As I found out directly, upgrading from pkgsrc version 2010Q1 to 2010Q2 has a minor quirk: binary packages for 2010Q2 will refuse to install with an older version of pkg_install. Rebuild pkgtools/pkg_install to the 2010Q2 version and the problem will go away.
Category: Goings-on
08/26/2010
There’s a BSD Show?
There’s a podcast titled “The BSD Show!”, which I didn’t know. What’s more, it has 15 minutes of Warner Losh speaking about FreeNAS. That’s the 4th broadcast so far. (via)
(added it to the links, too)
08/25/2010
Logo request, certification details
Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
08/24/2010
HEADS UP: structure changes, pkgsrc changes
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
TCP-MD5, anyone?
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
08/23/2010
DragonFly hosting available
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
08/21/2010
BSDTalk 195: Mike Larkin, ACPI, OpenBSD
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
08/16/2010
Summary of recent kernel work
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
08/15/2010
What of OpenSolaris?
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
08/14/2010
fairq disk scheduling now default
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?
No more libevent
The libevent library has been removed from the repository to ease the maintenance burden. There is some additional rationale in this tracker issue.
08/11/2010
Testing the iphdr branch
Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
08/10/2010
Messylaneous: SSDs, GPL, HACK, books, UNIX, oldwww
I almost had an all-acronym title, darnit.
- Theodore T’so’s writing about SSDs. It’s Linuxish, so not all the problems he finds would apply to DragonFly, but interesting in the detail level.
- The WordPress Theme Fiasco. (via) I link just so I can say that BSD licensing certainly takes away some of these headaches.
- How to get Vim to highlight HACK the same as XXX.
- How many books are there in the world? (via) I find this strangely interesting, probably cause I like books.
- 10 Great Unix Tools (via).
- The oldest web page, via Prof. Dr. Style, also a good read. I still reflexively assume web links that contain a ~ must be more authentic and personal than any other. (via).
08/09/2010
More pf stuff: a review
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Places to go, exams to take
Dru Lavigne has listed conventions she’ll be at over the next few months, so if you feel like taking a BSDA exam or just plain helping out at a BSD booth, check the list.
08/07/2010
Building a device list, checking it twice
Stathis Kamperis was looking for a way to list all disk devices and the associated serial numbers. Matthew Dillon described a manual way to find it. That manual method could be turned into a single shell script, if anyone wanted a small shell programming task.
08/06/2010
Even more numbers
Samuel Greear has even more benchmarks for his kqueue work. This time, he took an example server from Unix Network Programming, and tested various permutations. His post has the relative timings for each server type.
08/04/2010
Messylaneous: vi, Pomodoro, Git
Some links! I normally would save this for a Lazy Reading Sunday entry, but I want to clear the backlog:
- 10 vi tips and tricks. (via)
- Pomodoro Technique, a way of breaking work into half-hour chunks to keep yourself productive. (via)
- More unusual Git tips. (via)
- 10 Differences Between Linux and BSD. Not that exciting, but I like the anecdote in item 4.
08/03/2010
August OSBR: Interdisciplinary Lessons
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Interdisciplinary Lessons”. September’s theme will be “Keystone Companies” and October will be “Sales Strategy”. If you want to contribute to those issues, articles are due by the 15th of the month before.
08/02/2010
New Features page for DragonFly
Matthew Dillon created a new Features page on the DragonFly site; it lists the technologies added to DragonFly from over the past few years.
A new BSD Blog!
Dru Lavigne’s started a PC-BSD Blog. This is great news – I don’t tend to cover other BSDs because I think there’s enough space in the blogosphere to others to do it. (and I only have so many hours in a day.) Dru’s already shown she knows posting, so I’m very happy to see more specific BSD outlets.
07/30/2010
I take it back
AboutBSD.net is putting source attribution on stories now, so I have nothing to complain about.
Well, I suppose I could complain about the default margins on embedded story images. It’s too small. Yes, I’m really reaching.
