Hacker News Reader

vedranmon ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

If you delay upgrading the kernel on occasions, it is more or less fine.

vedranmon ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

Several reasons, but major ones (for me) are reliability (checksums and self-healing) and portability (no other modern filesystem can be read and written on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS).

Snapshots ("boot environments") are also supported by Btrfs (my Linux installations use that so I don't have to worry about having the 3rd party kernel module to read my rootfs). Performance isn't that great either and, assuming Linux, XFS is a better choice if that is your main concern.

vedranmon Digital gardens people maintain outside the "Big Tech" walled gardens

I have a website [1] on GitHub Pages. It's extremely easy to move out of GitHub, since it is on a domain I control, which is not the case with e.g. social profiles. That fact that the site is static makes it really easy to host it basically anywhere where a web server exists.

The site is deployed using a GitHub Actions workflow, which happens to be the only GitHub-specific feature, but a similar script could easily be written in the future for another hosting if necessary.

[1] https://group.miletic.net/

vedranmon Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686k in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization

Half is definitely an exaggeration for LinuxKPI modules that cover WiFi and GPU drivers.

Still, most of radeon/amdgpu DRM driver is MIT-licensed and doesn't require abiding by the GPL (not sure about other drivers as I don't use them, but I assume licenses vary).

vedranmon Transforming Material for MkDocs

Good read and good direction for the project to take. I hope that the solutions to these challenges end up materializing (pun fully intended).

vedranmon Run CUDA, unmodified, on AMD GPUs

If you are going the "open standard" route, SYCL is much more modern than OpenCL and also nicer to work with.

vedranmon Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

> - Helpful 404s. If you mistype a url, the 404 page compares it to working urls and shows you the closest match. All done using clientside JS (no web server needed). For example: https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html

Very neat! Many other are cool too.

vedranmon Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

On the topic of showing page progress with table of contents, author's description matches exactly how it is implemented in Material for MkDocs [1]. I moved my blog from WordPress to it (for unrelated reasons) and I immediately liked how going through longer blog posts felt with highlighted entry in the table of contents moving together with the page.

[1] https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/setting-up...

vedranmon Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

Do you mean blogroll?

vedranmon Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (2019)

My group used to teach Computer Networks at a university ([1] gives a fair overview of the scope if you know Croatian or use a bit of Google Translate). We used CORE and PHP built-in web server [2] for the basic course. IMHO, stuff like Shadow is too overwhelming for the introductory course, but we planned to use it together with ns-3 and SimGrid for the advanced course (which in the end we never got a chance to develop for unrelated reasons).

[1] https://group.miletic.net/hr/nastava/kolegiji/RM/

[2] https://coreemu.github.io/core/

vedranmon The Alternative Implementation Problem

Came to the comments to post just this. LuaJIT is enthusiastically used in the TeX community and luajittex executable is readily available in parallel to luatex.

vedranmon Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

I read Steve McConnell's Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art and I can recommend it without hesitation. It is quite old by now so there might be something newer and better out there as well.

vedranmon The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6

It's already there for several months. From the last status report:

> KDE Frameworks 6 (alpha) 5.247 was updated in the ports tree.

> KDE Plasma Desktop 6 (beta 2) 5.91.0 was updated in the ports tree.

https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-10-2023-12/#_kde_...

vedranmon Ask HN: What is your go-to stack for the web?

These days I am doing HPC software development, so not much web development. Over the last few years I used to work as a senior lecturer and then a junior professor at a university, where my group worked with web tech quite a bit.

We used PHP/Laravel for developing a scientific SaaS prototype [1] and Python/Django for teaching web application development [2]. For documentation (including teaching materials, blogging), we had a preference for static site generator (Jamstack) solutions: we used Sphinx and later switched to MkDocs [3, 4].

[1] https://group.miletic.net/en/publications/#2021

[2] https://group.miletic.net/hr/nastava/kolegiji/PW/#vjezbe

[3] https://group.miletic.net/en/blog/2017-07-29-why-we-use-rest...

[4] https://group.miletic.net/en/blog/2021-08-16-markdown-vs-res...

vedranmon Stract: Open-souce, non-profit search engine

I'm presently on leave at a university in Croatia and my research group's name is Group for Applications and Services on Exascale Research Infrastructure, so the acronym is GASERI. [1]

The first result for gaseri on Stract is our presentation of group's research work, and the second result is our landing page.

