LLVM – Jupiter Broadcasting

There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source. As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time to write a detailed response — which he shortly thereafter elevated into a blog entry.

Let me be clear that I hold Jay in high regard, as both a software engineer and an entrepreneur — and I appreciate the time he took to write a thoughtful response. That said, there are aspects of his response that I found troubling enough to closely re-read the Confluent Community License — and that in turn has led me to a deeply disturbing realization about what is potentially going on here.

To GitHub: Assuming that this is in fact a EULA, I think it is perilous to allow EULAs to sit in public repositories. It’s one thing to have one click through to accept a license (though again, that itself is dubious), but to say that a git clone is an implicit acceptance of a contract that happens to be sitting somewhere in the repository beggars belief. With efforts like choosealicense.com, GitHub has been a model in guiding projects with respect to licensing; it would be helpful for GitHub’s counsel to weigh in on their view of this new strain of source-available proprietary software and the degree to which it comes into conflict with GitHub’s own terms of service.

To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!

###NetBSD and LLVM
NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support

I’m recently helping the NetBSD developers to improve the support for this operating system in various LLVM components. As you can read in my previous report, I’ve been focusing on fixing build and test failures for the purpose of improving the buildbot coverage.
Previously, I’ve resolved test failures in LLVM, Clang, LLD, libunwind, openmp and partially libc++. During the remainder of the month, I’ve been working on the remaining libc++ test failures, improving the NetBSD clang driver and helping Kamil Rytarowski with compiler-rt.

The process of upstreaming support to LLVM sanitizers has been finalized

I’ve finished the process of upstreaming patches to LLVM sanitizers (almost 2000LOC of local code) and submitted to upstream new improvements for the NetBSD support. Today out of the box (in unpatched version) we have support for a variety of compiler-rt LLVM features: ASan (finds unauthorized memory access), UBSan (finds unspecified code semantics), TSan (finds threading bugs), MSan (finds uninitialized memory use), SafeStack (double stack hardening), Profile (code coverage), XRay (dynamic code tracing); while other ones such as Scudo (hardened allocator) or DFSan (generic data flow sanitizer) are not far away from completeness.
The NetBSD support is no longer visibly lacking behind Linux in sanitizers, although there are still failing tests on NetBSD that are not observed on Linux. On the other hand there are features working on NetBSD that are not functional on Linux, like sanitizing programs during early initialization process of OS (this is caused by /proc dependency on Linux that is mounted by startup programs, while NetBSD relies on sysctl(3) interfaces that is always available).

##News Roundup
###Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0

Playing with FreeBSD with past week I don’t feel as though there were any big surprises or changes in this release compared to FreeBSD 11. In typical FreeBSD fashion, progress tends to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and this release feels like a polished and improved incremental step forward. I like that the installer handles both UFS and ZFS guided partitioning now and in a friendly manner. In the past I had trouble getting FreeBSD’s boot menu to work with boot environments, but that has been fixed for this release.
I like the security options in the installer too. These are not new, but I think worth mentioning. FreeBSD, unlike most Linux distributions, offers several low-level security options (like hiding other users’ processes and randomizing PIDs) and I like having these presented at install time. It’s harder for people to attack what they cannot see, or predict, and FreeBSD optionally makes these little adjustment for us.
Something which stands out about FreeBSD, compared to most Linux distributions I run, is that FreeBSD rarely holds the user’s hand, but also rarely surprises the user. This means there is more reading to do up front and new users may struggle to get used to editing configuration files in a text editor. But FreeBSD rarely does anything unless told to do it. Updates rarely change the system’s behaviour, working technology rarely gets swapped out for something new, the system and its applications never crashed during my trial. Everything was rock solid. The operating system may seem like a minimal, blank slate to new users, but it’s wonderfully dependable and predictable in my experience.
I probably wouldn’t recommend FreeBSD for desktop use. It’s close relative, GhostBSD, ships with a friendly desktop and does special work to make end user applications run smoothly. But for people who want to run servers, possible for years without change or issues, FreeBSD is a great option. It’s also an attractive choice, in my opinion, for people who like to build their system from the ground up, like you would with Debian’s server install or Arch Linux. Apart from the base tools and documentation, there is nothing on a FreeBSD system apart from what we put on it.

