The almost-to-200 expisode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with John Hixson about PC-Sysinstall and what it could replace.
10/04/2010
Firefox fix found
10/03/2010
Lazy Reading:books, talks, games, games
This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.
- Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft) Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes. Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
- Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
- 12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest. (via) Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles. MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc. The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
- Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing. (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.) One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK. I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11. Darnit. Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.
10/02/2010
How to arrange your vm_map
Based on a recent project list entry for “changing the vm_map lookup” (currently last item on the page), Venkatesh Srinivas wrote up a bit more information on it, linking to different strategies for arranging the data. Good reading for those who like data structures.
x86_64 testing available
Matthias Schmidt has set up a x86_64 DragonFly machine at uther.dragonflybsd.org. Anyone wanting to try 64-bit testing can use a vkernel on that machine. Mail him for an account.
10/01/2010
Open device driver development, anyone?
Hasso Tepper posted a link to something I had only heard about when it didn’t exist in physical form: the Open Graphics Device v1. It’s possible to get one if you’re going to write support for it.
OSBR: Sales
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Sales as the theme. The very first article talks about something dangerous: turning open-source users into customers.
09/30/2010
Git mirror for pkgsrc being rebuilt
Our mirror of the never-quite-official git repository for pkgsrc is being rebuilt, so it will be temporarily inaccessible. Matthew Dillon is working on building a new one directly from pkgsrc CVS, which will have a different link.
Update: It’s finished. Matthew Dillon’s posted a summary of the changes and what you need to update in order to use it.
BSD Show! – Olander, Schwartz
The BSD Show! has a 15 minute talk with Matt Olander about MeetBSD, and a 14-minute B-Side with Randal Schwartz, who writes books and does podcasts. (there, even more to listen to now.)
09/29/2010
BSDTalk 198: MeetBSD Cali 2010
BSDTalk 198 has 12 minutes of conversation with Matt Olander and James T. Nixon, about MeetBSD. (which is November 5th and 6th.)
x86_64 bootable help, revisited
It looks like my prior article was incorrect: it was a different issue than MADT causing problems with booting x86_64. Scrambled memory report appears to be at the heart of the issue; in any case, it’s fixed now.
Flash 9 on DragonFly
Chris Turner wrote up his experience of getting Flash 9 to work on DragonFly. The usual disclaimers apply.
Update: there’s an improved library available that fixes some audio and video sync problems.
09/28/2010
OpenSSL notes
Peter Avalos wrote a note that better summarized my earlier post, and mentioned a problem/workaround with ssh and non-md5 MACs.
x86_64 bootable help, sorta
John Marino found that when he couldn’t boot a x86_64 development image in Virtualbox, setting the sysctl hw.madt_probe_test=1 seemed to make a difference long enough to boot, though it still crashed later. It’s worth trying if there’s no other way to boot, at least.
09/27/2010
Revised pkgsrc guide
I’ve drastically revamped the pkgsrc howto on the dragonflybsd.org website. It’s also linked in that site’s menu, too. Comments please!
Welcome back, you two
Two committers who went dormant some time ago: Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Two committers who recently became active again? Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Welcome, back, guys. Developers tend to be active in open source only for as long as they’ve got an itch to scratch, so it’s always great to see a return.
Don’t upgrade, do recompile
A bump in shared library version for libssl/libcrypto means that any programs dependent on it will require a rebuild – including any pkgsrc programs.
This only affects you if you are running 2.7, for now. It means that on upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8, any libssl-using programs will need to be updated. This may not be a big thing, since pkgsrc-2010Q3 will also be out and people will want to upgrade anyway.
09/26/2010
Lazy Reading: subversion, packaging, beams
A small crop for Lazy Reading this week – oh well.
- Bad things about SVN. I’ve always thought git is more interesting, but subversion is easier. Oh well. The article is also fun for the unfiltered Windows-hate.
- At least this hasn’t happened yet with pkgsrc.
- What happens if you put your hand in the way of the Large Hadron Collider beam? (via)
Binary package upgrade issue
I’ve noticed that if you have older pkgsrc packages installed, and install binary packages for pkgsrc-2010Q2, those packages will refuse to install if pkg_install is an older version than what they were built with.
I ended up force-deleting pkg_install and bmake, and reinstalling by running pkgtools/bootstrap/bootstrap. There may be better solutions; I’m mentioning it now since it’s a known problem.