07/29/2010
Snapshot build logs now available
The logs from regular DragonFly builds are now available as they are completed. It’s i386 right now, with x86_64 on the way.
pf progress
Jan Lentfer posted about his progress on upgrading pf. He has pickups working, but on on a per-rule basis; he’s looking for feedback on how important this option is for other users.
07/27/2010
Another compilation site, plus me complaining
Dru Lavigne linked to AboutBSD.net; it’s an aggregate site that compiles the RSS feeds from a number of BSD sites.
It doesn’t list any news from this site. I had a conversation with “Psyber.Monkey”, the maintainer some months ago and I pointed out that since it was copying posts wholesale, it sounded like I was writing for that website instead of my own, and it didn’t note the source, or even keep my name with my work. He said he’d address that and remove my copied posts until it was fixed. It looks like it hasn’t been addressed.
The BSD license (for example) allows for copying work, but it doesn’t allow you to strip the author’s name off the work. The AboutBSD.net articles at least link back to the original articles now, but I’d like to see more specific attribution, as is done at other places that quote people’s work, like KernelTrap or even (usually) Slashdot.
I don’t want to sound too cranky about it, as he did reach out and check, which is a first – normally I just see my writing surface on aggregate feed sites, and that’s the earliest I hear of it.
Update: I take it back.
07/26/2010
GPT, please
Is it time to move to GPT instead of the traditional fdisk/disklabel combo? Petr thinks so. There’s some work to do, though.
07/25/2010
Network Flow Analysis: a review
Michael Lucas sent me a copy of his newest book, Network Flow Analysis, on the grounds that I read it and write what I thought. While book reviews aren’t usual fare for this site, it’s appealing to write something different from my usual brief summaries.
(more after the jump…)
pkgsrc-2010Q2 out, I think
I haven’t seen an announcement at all, but I’m inferring that it’s out. I’ll be changing the DragonFly build machines momentarily.
07/23/2010
BSDA Exam locations and dates
Dru Lavigne has posted a list of upcoming locations for BSDA exams; look for one near you, as this list is globe-spanning.
07/22/2010
pf: farther along
Jan Lentfer has more on his progress updating pf in DragonFly to a more recent version. He’s looking for testers, especially ones with a more complex pf setup.
BSDTalk: Hipp and Fossil SCM
BSDTalk 194 has a conversation with D. Richard Hipp, about the Fossil “distributed software configuration management system”.
07/17/2010
BSD-Day 2010 in Hungary
November 20th, 2010 is the date for BSD-Day, in Budapest. Gabor Pali has a note out inviting developer to attend and give talks. There’s more details on a FreeBSD wiki page.
07/16/2010
More mandoc madness
Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.
Another GSoC update
David Shao has updated his GSoC project page on the DragonFly website. His project is updating DRM/GEM/KMS for BSD systems. It’s a huge but important piece of work. This update brings news on updates to locking systems and data structures.
07/15/2010
New kevent for testing
Samuel J. Greear’s work on his Google Summer of Code project, unifying the select/poll/kevent subsystem into kevent, is already available for testing. Any testing – just booting, or running X, or other simple tasks – is useful, as this new system touches many things.
An easy way to use clang
Sascha Wildner has set up $CCVER so that it can be used with ‘clangsvn’. If you install clang from svn into /usr/local, it’ll get picked up and used as the system compiler.
07/12/2010
Messylaneous: reading, catchup
I apologize; I’ve been missing. Here’s some misc links while I get back in gear:
- A very good reason to be interested in Hammer over ZFS: nobody will threaten lawsuits over Hammer.
- 10 tricks for admins. I’m posting it cause I can never remember that thing with tunneling ssh out. (via)
- This Gaming Life, as a free download. An excellent book that is in physical form on my shelf right now. Yes, unrelated.
07/02/2010
SoC kqueue progress
Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.
06/29/2010
Real world use and DragonFly
Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.
06/27/2010
Messylaneous: Reviews, packaging, installers, etc
Link catchup!
- The BSD Certification Group needs reviewers for the BSDA exam objectives. It’s as easy as writing on a wiki.
- Undeadly has a lengthy article up about the OpenBSD equivalent of pkgsrc bulk builds, called dbp3. Interesting, because it was constructed on purpose, for that purpose. It’s interesting to me because I have pbulk running all the time, and it’s not as liner a process as I’d like.