###FreeBSD 12.0 Performance Against Windows & Linux On An Intel Xeon Server

Last week I posted benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 against various Linux distributions using a Tyan dual socket Intel Xeon server. In this article are some complementary results when adding in the performance of FreeBSD 11.2 against the new FreeBSD 12.0 stable release for this leading BSD operating system. As some fun benchmarks to end out 2018, here are the results of FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 (including an additional run when using GCC rather than Clang) up against Windows Server and several enterprise-ready Linux distributions.
While FreeBSD 12.0 had picked up just one win of the Windows/Linux comparisons run, the FreeBSD performance is moving in the right direction. FreeBSD 12.0 was certainly faster than FreeBSD 11.2 on this dual Intel Xeon Scalable server based on a Tyan 1U platform. Meanwhile, to no surprise given the data last week, Clear Linux was by far the fastest out-of-the-box operating system tested.
I did run some extra benchmarks on FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 with this hardware: in total I ran 120 benchmarks for these BSD tests. Of the 120 tests, there were just 15 cases where FreeBSD 11.2 was faster than 12.0. Seeing FreeBSD 12.0 faster than 11.2 nearly 90% of the time is an accomplishment and usually with other operating systems we see more of a mixed bag on new releases with not such solidly better performance. It was also great seeing the competitive performance out of FreeBSD when using the Clang compiler for the source-based tests compared to the GCC8 performance. Additional data available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

###How NetBSD came to be shipped by Microsoft
Google cache in case the site is down

In 2000, Joe Britt, Matt Hershenson and Andy Rubin formed Danger Incorporated. Danger developed the world’s first recognizable smartphone, the Danger HipTop. T-Mobile sold the first HipTop under the brand name Sidekick in October of 2002.
Danger had a well developed kernel that had been designed and built in house. The kernel came to be viewed as not a core intellectual property and Danger started a search for a replacement. For business reasons, mostly to do with legal concerns over the Gnu Public License, Danger rejected Linux and began to consider BSD Unix as a replacement for the kernel.
In 2006 I was hired by Mike Chen, the manager of the kernel development group to investigate the feasibility of replacing the Danger kernel with a BSD kernel, to select the version of BSD to use, to develop a prototype and to develop the plan for adapting BSD to Danger’s requirements.
NetBSD was easily the best choice among the BSD variations at the time because it had well developed cross development tools. It was easy to use a NetBSD desktop running an Intel release to cross compile a NetBSD kernel and runtime for a device running an ARM processor. (Those interested in mailing list archaeology might be amused to investigate NetBSD technical mailing list for mail from picovex, particularly from Bucky Katz at picovex.)
We began product development on the specific prototype of the phone that would become the Sidekick LX2009 in 2007 and contracts for the phone were written with T-Mobile. We were about half way through the two year development cycle when Microsoft purchased Danger in 2008.
Microsoft would have preferred to ship the Sidekick running Windows/CE rather than NetBSD, but a schedule analysis performed by me, and another by an independent outside contractor, indicated that doing so would result in unacceptable delay.

##Beastie Bits

##Feedback/Questions

Dries – Lets talk a bit about VIMAGE jails
ohb – Question About ZFS Root Dataset
Micah – Active-Active NAS Sync recommendations

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post FOSS Clothing | BSD Now 280 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Software Disenchantment | BSD Now 265

Angela Fisher — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 13:31:00 +0000

##Headlines

###[FreeBSD DevSummit & EuroBSDcon 2018 in Romania]

Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devsummits (FreeBSD and NetBSD), while the last two are for talks.
Although Benedict organized the devsummit in large parts, he did not attend it this year. He held his Ansible tutorial in the morning of the first day, followed by Niclas Zeising’s new ports and poudriere tutorial (which had a record attendance). It was intended for beginners that had never used poudriere before and those who wanted to create their first port. The tutorial was well received and Niclas already has ideas for extending it for future conferences.
On the second day, Benedict took Kirk McKusick’s “An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System” tutorial, held as a one full day class this year. Although it was reduced in content, it went into enough depth of many areas of the kernel and operating system to spark many questions from attendees. Clearly, this is a good start into kernel programming as Kirk provides enough material and backstories to understand why certain things are implemented as they are.
Olivier Robert took [https://www.talegraph.com/tales/l2o9ltrvsE](pictures from the devsummit) and created a nice gallery out of it.
Devsummit evenings saw dinners at two restaurants that allowed developers to spend some time talking over food and drinks.
The conference opened on the next day with the opening session held by Mihai Carabas. He introduced the first keynote speaker, a colleague of his who presented “Lightweight virtualization with LightVM and Unikraft”.
Benedict helped out at the FreeBSD Foundation sponsor table and talked to people. He saw the following talks in between:

Selfhosting as an alternative to the public cloud (by Albert Dengg)
Using Boot Environments at Scale (by Allan Jude)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
FreeBSD Graphics (by Niclas Zeising)

Allan spent a lot of time talking to people and helping track down issues they were having, in addition to attending many talks:

