PHP 5.4 status in pkgsrc

Takahiro Kambe is bringing PHP 5.4 into pkgsrc, probably as lang/php54.  Follow the whole thread for a discussion of version numbering.  As a side effect of this, PHP 5.2 will leave pkgsrc by the next quarterly pkgsrc release.  If you’re using that older flavor, you’ll want to upgrade.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Recent networking updates

Sepherosa Ziehau has been making various updates that conform to standards lately, including “RFC4653 Non-Congestion Robustness (NCR)” and “RFC3517bis“.  I’m not familiar with what they do, but you can follow the links and read the RFCs if you are curious.

(Not sure if I got that 3517 one correct…)

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

TUI mode added to kgdb

TUI mode is available now for kgdb on DragonFly, thanks to John Marino.  It’s apparently a Text User Interface for debugging core files.  I haven’t used it, so I’m relying on the testimony of others.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

An Apache 2.4 bug, worked around

Apparently Apache 2.4 has a bug that will cause network stalls when sending data that doesn’t line up with segment size.  Sepherosa Ziehau has put in a workaround for the issue.  Alternately, you can use www/apache22.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Hammer 2 progress

Matthew Dillon’s recently added getaddr/setaddr support, dumping, and session encryption, among other things, to Hammer 2.  Or is it HAMMER2?  I’m not sure.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Hammer     0 Comments

BSDTalk 214: Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer

BSDTalk 214 has nearly an hour of conversation with Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer, all from the recent BSDCan.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Periodicals     0 Comments

Vendor branch updates: libedit, libncurses, libgmp, zlib, gdb

John Marino has updated libncurses, libedit, gdb, libgmp, and zlib.  The release notes are helpfully contained within each commit.  If that wasn’t enough, he’s also added terminfo, a future replacement for termcap, if I understand correctly.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

OpenSSL updated two different ways

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in two different places:. The 3.0 release now has OpenSSL 1.0.0j, which fixes several security issues (see link for CVE IDs).  DragonFly 3.1 now has OpenSSL 1.0.1c.   As for a changelog… this, maybe?

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

“Level/low” USB fix

If you are having USB issues on boot with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau’s sysctl suggestions may help you.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig.  A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor.   The first two chapters are available as a PDF.  Read and if you like it, order the whole thing.  Also: Steve and Steve.  If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Lazy Reading, UNIXish     0 Comments

BSDTalk 213: Paul Schenkeveld and EuroBSDCon

BSDTalk 213 is out, with 14 minutes of conversation with Paul Schenkeveld about EuroBSDCon.  EuroBSDCon is happening in late October, in Poland.  Also, the BSDTalk website has a new layout.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Device support, Periodicals     0 Comments

Virtio drivers, an explanation

Venkatesh Srinivas posted an explanation of the virtio update he’s working on.  I linked to the work before, but not his explanation, which goes into the ‘vm_balloon’ device.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Update, Asus G2K users

Sascha Wildner’s posted an update to the acpi_asus(4) module, so it’s worth updating if you have an appropriate Asus machine and are running DragonFly-current.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Pkgsrc doing better on DragonFly

Thanks to the efforts of John Marino and others, pkgsrc is having possibly the highest success rate ever of successful package software builds.  If only I could get a pkgsrc-2012Q1 build to complete and upload…

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Something new under the sun

You’d think everything that could be done with grep has already been done, but no: grep, which is an externally-produced program, has been updated in DragonFly to version 2.12 by John Marino.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Recent syncs from FreeBSD and back again

A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog.  Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).

In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.

 

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, FreeBSD     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/06

Drowning in links this week.  Is that so bad?  No.

Your unrelated links of the week: Turntablism.  I was talking about assembled music last week, and this is a whole area to itself.  Watch Kid Koala turn a few seconds of trumpet playing into an entire blues progression.

Posted by     Categories: Lazy Reading, pkgsrc, roguelike     1 Comment

BSD Magazine for May is out

BSD Magazine for May is out, with the theme of BSD security, though of course there’s a lot more than that topic in the free PDF.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Periodicals     0 Comments

Virtual IO drivers status

Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on integration of Tim Bisson’s virtio-bhyve drivers into DragonFly.  This would make throughput better in KVM/Qemu.  His bug ticket has some questions that could use answers.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Ebooks sale, just today

There’s a Day Against DRM sale going on for O’Reilly.  50% off everything, and all the books are DRM-free.  I found out about this through Michael Lucas, whose No Starch books are represented there too.  It’s a fantastic deal and it’s today only, so strike now while you have the chance.

(I should make a ‘buy buy buy!’ tag for articles.)