- The PC-BSD installer is now present in FreeBSD; I think this is based on the same original installer used for DragonFly. Maybe, maybe not, but I’m curious about the feature set if it’s able to displace the venerable and firmly lodged FreeBSD sysinstall.
- Off topic: I bought an Android-based phone recently, so this (kinda grody) comment on how Apple handles bad reception for the new iPhone is entertaining.
- Really off topic: this man’s conversation about polyhedral dice (Youtube) is strangely compelling. You may or may have needed to play tabletop games previously to really appreciate it. (via)
06/24/2010
Another image
Not actually related to DragonFly except by coincidental name, but it’s entertaining and imageblogging is fun. (via, some other images there nsfw)
06/22/2010
Free book, if you are lucky
Michael Lucas is giving away a limited number of copies of his new Network Flow Analysis book. Post something clever and you may get it. Please don’t be more clever than me, though, as I want a copy.
06/21/2010
Congratulations, Dru
Dru Lavigne is the new “Director of Community Development” for PC-BSD. I am totally jealous, and she is the perfect person for the job.
06/17/2010
BSDTalk 192: pf, Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen
There’s a new BSDTalk podcast up, again from BSDCan 2010. This one interviews Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen about pf, for 20 minutes.
Freeze for pkgsrc-2010Q2 starts about now
It’s been 0.25 years since the last, so pkgsrc is due for another quarterly release. The usually-two-week freeze before release starts tonight. The release should happen at the end of the month.
06/14/2010
Qemu notes
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
06/13/2010
Progress update on pf
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
06/12/2010
Messylaneous – Unixy articles, clang, pkgsrc projects, more
- IBM’s developerWorks has an article up about GNU screen. It’s not BSD-specific, but the tips in using screen are useful. (Before someone brings it up: yes, tmux too.)
- Another article talks about inspecting network traffic using various tools including tcpdump and wireshark. It is a tremendous advantage to see what happens on a network at the most basic level, so this is a good skill to pick up.
- Oh, and “Setting up UNIX file systems” and “10 steps to Unix nirvana“.
- FreeBSD now ships with clang. (via) I know DragonFly (mostly?) works with clang… Could we switch?
- “hwstat” will gain DragonFly support soon.
- Firmware for ral(4) has been added by Joe Talbott.
- Thomas Klausner has a writeup of some project ideas or goals taken from the recent pkgsrcCon. A followup has me thinking: if the -uu option updates dependent packages with pkg_add, does that mean ‘pkg_radd -uu packagename” will do all updating possible based on available binary packages? Worth trying.
06/11/2010
Welcome new commiter: Venkatesh Srinivas
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
06/10/2010
Specific steps for multiprocessing
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
New BSDTalk: clang clang clang
BSDTalk has a very timely interview with Roman Divácký and Ed Schouten about the switch to clang/LLVM in FreeBSD. It’s 17 minutes, recorded at the recent BSDCan 2010.
06/07/2010
More pcc notes
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
06/04/2010
Mandoc, mdocml, and usage
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
06/02/2010
bmake(1)ing a list, checking it twice
I found this reference list of targets for bmake very useful, especially because I can never remember them all. Unfortunately, the site where it’s located appears to be going away at the end of the month, but it should resurface on a new NetBSD wiki.
06/01/2010
BSDTalk 190: Michael Lucas
BSDTalk 190 has 20 minutes of conversation with Michael Lucas, one of my favorite authors, about his new book, “Network Flow Analysis“. He is also responsible for other BSD books.
June OSBR: Growing Business
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and it has a number of articles about growth and open source. It’s a mix of “how-to” and “how-we-did” articles.
05/31/2010
dragonflybsd.org upgrade
www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
05/30/2010
GEM and KMS progress for GSoC
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
Things to eat up your day
It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.
Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.
Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).