Hacking together a FreeBSD presentation streaming box – For as little as possible (by Tom Jones)
Introduction of FreeBSD in new environments (by Baptiste Daroussin)
Keynote: Some computing and networking historical perspectives (by Ron Broersma)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
Being a BSD user (by Roller Angel)
From “Hello World” to the VFS Layer: building a beadm for DragonFly BSD (by Michael Voight)
We also met the winner of our Power Bagel raffle from Episode 2^8. He received the item in the meantime and had it with him at the conference, providing a power outlet to charge other people’s devices.
During the closing session, GroffTheBSDGoat was handed over to Deb Goodkin, who will bring the little guy to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and then to MeetBSD later this year. It was also revealed that next year’s EuroBSDcon will be held in Lillehammer, Norway.
Thanks to all the speakers, helpers, sponsors, organizers, and attendees for making it a successful conferences. There were no talks recorded this year, but the slides will be uploaded to the EuroBSDcon website in a couple of weeks. The OpenBSD talks are already available, so check them out.

###Software disenchantment

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days 🙂
You’ve probably heard this mantra: “programmer time is more expensive than computer time”. What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.

Everything is unbearably slow

Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
Google Inbox, a web app written by Google, running in Chrome browser also by Google, takes 13 seconds to open moderately-sized emails:
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because it’s the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesn’t mean 60fps, it’s rather “as fast as this web page could possibly go”. I’m dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Pavel Fatin: Typing in editor is a relatively simple process, so even 286 PCs were able to provide a rather fluid typing experience.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.

Everything is HUUUUGE

And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10× faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4Gb, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 Mb. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?
Google keyboard app routinely eats 150 Mb. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? Google app, which is basically just a package for Google Web Search, is 350 Mb! Google Play Services, which I do not use (I don’t buy books, music or videos there)—300 Mb that just sit there and which I’m unable to delete.
All that leaves me around 1 Gb for my photos after I install all the essential (social, chats, maps, taxi, banks etc) apps. And that’s with no games and no music at all! Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.
A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared.

Better world manifesto

I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.
What we have today is not progress. We barely meet business goals with poor tools applied over the top. We’re stuck in local optima and nobody wants to move out. It’s not even a good place, it’s bloated and inefficient. We just somehow got used to it.
So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what are we doing and why. We need to deliver: reliably, predictably, with topmost quality. We can—and should–take pride in our work. Not just “given what we had…”—no buts!
I hope I’m not alone at this. I hope there are people out there who want to do the same. I’d appreciate if we at least start talking about how absurdly bad our current situation in the software industry is. And then we maybe figure out how to get out.

##News Roundup
###[llvm-announce] LLVM 7.0.0 Release

I am pleased to announce that LLVM 7 is now available.

Get it here: https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#7.0.0

The release contains the work on trunk up to SVN revision 338536 plus
work on the release branch. It is the result of the community's work
over the past six months, including: function multiversioning in Clang
with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved
PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support
for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray
and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer
support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many
long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production
ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and
diagtool. And as usual, many optimizations, improved diagnostics, and
bug fixes.

For more details, see the release notes:
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Thanks to everyone who helped with filing, fixing, and code reviewing
for the release-blocking bugs!

Special thanks to the release testers and packagers: Bero
Rosenkränzer, Brian Cain, Dimitry Andric, Jonas Hahnfeld, Lei Huang
Michał Górny, Sylvestre Ledru, Takumi Nakamura, and Vedant Kumar.

For questions or comments about the release, please contact the
community on the mailing lists. Onwards to LLVM 8!

Cheers,
Hans

###Update your Thinkpad’s bios with Linux or OpenBSD

Get your new bios

At first, go to the Lenovo website and download your new bios:

Go to lenovo support
Use the search bar to find your product (example for me, x270)
Choose the right product (if necessary) and click search
On the right side, click on Update Your System
Click on BIOS/UEFI
Choose *BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows *
Download

For me the file is called like this : r0iuj25wd.iso

Extract bios update

Now you will need to install geteltorito.

With OpenBSD:

$ doas pkg_add geteltorito
quirks-3.7 signed on 2018-09-09T13:15:19Z
geteltorito-0.6: ok

With Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install genisoimage

Now we will extract the bios update :

$ geteltorito -o bios_update.img r0iuj25wd.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 43008 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios_update.img".
This will create a file called bios_update.img.

Put the image on an USB key
CAREFULL : on my computer, my USB key is sda1 on Linux and sd1 on OpenBSD.

Please check twice on your computer the name of your USB key.