Can't complain.

Viva open source, viva AGPL search engine!

[1] https://group.miletic.net/

vedranmon Roundcube open-source webmail software merges with Nextcloud

I had the requirement for the same basic functionality and switched to Syncthing several years ago. Haven't looked back: works all the time, every time, and it is much easier to maintain.

vedranmon FreeBSD 14.0-Release

I wish more random guys gave 2^18 dollars to open source.

vedranmon FreeBSD 14.0-Release

Congratulations! Here's a summary of the highlights from the release announcement [1]:

- OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.5p1.

- OpenSSL has been updated to version 3.0.12, a major upgrade from OpenSSL 1.1.1t in FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE.

- The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough.

- FreeBSD supports up to 1024 cores on the amd64 and arm64 platforms.

- ZFS has been upgraded to OpenZFS release 2.2, providing significant performance improvements.

- It is now possible to perform background filesystem checks on UFS file systems running with journaled soft updates.

- Experimental ZFS images are now available for AWS and Azure.

- The default congestion control mechanism for TCP is now CUBIC.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/announce/

vedranmon FreeBSD Release Engineering Team Update: Colin Percival Is Now Release Engineer

Thanks for the clarification.

vedranmon FreeBSD Release Engineering Team Update: Colin Percival Is Now Release Engineer

No idea either.

Anyhow, I hope that all of the issues delaying 14.0-RELEASE have been addressed now and that it will come out soon now.

vedranmon NetBSD 10.0 RC1

FreeBSD is a full-featured OS. Me and my colleagues used it for initial porting of a particular scientific software (non-GUI, just CLI and library) to macOS while having no access to an Apple Mac machine. Almost all the time (modulo Clang version differences), what worked on FreeBSD, also worked on macOS. Even if that was not the case, just using FreeBSD would have helped us a lot to "de-GNU-ify" the assumptions present in the code.

FreeBSD Ports/packages are a great collection of software (~30000); while not always providing the latest version of all software (and I will admit that I am spoiled in that regard by the usage of Arch Linux and derivatives), almost anything you need is there and it just works.

vedranmon FreeBSD 14.0-BETA2 Now Available

No need to rush. 13.2 will remain supported for more than half a year (13.3 release date + 3 months).

vedranmon FreeBSD 14.0-BETA2 Now Available

OpenSSL 1.1.1 is EOL, so it was unavoidable. On the other hand, 3.0 is LTS, so the impact of the refactor will last for a while.

vedranmon FreeBSD 14 Beta Released with WiFi 6 Support, Updated LLVM Toolchain, Fwget

FreeBSD 14 adds a new "fwget" utility for fetching firmware packages - initially fwget can get firmware for Intel and AMD GPUs. Among the many changes to find are FreeBSD replacing sendmail with dma, Kinst as a new DTrace provider, makefs adding ZFS support, boottrace is a new interface for capturing trace events during system boot and shutdown processes, the kernel TLS offloading handling receive-side offloading of TLS 1.3, initial WiFi 6 support in WPA, sh is now the default shell for the root user, and an updated LLVM toolchain.

vedranmon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://gaseri.org/en/blog/

It used to be a separate website, but since becoming a principal investigator and starting my own group, I have integrated it into the group website. I mostly write about academic research/teaching and open-source software/principles/evangelization.

One of the posts from last year https://gaseri.org/en/blog/2022-02-24-dont-use-rar/ got a fairly nice traction on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30465933

My personal favorite overall is the post from 2015 https://gaseri.org/en/blog/2015-09-14-what-is-the-price-of-o... where I wrote about proprietary and open-source software in computational chemistry by debunking an article from American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

vedranmon Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

How exactly would Red Hat pursue such strategy and compete with Canonical? Consider the fact that Red Hat leaves the copyright to the contributor in Red Hat's projects, while Canonical requires contributors to sign CLA to get patches included in Canonical's projects. Given this arrangement, Canonical both benefits from the contributions and also has extra rights over the code that everyone else doesn't have that gives them a competitive advantage.

vedranmon The Asymmetry of Open Source

Assuming this is feasible, how would you make sure the collected money ends up funding the right projects?

vedranmon The Asymmetry of Open Source

That's called source available.

vedranmon Tilck – A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

Can you provide a source for that? I have found the performance between FreeBSD and Linux to be comparable, even when using Python.