05/27/2010
Messylaneous for 2010/05/27: destroying flash, Unix, programming
I had a sudden buildup of things to link to. It’s three items, but there’s enough info here to eat a few hours…
- Flash Destroyer: (destroying hardware, not like what Apple’s trying) found via the howling void, which of course has lots of complaints about technical inaccuracy. Still, interesting to contrast this with swapcache usage. The Bus Pirate on that site also sounds interesting.
- Handling multiple SSH keys in your SSH config: talks about one issue that came out of a larger IBM developerWorks UNIX tips article which is part of a larger series. I may have linked to parts of it before; it’s firmly packed with usefulness. Seriously, go read.
- Dru Lavigne linked to this article about the future of software development, and I agree with her: it’s a good prediction of the very near future.
05/26/2010
Big network stack changes
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
05/24/2010
Long-term swapcache results
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
05/23/2010
New HOWTO: swapcache
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!
05/19/2010
Projects and money available
As described on the kernel@ mailing list, there’s several code bounties out now, formed in part from GSoC projects that didn’t get a slot. All of them have money waiting behind them. (I’d sure like to see better interrupt routing.)
05/18/2010
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
As McLone points out, the filesystem comparison page on Wikipedia is missing some Hammer details. Anyone want to fill in the pertinent numbers?
More Gource and BSD
Paul Onyschuk went and created a very neat and very long Gource movie using one of the oldest codebases out there: NetBSD. It’s available on Vimeo. His original data is available if anyone wants to try something similar.
Messylaneous for 2010/05/18: Facebook, fsck
A brief history of fsck (via) Is “A Brief History of X” a meme all by itself? Searching on it gave me this book of course, but also this interesting article about Internet history.
I’ve been restraining myself from a Facebook rant (other than deleting my Facebook account), as there’s plenty of people complaining about Facebook out there. This description, however, is as good a reason as anything for why there’s better choices.
Speaking of getting away from Facebook and fsck, apparently a “dirty Unix joke” made it into a New York Times photo about Facebook alternatives. (via)
That was my best segue ever.
Totally unrelated now: “Clicky” keyboards, and various links about them. (via) There’s at least a few person who’s going to read those links and get excited based on a mix of nostalgia and utility.
05/17/2010
BSD meetup in London
Sevan Janiyan passed along a note: there’s a *BSD meetup at the Barrowboy and Banker pub
by London Bridge, in London, the 27th of May. I’d love to attend, both because it’s BSD and because it’s a pub. That pesky Atlantic gets in the way.
05/16/2010
BSDCan 2010 videos online
FOSSLC has videos of the presentations from the recent BSDCan. (via) I’m listening to Will Backman’s keynote right now about the BSD community based on his BSDTalk work.
Update: Dru has a list of videos and pictures.
05/15/2010
Potential pf update
The version of pf in DragonFly is somewhat long in the tooth, but Jan Lentfer’s volunteered himself for the herculanean job of updating it. Go, Jan! Let’s hope this large task is more Nemean than Augean.
05/14/2010
Have you tried BSDStats?
Marc G. Fournier posted some statistics gathered from his BSDStats service. It’s possible to activate this right now on DragonFly. Just put
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
in /etc/rc.conf. For details, there’s the man page.
05/12/2010
BSD Events link added
Have I managed to forget all this time to add Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Events Twitter feed to my link list on the Digest? Yes, I did – fixed.
Rolling everything back
If you have a Hammer filesystem, and you want to roll the entire thing back to a previous snapshot – all files, everywhere – it can be accomplished with one command.
05/11/2010
Note on NAT
Did you know… ipfw/natd appears to be broken in DragonFly 2.6? Using pf is a better choice, at least, but I found it out the hard way.
05/09/2010
Some pkgsrc reports
I’ve put a few of the reports from pkgsrc builds on DragonFly out. They’re all using pkgsrc-2010Q1, on i386/DragonFly 2.6, i386/DragonFly 2.7, and x86_64/DragonFly 2.7. The links in the reports go to the errors that caused each package to not build. If you happen to see something that has an easy fix, or that you really need to have working, please submit a fix.
05/07/2010
2.6.3 announcement up
The ISO images have been filtering out to the mirrors for a while already, but the 2.6.3 release is officially announced on the DragonFly website and release page.