With OpenBSD :

$ doas dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/rsd1c

With Linux :

$ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda

Now all you need is to reboot, to boot on your USB key and follow the instructions. Enjoy

###Announcing The HardenedBSD Foundation

In June of 2018, we announced our intent to become a not-for-profit, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization in the United States. It took a dedicated team months of work behind-the-scenes to make that happen. On 06 September 2018, HardenedBSD Foundation Corp was granted 501©(3) status, from which point all US-based persons making donations can deduct the donation from their taxes.
We are grateful for those who contribute to HardenedBSD in whatever way they can. Thank you for making HardenedBSD possible. We look forward to a bright future, driven by a helpful and positive community.

###How you migrate ZFS filesystems matters

If you want to move a ZFS filesystem around from one host to another, you have two general approaches; you can use ‘zfs send’ and ‘zfs receive’, or you can use a user level copying tool such as rsync (or ‘tar -cf | tar -xf’, or any number of similar options). Until recently, I had considered these two approaches to be more or less equivalent apart from their convenience and speed (which generally tilted in favour of ‘zfs send’). It turns out that this is not necessarily the case and there are situations where you will want one instead of the other.
We have had two generations of ZFS fileservers so far, the Solaris ones and the OmniOS ones. When we moved from the first generation to the second generation, we migrated filesystems across using ‘zfs send’, including the filesystem with my home directory in it (we did this for various reasons). Recently I discovered that some old things in my filesystem didn’t have file type information in their directory entries. ZFS has been adding file type information to directories for a long time, but not quite as long as my home directory has been on ZFS.
This illustrates an important difference between the ‘zfs send’ approach and the rsync approach, which is that zfs send doesn’t update or change at least some ZFS on-disk data structures, in the way that re-writing them from scratch from user level does. There are both positives and negatives to this, and a certain amount of rewriting does happen even in the ‘zfs send’ case (for example, all of the block pointers get changed, and ZFS will re-compress your data as applicable).
I knew that in theory you had to copy things at the user level if you wanted to make sure that your ZFS filesystem and everything in it was fully up to date with the latest ZFS features. But I didn’t expect to hit a situation where it mattered in practice until, well, I did. Now I suspect that old files on our old filesystems may be partially missing a number of things, and I’m wondering how much of the various changes in ‘zfs upgrade -v’ apply even to old data.
(I’d run into this sort of general thing before when I looked into ext3 to ext4 conversion on Linux.)
With all that said, I doubt this will change our plans for migrating our ZFS filesystems in the future (to our third generation fileservers). ZFS sending and receiving is just too convenient, too fast and too reliable to give up. Rsync isn’t bad, but it’s not the same, and so we only use it when we have to (when we’re moving only some of the people in a filesystem instead of all of them, for example).
PS: I was going to try to say something about what ‘zfs send’ did and didn’t update, but having looked briefly at the code I’ve concluded that I need to do more research before running my keyboard off. In the mean time, you can read the OpenZFS wiki page on ZFS send and receive, which has plenty of juicy technical details.
PPS: Since eliminating all-zero blocks is a form of compression, you can turn zero-filled files into sparse files through a ZFS send/receive if the destination has compression enabled. As far as I know, genuine sparse files on the source will stay sparse through a ZFS send/receive even if they’re sent to a destination with compression off.

##Beastie Bits

##Feedback/Questions

Todd – 2 Nics, 1 bhyve and a jail cell
Thomas – Deep Dive
Morgan – Send/Receive to Manage Fragmentation?
Dominik – hierarchical jails -> networking

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post Software Disenchantment | BSD Now 265 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hipster Tendencies | CR 159

chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 14:47:25 +0000

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Mike makes the case for Chris’ slide into hipsterhood & Chris responds in kind. Between those hijinks the guys discuss the massive LLVM advantage Apple is leveraging that nobody is talking about.

Plus we reflect on the most important skill in software development, read some emails & more!

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Dockercon

DockerCon (@DockerCon) | Twitter

Apple’s Bitcode Telegraphs Future CPU Plans

The biggest announcement at this week’s WWDC is one hardly anyone noticed. During the Platforms State of the Union on Tuesday, Andreas Wendker briefly mentioned Bitcode, describing it as an opportunity for future compiler optimizations to be applied to already-submitted apps. He also mentioned that it allows apps to be future-proofed by letting the store add support for future CPU features without developers having to resubmit.

This means that apps can automatically “take advantage of new processor capabilities we might be adding in the future, without you re-submitting to the store.”

Platforms State of the Union – WWDC 2015 – Videos – Apple Developer

Popular Online This Week

The most important skill in software development

Here’s an insightful paragraph from James Hague’s blog post Organization skills beat algorithmic wizardry:

When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. I’ve worked on large telecommunications systems, console games, blogging software, a bunch of personal tools, and very rarely is there some tricky data structure or algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else. But there’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there.

