Project Trident 18.12 released, Spotifyd on NetBSD, OPNsense 18.7.10 is available, Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, OpenRsync, LLD porting to NetBSD, and more.
##Headlines
###AsiaBSDCon 2019 Call for Papers
###Project Trident 18.12 Released
###Building Spotifyd on NetBSD
These are the steps I went through to build and run Spotifyd (this commit at the time of writing) on NetBSD AMD64. It’s a Spotify Connect client so it means I still need to control Spotify from another device (typically my phone), but the audio is played through my desktop… which is where my speakers and headphones are plugged in - it means I don’t have to unplug stuff and re-plug into my phone, work laptop, etc. This is 100% a “good enough for now solution” for me; I have had a quick play with the Go based microcontroller from spotcontrol and that allows a completely NetBSD only experience (although it is just an example application so doesn’t provide many features - great as a basis to build on though).
##News Roundup
2019 means 19.1 is almost here. In the meantime accept this small
incremental update with goodies such as Suricata 4.1, custom passwords
for P12 certificate export as well as fresh fixes in the FreeBSD base.
A lot of cleanups went into this update to make sure there will be a
smooth transition to 19.1-RC for you early birds. We expect RC1 in 1-2
weeks and the final 19.1 on January 29.
###Introducing the Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation
A few weeks ago, I got an itch to build a workstation with AMD EPYC. There are a few constraints. First, I needed a higher-clock part. Second, I knew the whole build would be focused more on being an ultra high-end workstation rather than simply utilizing gaming components. With that, I decided it was time to hit on a bit of nostalgia for our readers. Mainly, I wanted to do an homage to Sun Microsystems. Sun made the server gear that the industry ran on for years, and as a fun fact, if you go behind the 1 Hacker Way sign at Facebook’s campus, they left the Sun Microsystems logo. Seeing that made me wonder if we could do an ultimate AMD EPYC build in a Sun Microsystems workstation.
###OpenRsync
This is a clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license. It is designed to be compatible with a modern rsync (3.1.3 is used for testing). It currently compiles and runs only on OpenBSD.
This project is still very new and very fast-moving.
It’s not ready for wide-spread testing. Or even narrow-spread beyond getting all of the bits to work. It’s not ready for strong attention. Or really any attention but by careful programming.
Many have asked about portability. We’re just not there yet, folks. But don’t worry, the system is easily portable. The hard part for porters is matching OpenBSD’s pledge and unveil.
###The first report on LLD porting
LLD is the link editor (linker) component of Clang toolchain. Its main advantage over GNU ld is much lower memory footprint, and linking speed. It is of specific interest to me since currently 8 GiB of memory are insufficient to link LLVM statically (which is the upstream default).
The first goal of LLD porting is to ensure that LLD can produce working NetBSD executables, and be used to build LLVM itself. Then, it is desirable to look into trying to build additional NetBSD components, and eventually into replacing /usr/bin/ld entirely with lld.
In this report, I would like to shortly summarize the issues I have found so far trying to use LLD on NetBSD.
It’s the second week of 2019 already, which means I’m curious what Nate is going to do with his series This week in usability … reset the numbering from week 1? That series is a great read, to keep up with all the little things that change in KDE source each week — aside from the release notes.
For the big ticket items of KDE on FreeBSD, you should read this blog instead.
##Beastie Bits
##Feedback/Questions