Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write.  It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed.  It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.

lightweight Python package to check if a file is binary

Disclaimer: I’m a customer.

Comments

This is a tour of FreeBSD laptop. Goal is configuring a Unix laptop with focused and efficient user interface, suitable for all sorts of office work, research and entertainment tasks. Point of reference for this machine is the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro 2015 and Jobs-era MacOS versions, on which my choices of user interface elements are mainly based.

There’s several deep dives in the links today; enjoy reading!

• NIST publication SP800-177r1-draft2: Trustworthy Email.  NIST publishes suprisingly comprehensive documents on technology practices; I am surprised they are not referenced more often.
• Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models.  More Mickens.  (via)
• 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email,  part one and part two.  I feel but cannot prove that this is related to why people say, “DragonFly feels so responsive!”  (via)
• Why ed(1) is not a good editor today.  There are people that like ed(1), unironically?
• Why I’m mostly not interest in exploring new fonts (on Unix).  It helps if you do everything in English, though.
• The Distracted State of the Union.  A sort of “these kids today” article, but linked simply because it points out that when you read the news, the news now reads you.  (via)
• Programmatically generated books, read out loud.  I was going to say “by the author”, but I’m not sure that’s technically correct.
• Badness, Enumerated by Robots.  There’s about a zillion links in this for more technical information; worth reading.

Your unrelated music link of the week: A Brief Primer on the Contemporary Glitch-Hop Scene.  I liked Tipper more than I expected.

Yesterday Twitter temporary locked my account (again) and this time I unable to unlock it. This is why I’ve decided to restart my newsletter and focus on the indie web.

• Self-hosted websites.
• Shell scripts and text editors.
• How-to guides for BSD/Unix users.
• Screencasts for web developers.

P.S. Email is still the best social network! :)

Comments

Still haven’t cleared my backlog of links…

• “DISABLE HYPERTHREADING ON ALL YOUR INTEL MACHINES IN THE BIOS.”  You should not be surprised by this.  (via)
• X11 on really small devices.  There’s video, though it’s a .mov file and so could also be on YouTube.
• mandoc-1.14.4 released.
• NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2018 Kyoto.  (via)
• Modern-day package requirements.  I could have sworn I linked to this before.
• Michael MacInnis: Oh a new Unix shell – BSDCan 2018.  Video, also probably mentioned indirectly before, but now there’s comments.
• unbound-adblock.  “The ultimate network adblocker!”  (via)
• OpenBSD on an iBook G4.  (via)
• Netgate SG-1000.  Runs pfSense; haven’t tried it but I like it just cause it’s tiny.
• PICO-8 works on OpenBSD using iridium browser.  (via)
• People who run BSD: A series of BSD user interviews.  I wish this kept going.  (via)
• Valuable News for 2018/08/11 and 2018/08/18.
• Michael W. Lucas on IT the to D.
• End of life for NetBSD 6.x.

 

The OpenBSD Foundation is excited to announce that it has received the first 2018 Iridium level donation. This year the first $100K+ donation came from Handshake (https://www.handshake.org).

We thank Handshake for its very generous support! This donation will no doubt fund many exciting projects in the coming years.

Comments

Ken Westerback (krw@ when wearing his dev hat) wrote in with some great news:

The OpenBSD Foundation is excited to announce that it has received the first 2018 Iridium level donation. This year the first $100K+ donation came from Handshake (https://www.handshake.org).

We thank Handshake for its very generous support! This donation will no doubt fund many exciting projects in the coming years.

Congratulations to all concerned.

Of course, this donation does not preclude others from contributing ;-)

When: 13th September 2018, 18:30 - 21:00

Where: Wheel Systems Office, Aleje Jerozolimskie 178, Warsaw

What:

• BSDCam 2018 Recap by Konrad Witaszczyk
• OpenBSD Daily by Adam Wołk
• Why is ARM a Tier 2 platform? by Patryk "Keijo" Jaworski

Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more.

Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.2.

In a message to tech@, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) gives an update on the state-of-play regarding processor vulnerabilities:

Two recently disclosed hardware bugs affected Intel cpus:

	 - TLBleed

	 - T1TF (the name "Foreshadow" refers to 1 of 3 aspects of this
	         bug, more aspects are surely on the way)

Solving these bugs requires new cpu microcode, a coding workaround,
*AND* the disabling of SMT / Hyperthreading.

Read more…

^JA source code patch exists which remedies this problem.

^JA source code patch exists which remedies this problem.

Comments

This episode has one of the more intriguing titles for BSDNow, and it’s because they are covering a recent hackathon and “BSDCam” (not BSDCan), which I did not know about.  The tiny network terminal server mentioned this week may be of use to people, too.

parser for the Open Financial Exchange file format

brushes used by software using libmypaint

library for making brushstrokes

In keeping with NetBSD's policy of supporting only the latest (8.x) and next most recent (7.x) major branches, the recent release of NetBSD 8.0 marks the end of life for NetBSD 6.x.

As of now, the following branches are no longer maintained:

• netbsd-6-1
• netbsd-6-0
• netbsd-6

Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more.

interstellar trading strategy game

If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems.  It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process.  I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.

run each test in a forked subprocess

What’s more, Matthew Dillon has published some testing results showing how power, CPU use, and memory speed all interact with these things.

Netgate® SG-5100 pfSense® Security Gateway appliance, Intel C3000 based appliance, which provides significant performance and engineering improvements relative to the SG-4860, is now available for pre-order.

C bindings generator from rust code