Algorithmic wizardry is easier to teach and easier to blog about than organizational skill, so we teach and blog about it instead. A one-hour class, or a blog post, can showcase a clever algorithm. But how do you present a clever bit of organization? If you jump to the solution, it’s unimpressive. “Here’s something simple I came up with. It may not look like much, but trust me, it was really hard to realize this was all I needed to do.” Or worse, “Here’s a moderately complicated pile of code, but you should have seen how much more complicated it was before. At least now someone stands a shot of understanding it.” Ho hum. I guess you had to be there.

You can’t appreciate a feat of organization until you experience the disorganization. But it’s hard to have the patience to wrap your head around a disorganized mess that you don’t care about. Only if the disorganized mess is your responsibility, something that means more to you than a case study, can you wrap your head around it and appreciate improvements. This means that while you can learn algorithmic wizardry through homework assignments, you’re unlikely to learn organization skills unless you work on a large project you care about, most likely because you’re paid to care about it.

The most important skill in software development | Hacker News

Feedback:

The post Hipster Tendencies | CR 159 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Vox Populi | BSD Now 91

chris — Thu, 28 May 2015 06:18:09 +0000

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

This week on the show, we’ve got something pretty different. We went to a Linux convention and asked various people if they’ve ever tried BSD and what they know about it. Stay tuned for that, all this week’s news and, of course, answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

LUKS in OpenBSD

Last week, we were surprised to find out that DragonFlyBSD has support for dm-crypt, sometimes referred to as LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup)
It looks like they might not be the only BSD with support for it for much longer, as OpenBSD is currently reviewing a patch for it as well
LUKS would presumably be an additional option in OpenBSD’s softraid system, which already provides native disk encryption
Support hasn’t been officially committed yet, it’s still going through testing, but the code is there if you want to try it out and report your findings
If enabled, this might pave the way for the first (semi-)cross platform encryption scheme since the demise of TrueCrypt (and maybe others BSDs will get it too in time)

FreeBSD gets 64bit Linux emulation

For those who might be unfamiliar, FreeBSD has an emulation layer to run Linux-only binaries (as rare as they may be)
The most common use case is for desktop users, enabling them to run proprietary applications like Adobe Flash or Skype
Similar systems can also be found in NetBSD and OpenBSD (though disabled by default on the latter)
However, until now, it’s only supported binaries compiled for the i386 architecture
This new update, already committed to -CURRENT, will open some new possibilities that weren’t previously possible
Meanwhile, HardenedBSD considers removing the emulation layer entirely

BSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Nagoya

We’ve covered the Japanese NetBSD users group setting up lots of machines at various conferences in the past, but now they’re expanding
Their latest report includes many of the NetBSD things you’d expect, but also a couple OpenBSD machines
Some of the NetBSD ones included a Power Mac G4, SHARP NetWalker, Cubieboard2 and the not-so-foreign Raspberry Pi
One new addition of interest is the OMRON LUNA88k, running the luna88k port of OpenBSD
While at the event, NetBSD even revived their older luna68k port
There was even an old cell phone running Windows games on NetBSD
Check the mailing list post for some links to all of the nice pictures

LLVM introduces OpenMP support

One of the things that has kept some people in the GCC camp is the lack of OpenMP support in LLVM
According to the blog post, it “enables Clang users to harness full power of modern multi-core processors with vector units”
With Clang being the default in FreeBSD, Bitrig and OS X, and with some other BSDs exploring the option of switching, the need for this potential speed boost was definitely there
This could also open some doors for more BSD in the area of high performance computing, putting an end to the current Linux monopoly

Interview – Eric, FSF, John, Jose, Kris and Stewart

Various “man on the street” style mini-interviews

News Roundup

BSD-licensed gettext replacement

If you’ve ever installed ports on any of the BSDs, you’ve probably had GNU’s gettext pulled in as a dependency
Wikipedia says “gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems”
A new BSD-licensed rewrite has begun, with the initial version being for NetBSD (but it’s likely to be portable)
If you’ve got some coding skills, get involved with the project – the more freely-licensed replacements, the better

Unix history git repo

A git repository was recently created to show off some Unix source code history
The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges
You can see early 386BSD commits all the way up to some of the more modern FreeBSD code
If you want to browse through the giant codebase, it can be a great history lesson
Paper with additional details and methodology

PCBSD 10.1.2 and Lumina updates

We mentioned 10.1.1 being released last week (and all the cool features a couple weeks before) but now 10.1.2 is out
This minor update contained a few hotfixes: RAID-Z installation, cache and log devices and the text-only installer in UEFI mode
There’s also a new post on the PCBSD blog about Lumina, answering some frequently asked questions and giving a general status update

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

Death by chocolate

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
We’re recording two episodes next week, so some extra feedback email would be good

The post Vox Populi | BSD Now 91 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

11 Years of Linux Benchmarking | LINUX Unplugged 94

chris — Tue, 26 May 2015 18:08:59 +0000

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Michael Larabel joins us to discuss his initiative of daily automated performance benchmarking of some of the world’s most important open source projects & reflects on 11 years of running Phoronix.com.