Update: “bmake replace USE_DESTDIR=yes” was suggested by Joerg Sonnenberger. “pkg_add -u /path/to/newer/pkg_install” should also work (untested).
This will probably apply to the upcoming pkgsrc-2010Q3, too. Building from source is a workaround for now.
09/25/2010
Squid issues
Jan Lentfer updated his version of squid, and had issues; this is a note for anyone else running squid to maybe wait before upgrading. Note that this applies to the development version of squid, not necessarily the pkgsrc version.
Update: No, wait, it’s OK.
Crater disk craters
A hard disk in crater.dragonflybsd.org, where the repo for DragonFly source is located, died last night. The disk has been replaced, and the files should all be back in place later today. Double-check if you committed something in the last 24 hours and make sure it’s there, just to be safe.
09/24/2010
Project lists galore
If you were looking for something to do, Samuel J. Greear has invested some time in cleaning up the various project idea pages out there, and has links to prove it.
The return of Fred
Did you know Fred is the name for the DragonFly mascot? Well, you do now. He’s also back in the bootloader, thanks to Joe Talbott.
09/23/2010
pkgsrc database, compiler changes
I mentioned previously that Postgres 9 is already in pkgsrc, but the flip side of that is both Postgres 8.2, and MySQL 4 are being removed. If you still have these installed, be ready to migrate at your next upgrade.
Oh, and you can switch to clang for building pkgsrc, too.
2.8 release in a few weeks
It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October. If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.
09/22/2010
Idlezero, explained
Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work. It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work. I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long. It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.
09/21/2010
Freeze for pkgsrc-2010Q3 starting soon
Starting September 23rd, pkgsrc will freeze (i.e. bugfixes only) in preparation for the 2010Q3 release, which is planned for one week later, instead of the usual 2 weeks. This release will include some very new software like Postgres 9, too.
09/20/2010
“Why did you choose DragonFly?”
Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
09/19/2010
BSDTalk 197: M. Warner Losh and FreeNAS
BSDTalk has another new episode, (197… almost at the 2-century mark!), and it has 37 minutes of conversation with M. Warner Losh about FreeNAS.
rpkgmanager, a want-list based pkgsrc manager
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
New BSD Show!: MidnightBSD
The BSD Show! (am I supposed to include that ! every time? I’m not sure.) has a 10-minute interview with Caryn Holt of MidnightBSD. Also, the B-side of the interview is up.
09/17/2010
AHCI update with new chipset support
In an effort to support a new system with an AMD 880G chipset, Matthew Dillon has updated the AHCI driver. If you have SATA drives using AHCI, please test. (with any chipset, not just 880G.)
09/16/2010
Encrypted HAMMER volumes possible
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
09/15/2010
twa, ips RAID driver updates
Sascha Wildner has brought in some changes to twa(4), for various 3ware RAID controllers, from FreeBSD. Also, YONETANI Tomokazu has added PCI IDs fixed up files for Adaptec ServeRAID 7x ips (4) devices.
Vkernels now start faster, run faster
Two recent changes in the way virtual kernels are constructed should make a speed difference. The startup time is reduced (and more memory can be given to the vkernel), and the overall running speed should be quicker, too.
09/14/2010
pf MPSAFE, mostly
DragonFly’s version of pf (corresponding with OpenBSD’s 4.2 version) is now multiprocessor safe, to match the network stack. pf itself isn’t using multiple processors; it’s just able to work without causing problems in an otherwise MPSAFE environment, thanks again to Jan Lentfer. Note that there’s one minor caveat.
Swapoff is on
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.
09/13/2010
More podcasts! BSDTalk 196: NYCBSDCon
It’s another BSD audio recording! Our cup runneth over, as long as you have a cup that holds audio recordings. BSDTalk 196 has Mark Saad and George Neville-Neil, talking for 10 minutes about NYCBSDCon 2010.
Lazy reading: toeplitz, forking, curating, Nethack
I totally meant to post this yesterday. Oops!
- We’re using toeplitz. I just like the name; I don’t understand how it works.
- The idea of software forks has been around since, oh, BSD and System V Unix diverged, if not earlier. Here’s an article that talks about forking in general, rather breathlessly. After reading that, read this perhaps more accurate fork parody. (via)
- You know what we could use for pkgsrc, and all the other port/package collections? Explanation. They face the same problem phone application stores face: too many programs to easily select what you need. You could certainly build a whole site just around package reviews; it’s even possible to argue that Ubuntu or PC-BSD are built around just making some 3rd-party-app choices ahead of time on an existing operating system. Anyway, here’s an article talking about that idea specifically around the Apple App Store. Please won’t somebody who is not me do something like that for pkgsrc?
