The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are Solaris and BSD. Even if you’ve never directly used one of these operating systems, at least two-thirds of all websites are served by Unix or Unix-like software. And, if you’ve ever picked up a smart phone, chances are it was running either a Unix variant or the Linux-driven Android. The core reason that Unix has been so ubiquitous isn’t its accessibility, or cost, or user interface design, although these things helped. The root cause of its success is its design philosophy.

Good design is crucial for success. Whether that’s good design of a piece of software, infrastructure like a railroad or power grid, or even something relatively simple like a flag, without good design your project is essentially doomed. Although you might be able to build a workable one-off electronics project that’s a rat’s nest of wires, or a prototype of something that gets the job done but isn’t user-friendly or scalable, for a large-scale project a set of good design principles from the start is key.

• Pricing Shifts between CreateSpace, IngramSpark, and KDP Print

  Before I go all stabby, though, let’s gather all the information. For an apples-to-apples comparison, I’m setting the CreateSpace price of Spilled Mirovar to $6.99, same as KDP Print and IngramSpark. We really need to make two comparisons. CreateSpace’s Expanded Distribution (CSED) is analogous to IngramSpark, and CreateSpace’s Amazon service is migrating to KDP Print.

• FreeBSD lockless algorithm - seq

  Those days locking algorithms are critical for operating systems, especially in a multi-threaded world. With time it turns out that classical locks, like mutex, are performance costly. Even when we are using techniques like having reads and writes mutex, synchronizing the state between CPUs can be costly. To optimize some cases, the lockless algorithm started to be used.

  There are multiple places in the kernel where we need to read some variables very often, but there is a small number of cases when we write to them. For such cases, the seq interface was created. [...]

• How does the process title works?

  Let's start by defining what the title of a process is - in this article, we will understand the name reported by ps(1)/top(1). When we are creating a new process using fork(2) the process inherits the name from its parent. In the scenario when we call exec(2) function we also pass the list of the arguments for a process, which will be treated as a process title. What if we would like to change the title of the process when it's running? It turns out that many operating systems do it in a different way. In this article we will discuss how open source operating systems like FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD do it.

• OpenBSD on disk images

  Users are able to declare disk images as ‘raw’ or ‘qcow2’ using either vmctl and vm.conf. The default disk image format is ‘raw’ if not specified.

• NetBSD 7.2 released (August 29, 2018)

  The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.2, the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

• NetBSD 7.2 Released - Backports USB 3.0 Support, Raspberry Pi 3 Compatibility

  While NetBSD 8.0 was released in July with new features like initial USB 3.0 support and UEFI boot-loader support for x86 64-bit hardware, for those not wanting to jump to 8.0 from the 7 series can now enjoy NetBSD 7.2.

  NetBSD 7.2 is a feature update to NetBSD 7 for those not yet or unable to migrate to NetBSD 8.0. NetBSD 7.2 back-ports support for USB 3.0 hardware, enhances the Linux emulation subsystem, provides support for newer Intel WiFi/WLAN cards, adds Raspberry Pi 3 support, offers various USB improvements, and has various bug fixes and stability improvements.

• NetBSD 7.2 Branch Update Release Brings USB 3.0 and Raspberry Pi 3 Support

  The NetBSD Project has released NetBSD 7.2, which is the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. This release brings a subset of fixes that were deemed important to security or stability reasons, and several new features and overall enhancements.

  NetBSD is a free and highly portable Unix-like operating system, and is entirely Open Source. It is available for many platforms such as 64-bit x86 servers, to various embedded ARM and MIPS based devices (SoCs).

• RSS Feed available for OpenBSD-current special instructions

  I wrote a script generating a RSS file from the content of the page https://www.openbsd.org/faq/current.html

• Out with the Old ..

     KDE4 ports will be removed from FreeBSD ports on December 31st, 2018

  [...]

  As for KDE4 itself: there haven’t been any upstream KDE4 releases since Applications 17.08.3, and Qt4 upon which it depends is EOL since 2015. The latest KDE Plasma desktop has been available in the official ports tree for over four months (and has been in use by users of Area51 for much much longer).

  So, given that there is a viable upgrade path (although, truth be told, you’ll probably have to re-configure KMail and get used to Falkon), we’ve decided to put a four month deprecation period on all the KDE4 ports. They will be removed at the end of this year, which will free up some maintainence time for chasing the steady stream of updates from the KDE community.

• KDE4 Being Dropped From FreeBSD At The End Of The Year

  With KDE4 not having seen an upstream release in years and the old KDE4 code beginning to break under newer C++ compilers, the KDE-FreeBSD team has announced a four-month deprecation period after which they are dropping the KDE4 ports from the operating system.

  On 31 December 2018 is when the FreeBSD maintainers of these older KDE packages plan to drop the KDE4 packages from their tree.