Plus our first take on Fedora 22 & how we resolved some rough edges, the best new options for new users that require Microsoft Office under Linux & more!

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

Emulate the Enterprise Hum…

Catch Up:

Mandriva is dead

Bye Bye Mandriva, She’s Being Liquidated

Per this French posting (translation), this company based out of Paris is being liquidated. Surprisingly, in 2013 the company managed to pull in 553.6k USD, but it wasn’t sustainable and now in 2015 the company with 10 to 19 employees left is ending.

New App Will Let You Share GPS Between Phone and Desktop

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

Opening The Gates To Our Daily Open-Source Linux Benchmark Results – Phoronix

For a few months now I’ve been talking about the LinuxBenchmarking.com initiative to provide daily benchmark results of the latest development Git/SVN code for various open-source projects in a fully-automated manner… Among the projects being tracked have been the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, etc.

LinuxBenchmarking.com

LinuxBenchmarking.com is a public deployment of the next-generation Phoromatic test orchestration and management software built into Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 and newer. This reference deployment of the open-source Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic benchmarking software tracks the performance of several high-profile open-source projects on a daily basis looking for performance regressions and improvements. This test farm is fully open-source and automated from the powering on/off systems, setting the systems into their appropriate state each time, remotely managing and maintaining the systems, and the collection of all benchmark results.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Smoothing out that swtich to Linux

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Fedora 22 Released, See What`s New

Fedora 22 Workstation was released today and it ships with the latest stable GNOME 3.16, a new default package manager and other interesting changes.

Torrent Server for the Fedora Project

Release Notes

This document provides the release notes for Fedora 22. It describes major changes offered as compared to Fedora 21. For a detailed listing of all changes, refer to the Fedora Technical Notes.

GNOME login screen doesn’t appear after installation

Common F22 bugs – FedoraProject

link to this item – Bugzilla: #1218787

On certain Macbook laptops with dual graphics cards, Fedora 22 Live environment boots fine, but after installation there’s just black screen and no boot splash followed by a GNOME login screen. There seems to be an issue with Wayland, an upcoming window system, which is used in GNOME login screen.

It seems that users of affected laptops should be able to work around this issue by booting in a basic graphics mode (adding nomodeset to the boot command line in GRUB), and then editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf file and uncommenting the following line:

#WaylandEnable=false

That will disable Wayland for GNOME login screen in future boots.

Red Hat Has Another Developer Now Working On Nouveau – Phoronix

Hans de Goede in the past has mostly been known for his Linux USB contributions while one year ago he joined the Red Hat Graphics Team where he worked on the various X.Org/Wayland things and then for a while was one of the Red Hat developers working on libinput.

With the libinput work settling down, his next course of action is going to be working on Nouveau. Right now it’s not known specifically what he’ll be focusing on as he’s still learning more about GPU driver programming, but it’s great to see Red Hat providing additional resources for Nouveau. Hans shared his new Nouveau focus at Red Hat via this mailing list post introducing himself to the Nouveau community.

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The post 11 Years of Linux Benchmarking | LINUX Unplugged 94 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

PIE in the Sky | BSD Now 85

chris — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 11:18:11 +0000

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This time on the show, we’ll be talking with Pascal Stumpf about static PIE in the upcoming OpenBSD release. He’ll tell us what types of attacks it prevents, and why it’s such a big deal. We’ve also got answers to questions from you in the audience and all this week’s news, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Solaris’ networking future is with OpenBSD

A curious patch from someone with an Oracle email address was recently sent in to one of the OpenBSD mailing lists
It was revealed that future releases of Solaris are going to drop their IPFilter firewall entirely, in favor of a port of the current version of PF
For anyone unfamiliar with the history of PF, it was actually made as a replacement for IPFilter in OpenBSD, due to some licensing issues
What’s more, Solaris was the original development platform for IPFilter, so the fact that it would be replaced in its own home is pretty interesting
This blog post goes through some of the backstory of the two firewalls
PF is in a lot of places – other BSDs, Mac OS X and iOS – but there are plenty of other OpenBSD-developed technologies end up ported to other projects too
“Many of the world’s largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you’re neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD’s PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project’s emphasis on correctness, quality and security”
You’re welcome, Oracle