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Heads Up!, UNIXish     1 Comment

Debugging RANCID

Michael Lucas has a writeup on how he debugged his RANCID setup.  I link to it for the technical details, and also because if you have to manage more than a few switches or other network devices, RANCID is very useful.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, Someday you will need this     0 Comments

ichwd(4) added, watchdog watches

Francois Tigeot has added ichwd(4), a driver for the watchdog function on some Intel ICH motherboard chipsets.  Sascha Wildner has also made the kernel option for it on by default.  (Look for /dev/wdog.)

Update: Francois Tigeot sent a link to an excellent page explaining hardware watchdogs.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Upgrading to pkgsrc-2012Q1

Here’s a post by yours truly, on how to move to pkgsrc-2012Q1 though building from source.  This is for anyone sick of waiting for me to finish the binary build of pkgsrc.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Followup on clustering

Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday.  It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Update for a clusterfix

A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you’re running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you’ll want to update.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/29

I go a bit beyond presenting links and comment on them too, this week.  Not too much!  Enjoy.

Your unrelated link of the week.  Youtube Poop.  As far as I can tell, ‘Youtube Poop’ are glitched videos made from Youtube content but with segments repeated, frames modified, or new sentences constructed from reassembling the frames.  Sometimes noisy, sometimes rude.  Also, an art form that can only exist now, and never really before.  Reminds me of the old Fensler Films, or that odd series out of Japan.  I find the idea of assembling new rhythms and music out of non-musical items fascinating, but I would, wouldn’t I?

(Turn your volume down before trying some of those links.)

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Lazy Reading     0 Comments

OpenSSL 1.0.1b updated

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL, though this version is apparently a bugfix, not a security fix.  Still need it anyway, since it disabled TLS 1.1 in an unexpected way.  See the OpenSSL changelog entry at “[26 Apr 2012]” for details.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on     0 Comments

Google Summer of Code: the projects

Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects.  Here’s direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:

(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)

SACK retransmission added

Sepherosa Ziehau added ”Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm” in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy.  It’s on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Packages that will go, and packages that might go

There’s a few pkgsrc packages that might be going the way of the dodo, soon.  There’s a few more that need love, so speak up if you use them.  Maybe you can be the Somebody™ that fixes them?

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     1 Comment

New committer: Markus Pfeiffer

Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer.  He’s ‘profmakx’ on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD’s USB infrastructure – which I am looking forward to, tremendously.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Google Summer of Code projects announced

Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:

(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately.  So if you didn’t get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there’s some great ideas out there that I’d like to see happen.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Google Summer of Code     0 Comments

Mosh for DragonFly developers

Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org.  If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help.  (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Where are the pkgsrc-2012Q1 binary packages for DragonFly?

I’m still working on building them.  I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon.  Sorry!

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/22

Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: One Thing Well.  The BSD tag might be the most useful.

OpenSSL updated to 1.0.1a

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110.  Thanks Peter!

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Cheap SSH Mastery

Michael Lucas’s worthwhile book, SSH Mastery, is currently having one of those sudden price cuts on Amazon – for the paperback version, about 25%.  Now it a good time to nab it before the price bounces back up.

Posted by     Categories: Book review, Goings-on     0 Comments

Disk quotas, the details

Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted.  There’s also the vquota(8) man page.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Try out quotas, temporarily

Because of several recent commits, quotas can be set.  They aren’t persistent yet, so they’ll vanish on reboot.  The standard disclaimer applies, as this is new.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

OpenJDK7 building

Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here’s a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/15

It’s a good week when I can start collecting new Lazy Reading material right after posting the previous week’s summary.

Your unrelated link of the week: Quigley’s Cabinet Followups.  There’s about a bazillion links there to follow about weird history.

 

Posted by     Categories: Lazy Reading, UNIXish     0 Comments

Optimized scoreboard for SACK

DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau.  What’s that mean?  SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost.  The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked.  So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.

(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

em(4) update

Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Hammer2 messaging

If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at.  Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Hammer     0 Comments

DragonFly time

DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone.  What’s this mean?  Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

IW changes wiill need a buildworld

Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post.  The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade.  The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat.  Or not; this is pretty technical.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

6 slots for Summer of Code

DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code.  That’s great!  We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Google Summer of Code     0 Comments

Longest review ever, finished

That DragonFly review is now available in all six parts.  (I included the preamble there.)  I still haven’t made it through the whole thing.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

OpenSSL updated to 1.0.1

Peter Avalos has updated DragonF’y's OpenSSL to version 1.0.1, in part to make future upgrades easier.  See the changelog for what’s new.  Look for the part specifically about 1.0.1, since the notes include unreleased material too.