- This writeup of one man’s experience with Forth gives a good feel for the language, or at least as good a feel as I can understand. Posted in memoriam for our recently departed Forth bootloader. (via) There’s other enjoyable articles on that blog, too.
- This describes about two years of my life, except it was mostly Zangband.
09/12/2010
BSD Show! B-Side: pfSense
Another B-Side show, this time with additional recordings from the pfSense show.
09/11/2010
BSD Show! B-sides: with me again
After the BSD Show episode with me talking about DragonFly finished, we continued joking around for a good while; Gamaral of the BSD Show! has edited that together into a “B-side“. Enjoy! By this point, I was relaxed, so I sound better.
Some wireless drivers return
Due to changes in networking, most of the wireless drivers in 2.7 stopped working a few days ago. Joe Talbott’s “brought back” iwi, ral, and wi. If you’re running 2.7 and using one of those drivers, it should be safe, relatively, to upgrade to a newer 2.7.
BSD Show!: pfSense
This week’s BSD Show! has 25 minutes of talking with Jim Pingle about pfSense.
09/10/2010
Even more network changes
A little work has snowballed into even more of the network systems in DragonFly being pulled apart in order to get rid of the Giant Lock. It may delay the 2.8 release by a week or two, but it’s already paying dividends, such as NFSv3 now performing at maximum physically possible speeds on gigabit Ethernet.
09/09/2010
More magazines make many mimprovements
(I ran out of alliterative words, sorry.) Venkatesh Srinivas has committed his work on memory allocation; his commit message has details. He’s kindly provided a link to the article that inspired the per-thread magazine work. He’s also provided graphs to show comparative performance benefits of his new memory allocator on DragonFly and on FreeBSD.
pf updated again to 4.2
Jan Lentfer has now updated pf in DragonFly to version 4.2, on top of his earlier work to get to 4.1. This upgrade apparently doubles speed from 4.1, plus he’s brought in some other, later fixes. Thanks for doing a superhuman amount of work, Jan!
09/07/2010
Wireless ripped out, being replaced
Well, technically not ripped out, just serialized roughly. This means if you update your DragonFly 2.7 machine in the next few days, the wireless drivers may not work, except for (I think) ath(4). They should return, better, by next week.
09/06/2010
Areca cards supported, with credit
Apparently the recently committed support for Areca RAID cards came with some help directly from Areca, facilitated by Venkatesh Srinivas. Perhaps next time you’re searching for a RAID card, consider Areca in light of the effort they are willing to contribute for an open-source project…
Dru Lavigne interview
Dru Lavigne has an interview in Distrowatch. Some of it is generic “talk about BSD licensing and etc. only in relation to Linux” style questions, but her answers are well thought-out. (via)
09/05/2010
Lazy reading: the return of ACID, SSI, weirdness
A smaller set of links, but still the same volume of reading material.
- Samuel Greear linked to this lengthy writeup on how to have both the consistency of ACID and the scaling of NoSQL. Astute observers may notice the similarities between the plan described and the way HAMMER works.
- Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out to me, after my works on The BSD Show! that MOSIX is an open source single-system-image implementation, though it appears to be designed for specialized high-speed networks rather than the more general case of DragonFly.
- This seems bizarre. (via)
09/04/2010
BSD Show!: me
I’m on the latest BSD Show! podcast. I haven’t listened to it yet – hope I came through OK.
09/03/2010
BSD Magazine: cross-platform
The September issue of BSD Magazine is about BSD and Linux. It’s a free download!
TCP-MD5 support
David BÉRARD has an patch for TCP-MD5 support; if this interests you, please test.
09/02/2010
Boot loader replaced
A familiar procedure in any open source project: irritation causes improvement. In this case, the Forth-based boot loader irritated Matthew Dillon into writing a new replacement C-based one. (See the commit too, and it may slightly affect the upgrade process for 2.7 users.)
All these recent locking changes seem to be adding up to a much more responsive system, incidentally.
September OSBR: Keystone companies
The September issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Keystone companies”. “Platform base development” may be a clearer if less exact phrase.