BAFUG discussion videos

The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos from their recent meetings
Sean Bruno gave a recap of his experiences at EuroBSDCon last year, including the devsummit and some proposed ideas from it (as well as their current status)
Craig Rodrigues also gave a talk about Kyua and the FreeBSD testing framework
Lastly, Kip Macy gave a talk titled “network stack changes, user-level FreeBSD”
The main two subjects there are some network stack changes, and how to get more people contributing, but there’s also open discussion about a variety of FreeBSD topics
If you’re close to the Bay Area in California, be sure to check out their group and attend a meeting sometime

More than just a makefile

If you’re not a BSD user just yet, you might be wondering how the various ports and pkgsrc systems compare to the binary way of doing things on Linux
This blog entry talks about the ports system in OpenBSD, but a lot of the concepts apply to all the ports systems across the BSDs
As it turns out, the ports system really isn’t that different from a binary package manager – they are what’s used to create binary packages, after all
The author goes through what makefiles do, customizing which options software is compiled with, patching source code to build and getting those patches back upstream
After that, he shows you how to get your new port tested, if you’re interesting in doing some porting yourself, and getting involved with the rest of the community
This post is very long and there’s a lot more to it, so check it out (and more discussion on Hacker News)

Securing your home fences

Hopefully all our listeners have realized that trusting your network(s) to a consumer router is a bad idea by now
We hear from a lot of users who want to set up some kind of BSD-based firewall, but don’t hear back from them after they’ve done it.. until now
In this post, someone goes through the process of setting up a home firewall using OPNsense on a PCEngines APU board
He notes that you have a lot of options software-wise, including vanilla FreeBSD, OpenBSD or even Linux, but decided to go with OPNsense because of the easy interface and configuration
The post covers all the hardware you’ll need, getting the OS installed to a flash drive or SD card and going through the whole process
Finally, he goes through setting up the firewall with the graphical interface, applying updates and finishing everything up
If you don’t have any experience using a serial console, this guide also has some good info for beginners about those (which also applies to regular FreeBSD)
We love super-detailed guides like this, so everyone should write more and send them to us immediately

Interview – Pascal Stumpf – pascal@openbsd.org

Static PIE in OpenBSD

News Roundup

LLVM’s new libFuzzer

We’ve discussed fuzzing on the show a number of times, albeit mostly with the American Fuzzy Lop utility
It looks like LLVM is going to have their own fuzzing tool too now
The Clang and LLVM guys are no strangers to this type of code testing, but decided to “close the loop” and start fuzzing parts of LLVM (including Clang) using LLVM itself
With Clang being the default in both FreeBSD and Bitrig, and with the other BSDs considering the switch, this could make for some good bug hunting across all the projects in the future

HardenedBSD upgrades secadm

The HardenedBSD guys have released a new version of their secadm tool, with the showcase feature being integriforce support
We covered both the secadm tool and integriforce in previous episodes, but the short version is that it’s a way to prevent files from being altered (even as root)
Their integriforce feature itself has also gotten a couple improvements: shared objects are now checked too, instead of just binaries, and it uses more caching to speed up the whole process now

RAID5 returns to OpenBSD

OpenBSD’s softraid subsystem, somewhat similar to FreeBSD’s GEOM, has had experimental RAID5 support for a while
However, it was exactly that – experimental – and required a recompile to enable
With some work from recent hackathons, the final piece was added to enable resuming partial array rebuilds
Now it’s on by default, and there’s a call for testing being put out, so grab a snapshot and put the code through its paces
The bioctl softraid command also now supports DUIDs during pseudo-device detachment, possibly paving the way for the installer to drop the “do you want to enable DUIDs?” question entirely

pkgng 1.5.0 released

Going back to what we talked about last week, the final version of pkgng 1.5.0 is out
The “provides” and “requires” support is finally in a regular release
A new “-r” switch will allow for direct installation to a chroot or alternate root directory
Memory usage should be much better now, and some general code speed-ups were added
This version also introduces support for Mac OS X, NetBSD and EdgeBSD – it’ll be interesting to see if anything comes of that
Many more bugs were fixed, so check the mailing list announcement for the rest (and plenty new bugs were added, according to bapt)

p2k15 hackathon reports

There was another OpenBSD hackathon that just finished up in the UK – this time it was mainly for ports work
As usual, the developers sent in reports of some of the things they got done at the event
Landry Breuil, both an upstream Mozilla developer and an OpenBSD developer, wrote in about the work he did on the Firefox port (specifically WebRTC) and some others, as well as reviewing lots of patches that were ready to commit
Stefan Sperling wrote in, detailing his work with wireless chipsets, specifically when the vendor doesn’t provide any hardware documentation, as well as updating some of the games in ports
Ken Westerback also sent in a report, but decided to be a rebel and not work on ports at all – he got a lot of GPT-related work done, and also reviewed the RAID5 support we talked about earlier