Posted by     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

pkginteractive: graphical pkgin

Julian Fagir has put together a graphical – meaning it works under curses in a terminal, or under X - interface to pkgin, the binary package manager.  Can someone try it and describe how well it works?

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Have Areca RAID? Now you can use MSI

Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI.   It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     1 Comment

Some more pkgsrc expunging

There’s several packages that will be removed from pkgsrc after the 2012Q2 branch, since they haven’t worked in a long time.  Also, Python 2.4 has been removed from pkgsrc-current and 2.5 will go the same way before the end of the year.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/08

The links are all over the map this week, which is fine.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: memepool.  It’s seen some activity lately.  It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.

pkgsrc-2012Q1 is branched

The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched.  I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.

The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today.  Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4′ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1′, and then to switch to it:

  1. cd /usr/pkgsrc
  2. git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
  3. git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
  4. git pull

At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications.  For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.

Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available.  Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.

Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that.  I mean, come on.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     2 Comments

BSD Magazine for April: Clouds

BSD Magazine’s April issue is out, and it’s about the Cloud.  Or clouds, depending on how you look at it.  Anyway, there’s several conversations in there about BSD-based hosting services, which I’m sure everyone has wished for at some time or another.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Periodicals     0 Comments

Longest DragonFly review ever?

Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever.  Here’s parts one, two, and three.  There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Does this load for you?

I have one trouble report.  I need more, especially if you’re in Australia.

Posted by     Categories: About This Site     9 Comments

Packages that might go away, or not?

There’s been some discussion of packages that have been broken for a long time in pkgsrc, over on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list.  It’s interesting to see just what breaks these packages, though it still seems up in the air whether any will be removed or not.  (Follow the thread if you have time.)  I don’t think the discussion has ended yet.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/04/01

This would be the right time for an April Fools joke…  but no.  It’s so common it’s hard to come up with something that won’t make people roll their eyes.

Your unrelated link of the day: a Space Shuttle launch from the point of view of the booster rocket. (via)  Remember when humanity had reusable spaceships?

Posted by     Categories: Lazy Reading     3 Comments

A minor DragonFly construction project

I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days.  My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw.  I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.

Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio.  You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap.  I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already.  This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.

I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg.  You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later.  I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2.  It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached.  That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.

Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy.  I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist.  Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.

I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.

I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me,  and slid the upside-down speakers onto them.  There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.

You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner.  How’s the sound?  Okayish.  You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar.  I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.

This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home.  (This laptop usually travels with me.)  I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.

(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background.  It was a wedding present.  I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer.  I don’t know why.)

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

mfi(4) updated

Sascha Wildner has updated mfi(4), the LSI MegaRAID SAS driver , via FreeBSD and LSI.  SAS2208-based controllers are now supported.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Plans for pkgsrc

I just removed old pkgsrc binary packages for DragonFly 2.6/2.7 from avalon, so if somehow you are running a version of DragonFly that old, and still using binary packages, you’ll want to upgrade.  I’m pretty confident that describes nobody.

Also, I have plans for coordinating the next pkgsrc release of 2012Q1, due April 6th, with the probably next minor upgrade of DragonFly, 3.0.3.  I wrote out my plans already, so go read.  (plus followup)

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

ldconfig search path change

John Marino has changed the default search path for ldconfig; it no longer looks along /usr/lib/gcc* since that’s already included via rpath.  The end result: you will need to do ‘make upgrade’ after your next buildworld build/installworld.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     2 Comments

Fixing X video performance

I’ve seen a few people complain about poor video performance in DragonFly, in Xorg.  If you see a bunch of  ”contigmalloc_map: failed …” errors in your dmesg, your video card needs more contiguous memory allocated.  Set vm.dma_reserved to 32M in /boot/loader.conf and you should be set.  If that doesn’t work, try 64M.

A 3.0.2 torrent

A torrent for DragonFly 3.0.2, found via Google search.  Which ISO or img files does it include?  I don’t know.  Which architectures?  I don’t know.  Is it legit?  I don’t know.  Click at your own risk, just like any other link.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     3 Comments

DragonFly 3.0.2 out

DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one.  This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Summer of Code student applications open

Student applications for Google Summer of Code (and DragonFly) can now be submitted, until April 6th.  Now’s your chance!

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Google Summer of Code     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/25

This is the week of in-depth items to look at.  I hope you have some time set aside…  Also, I’m doing something a little different; since Lazy Reading articles are built up over the week, I’m scheduling it for early Sunday (EST) so that you can read it in your bathrobe, drinking an astonishingly large amount of tea.  Or at least that’s what I’ll be doing.