09/01/2010
A reference for pkgsrc make, again
There’s a whole lot of options for bmake, used in pkgsrc, and they aren’t immediately obvious. I’ve linked to a reference before, but it’s no longer at that location. However, I found a new link!
Another BSD Show! item
I missed this before, but Gerard van Essen linked to it: there’s a BSD Show! episode from 2010-06-22 with James T. Nixon from PC-BSD, in addition to the other episodes I linked recently.
(I was recorded for the show tonight – it was fun!)
BSD Certification Professional requirements out
The Professional Certification requirements are now published. (via) The tests happen at various conventions around the world, so plan ahead and you should be able to find one near you.
Upgrading pkgsrc from 2010Q1 to 2010Q2
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.
08/31/2010
Just continue with buildkernel for now
Full buildworlds again, as there’s more commits that make it necessary. If you’re running 2.7, you should probably just plan on using buildworld, and not quickworld for rebuilding.
08/30/2010
Another recompile
System data structures have changed again, so make sure your next rebuild is a full buildworld/buildkernel if you’re running 2.7. There’s been a lot of changes to pull more and more out from under the Giant Lock.
08/29/2010
More BSD Show!
The BSD Show!, the show I didn’t know was there, already has more 20 minutes more of content; an interview with Adam Hamsik about NetBSD.
They’re looking for more guests, too…
08/28/2010
Minor software hiccup possible
happened to notice that recent libkinfo changes broke sysutils/estd. It’s fixed by rebuilding the program, though this may affect a few other packages. This only affects people running bleeding-edge DragonFly 2.7.
08/27/2010
Google Summer of Code 2010: everybody wins!
All three of the Google Summer of Code Projects for DragonFly are complete and passed! The code for each will show up at the Google-hosted project page in the next week or so. The original proposals for Alex Hornung’s device mapper/LVM, Samuel Greear’s kevent/select/pool work, and David Shao’s GEM/KMS porting are still there on the Google project page for DragonFly.
arcmsr(4) added
Sascha Wildner has brought in arcmsr(4), an Areca RAID controller driver. Please try it if you have the right hardware.
08/26/2010
Giant Lock on the way out
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
tmpfs gets tougher
Thanks to the efforts of Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs file systems on DragonFly can now withstand fsstress testing. Thanks, Venkatesh!
(One of the benefits of posting about people’s work is that the names are fun to type.)
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
London BSD meetup
Sevan Janiyan sent along news of a London *BSD meetup happening on August 26th, at The Cleveland Arms in Bayswater, starting at 7 PM.
Of course, you already knew because you watch the BSDEvents feed, don’t you? Well, you should.
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)
08/22/2010
Messylaneous: books, conventions, videos, conventions
Link dumps just so I can get caught up.
- Michael Lucas was interviewed about his new Network Flow Analysis (previously reviewed) book, in two parts. Also, he’s speaking at NYCBSDCon, this November 12th-14th.
- Dru Lavigne gave a talk on “Getting Started in an Open Source Community“. (via) In other video news, MeetBSD 2010 videos are available now.
- Random Google searches turned up a DragonFly installation video on Via hardware.
- Back to convention items: Kirk Russell has a short BSDCan recap. (via)
- Also, cluster ssh.
- Stathis Kamperis updated DragonFly’s One True Awk. (Huh. Brian Kernighan’s not at Bell Labs anymore.)
Updates and improvements for HAMMER, crypto
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of recent bugfixes in HAMMER and kqueue, which means if you are running a version of bleeding edge DragonFly build in the last few weeks, you should update.
He also mentions a “significant improvement in performance” in disk encryption. How significant? Over three times as fast.
08/21/2010
BSDTalk 195: Mike Larkin, ACPI, OpenBSD
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Proper credits
Samuel J. Greear has been posting news while I was off somewhere in Lake Huron. I didn’t fix it to show proper credits, for which I apologize. He’s done a wonderful job, however, and his name is now shown correctly on his posts.
I now get to actually read the past week’s Digest for recent news, for the first time ever.
08/20/2010
Softcrypto work in master
Matthew Dillon sent an email to the kernel list detailing the performance improvements that he and Alex Hornung have recently made to dm_crypt and opencrypto. The disk encryption work does still come with a warning, however.
08/17/2010
New HAMMER catastrophic recovery tool
Matthew Dillon reports that DragonFly now has a catastrophic recovery tool for HAMMER filesystems, with pertinent details.
08/16/2010
Summary of recent kernel work
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.