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you want to come on for an interview, or know someone else who might be interesting to hear from, let us know

The post PIE in the Sky | BSD Now 85 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Must Be Rigged | BSD Now 67

chris — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 11:13:33 +0000

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Coming up this week on the show, we’ve got an interview with Patrick Wildt, one of the developers of Bitrig. We’ll find out all the details of their OpenBSD fork, what makes it different and what their plans are going forward. We’ve also got all the week’s news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Bitrig 1.0 released

If you haven’t heard of it, Bitrig is a fork of OpenBSD that started a couple years ago
According to their FAQ, some of their goals include: only supporting modern hardware and a limited set of CPU architectures, replacing nearly all GNU tools in base with BSD versions and having better virtualization support
They’ve finally announced their first official release, 1.0
This release introduces support for Clang 3.4, replacing the old GCC, along with libc++ replacing the GNU version
It also includes filesystem journaling, support for GPT and – most importantly – a hacker- style console with green text on black background
One of the developers answered some questions about it on Hacker News too

Is it time to try BSD?

Here we get a little peek into the Linux world – more and more people are considering switching
On a more mainstream tech news site, they have an article about people switching away from Linux and to BSD
People are starting to get even more suspicious of systemd, and lots of drama in the Linux world is leading a whole new group of potential users over to the BSD side
This article explores some pros and cons of switching, and features opinions of various users

Poudriere 3.1 released

One of the first things we ever covered on the show was poudriere, a tool with a funny name that’s used to build binary packages from FreeBSD ports
It’s come a long way since then, and bdrewery and bapt have just announced a new major version
This new release features a redesigned web interface to check on the status of your packages
There are lots of new bulk building options to preserve packages even if some fail to compile – this makes maintaining a production repo much easier
It also introduces a useful new “pkgclean” subcommand to clean out your repository of packages that aren’t needed anymore, and poudriere keeps it cleaner by default as well now
Check the full release notes for all the additions and bug fixes

Firewalling with OpenBSD’s pf and pfsync

A talk by David Gwynne from an Australian conference was uploaded, with the subject matter being pf and pfsync
He uses pf to manage 60 internal networks with a single firewall
The talk gives some background on how pf originally came to be and some OpenBSD 101 for the uninitiated
It also touches on different rulesets, use cases, configuration syntax, placing limits on connections, ospf, authpf, segregating VLANs, synproxy handling and a lot more
The second half of the presentation focuses on pfsync and carp for failover and redundancy
With two BSD boxes running pfsync, you can actually patch your kernel and still stay connected to IRC

Interview – Patrick Wildt – patrick@bitrig.org / @bitrig

The initial release of Bitrig

News Roundup

Infrastructural enhancements at NYI

The FreeBSD foundation put up a new blog post detailing some hardware improvements they’ve recently done
Their eastern US colocation is hosted at New York Internet, and is used for FTP mirrors, pkgng mirrors, and also as a place for developers to test things
There’ve been fourteen machines purchased since July, and now FreeBSD boasts a total of sixty-eight physical boxes there
This blog post goes into detail about how those servers are used and details some of the network topology

The long tail of MD5

Our friend Ted Unangst is on a quest to replace all instances of MD5 in OpenBSD’s tree with something more modern
In this blog post, he goes through some of the different areas where MD5 still lives, and discovers how easy (or impossible) it would be to replace
Through some recent commits, OpenBSD now uses SHA512 in some places that you might not expect
Some other places require a bit more care…

DragonFly cheat sheet

If you’ve been thinking of trying out DragonFlyBSD lately, this might make the transition a bit easier
A user-created “cheat sheet” on the website lists some common answers to beginner questions
The page features a walkthrough of the installer, some shell tips and workarounds for various issues
At the end, it also has some things that new users can get involved with to help out

Experiences with an OpenBSD laptop

A lot of people seem to be interested in trying out some form of BSD on their laptop, and this article details just that
The author got interested in OpenBSD mostly because of the security focus and the fact that it’s not Linux
In this blog post, he goes through the steps of researching, installing, configuring, upgrading and finally actually using it on his Thinkpad
He even gives us a mention as a good place to learn more about BSD, thanks!

PC-BSD Updates

A call for testing of a new update system has gone out
Conversion to Qt5 for utils has taken place

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – no question is too big or too small, so don’t be afraid to get in touch with us
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
Last reminder: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until next Wednesday to send them in. Do it now!

The post Must Be Rigged | BSD Now 67 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.