  • Apparently there’s a Russian version of BSD Magazine, with a special Russian-only article.  Anyone who can read it willing to tell me what it’s about?
  • Did you know BSD also stands for something bike-related?
  • 70 Roguelikes!  The 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, just completed, has 70 games out as a result.  This will keep you busy, and there’s a very good writeup on several of the games to help you pick from the options.
  • 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop.  (via)  I link it because almost everyone, sooner or later, has used it or has used a program with a very similar tool layout.  Though I suppose you could argue it all comes from MacPaint, designed by Susan Kare, who happens to have also originated Clarus the dogcow.  Moof!
  • Man, Apple used to really have a sense of humor, too.  Maybe they still do.  Companies still do funny things (caution, autoplay video), but it seems to be done with the company’s marketing image in mind these days.  Also, get your ball out of my yard you darn kids etc.
  • Michael Lucas is teaching a SSH class at BSDCan 2012.
  • Lucas also has also disclosed numbers on his recent self-publishing venture.  I love seeing numbers like this because self-publishing discussion usually brings a whole lot of biases to the table, and people come down on one side or another because of what they want it to be, not because of what it is.  (Like discussions of the music industry, piracy, and software.)  This is just the plain numbers.  Also, Absolute OpenBSD, second edition, is definitely his next book.
  • Still on ssh, This Undeadly article talks about using OpenBSD, make, and ssh to speed up research.
  • 20 iconic tech sounds bound for extinction. (via)  Something in there will make you feel nostalgic.  I like the 8mm film noise.
  • Speaking of noise, here’s Famous Sounds, mostly electronically generated or sampled.  (via)  I guarantee some of these will be instantly familiar even though you won’t have heard the original song.

Your unrelated link of the week: Traitor.  (via)  It’s a Flash space shootemup game.   But dragonflies show up in one part!  (to shoot.)

Posted by     Categories: Lazy Reading, Periodicals, roguelike     1 Comment

AMD processor bug: the followup

Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found.   Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.

Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate.  Why draw such a heavy line under that?  The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem.  Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!

 

 

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments

Another pkgsrc bulk build report

This report from yours truly is using pkgsrc-current, so it reflects some of what will show up in pkgsrc-2012Q1.  John Marino has already fixed some of the “top breakage” items, so the numbers should be even better for the next one…

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q1 has started

It runs from now to April 6th, so nothing but bug fixes in pkgsrc until then.  If you have any package fixes you needed, now’s the time to ask someone.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

HEADS UP: full buildworld required

If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly (meaning version 3.1), you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update.  ’make quickworld’ will appear to succeed but the kernel won’t work.

If you’re running DragonFly 3.0.x, this does not affect you.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Heads Up!     2 Comments

Apache in jail: a tip

Konrad Neuwirth is running Apache inside a jail, and getting some weird errors.  Obviously I don’t know the fix, but Chris Turner knows what the settings need to be.

Are you using old packages?

We have pkgsrc binaries still around for DragonFly 2.6/2.7.  As I posted, I’d like to get rid of them.  Would that inconvenience anyone?

We don’t have a set expiration policy.  We probably should.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments

How to idle on #dragonfly

A tip for anyone who hasn’t tried this yet: run irssi in screen, and connect to #dragonflybsd on EFNet.  You can then resume your screen session at any time after disconnecting and see the backlog, catch people addressing you directly, etc.

Before anyone says it: yes, I know, tmux works too.

Posted by     Categories: DragonFly, Someday you will need this     2 Comments

DragonFly and a Mac

Carsten Mattner wrote out his notes on EFI booting on a Mac.  This gets you closer to booting DragonFly on there, but I don’t think it is completely working yet.

Update: Carsten Mattner has a better summation than what I wrote.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Things for, and not for, the next pkgsrc branch

That’s pkgsrc-2012Q1 I’m talking about.  It appears KDE will jump from 4.5 (what’s there now) to 4.8, and Zope/Plone will be removed.  This will make you happy or sad depending on whether you have these things installed.

Posted by     Categories: Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments

Do you have an HP laptop?

If you do, acpi_hp could use some testing.  Sascha Wildner just brought some improvements in for that module.   I’ve seen discounted HP laptops show up in various places, recently.

Posted by     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/18

I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day.  A nice full week’s worth of stuff.

Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger.  (via)  It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta.  If you like  postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.

Getting published for BSD

BSD Magazine is looking for articles – specifically DragonFly articles, though I imagine it doesn’t have to be.  I’m stretched too thin to write anything right now, but if you have something, contact them.

Posted by     Categories: BSD, Periodicals     1 Comment