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BSD: FreeBSD News and How to Install NetBSD on Old Apple Macs
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Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Automating FreeBSD Jails with cdist - Zero Dependencies Inside the Jail
Jails break that assumption in a satisfying way. A FreeBSD jail is supposed to be small - sometimes a single static binary, an rc.d script, and a few lines in rc.conf. Installing Python into every jail just so Ansible can run its setup module is, to borrow a phrase, the tail wagging the dog. I already wrote about a workaround for Ansible: the jailexec connection plugin, which SSHes to the jail host and uses jexec to tunnel commands into each jail. It works, and I still reach for it when I already have an Ansible setup. But many Ansible modules assume Python on the target, so in practice some of those jails still end up growing a Python interpreter.
Then I tried cdist, and everything got smaller.
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Adam Russell ☛ NetBSD/MacPPC 9.4 Installation on a QEMU emulated PowerPC Macintosh
Apple last used PowerPC chips about twenty years ago, then transitioned to Intel based chips until 2020 with the introduction of ARM based systems. For many years the older PowerPC based systems could be inexpensively purchased on the used market. As time continues to pass these are increasingly rare to find at all, much less in good working order. For the time in which they could be easily obtained cheaply they were a good source of reasonably powerful systems that could be leveraged for research and hobby usage via open source operating systems, mainly NetBSD and Debian Linux. These operating systems continue to support the PowerPC architecture. Indeed the platform is far from dead and continues to see advancement and usage, albeit it mostly in niche contexts. QEMU supports PowerPC emulation of a nice representative variety of systems. For our purposes we will only focus on emulation of PowerPC Apple Macintosh systems.
ZFS helped to remove code
Anyway I bring this up because I got an SMS from him this morning saying he’d been able to replace most of his codebase with ZFS, and managed to ink out a significant performance boost in the process. I asked for permission to share here.
This experience tells me a couple of key things: [...]