upcoming conventions.
The DragonFly 4.4.3 point release is out. There’s a commit page listing the changes between 4.4.2 and 4.4.3. Nobody will be surprised that there’s an OpenSSL update in there.
If you want a complete image, it’s available for download at your nearest mirror. If you want to upgrade an existing install:
cd /usr; make src-update
(or src-create-shallow if you don't already have source)
make buildworld && make buildkernel
make installkernel && make installworld
make upgrade
reboot
I’d save this for an In Other BSDs note, but that’s a whole week away: FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS is published, available in electronic and printed editions. I suspect this would be interesting to non-BSD users, too.
The GNN in the title is George Neville-Neil, interviewed on BSDNow 136 about the TeachBSD project, plus the usual collection of recent BSD news. The show title comes from this station advert.
Posting now so people have warning: NYCBUG’s monthly meeting is tomorrow, April 6th, and has John Wolfe presenting “Debugging with LLVM”. Note that the meeting announcement I just linked has the NYCBUG schedule and speakers for the rest of the calendar year. Surely you can make one of them?
BSDNow 133 is a recap of everything seen and done at the just-concluded AsiaBSDCon 2016. In addition, there’s a conversation with Brad Davis about packaging FreeBSD’s base system. (there’s been talks about this before.)
(I know AsiaBSDCon 2016 was streamed; was the video made available?)
I’m actually a few days late pointing at this, as it came out a few days ago. Anyway, the most-recent-at-this-point Garbage podcast is out, talking about VAX going away, and ends with a good note about donations, and how just giving your pocket change helps.
If you’re somewhere around Michigan tomorrow around 7 PM, Michael W. Lucas is presenting at the SEMIBUG meeting, on FreeBSD filesystems. See the group site for location.
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.
BSDNow 131 is out, and has an interview of Jamie McParland, on I assume the topic of BSD in school environments, guessing by the title and guest’s email address. It has the normal summary of news items, including explanations of load average I think many people would find useful.
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.
BSDTalk 262 is available, talking with Tex Andrews for 23 minutes about LightZone, “open source digital darkroom software”.