Web technologies

Hi folks,

Still overseeing other folks carrying the entertainment part of the BSD, @thfr, the more and more famous OpenBSD contributor, just brought not less than the Vulkan api few days ago. To the point there is even a Phoronix article (I agree with Bryan Steele on this, there is some misunderstanding here and there but overall having these on the website brings attention to it ... not all bad). So logically, games compatible with start to get their entries in the tree too ... vkQuake, the vulkan counterpart/portage of the old OpenGL version ... some others are planned most of them starting with the convenient vk prefix. That alone brings an unexpected change in the OpenBSD's landscape to say the least :-) congratulations.

In parallel, a relatively recent GitHub project attracted my attention, Mimalloc from ... Microsoft :-) well ... no worries, you do not have to cross yourself before reading the source code and all of that, it is pretty good quality code and compatible with all BSD :-) I was impressed by the performance to be honest with few internal tests, professional and personal, maybe less in multi thread contexts though, I still prefer jemalloc for this ... but not bad at all for a start :-)

Apart of this, I still went on openjdk journey, by implementing the UseLargePages support on FreeBSD, most of the time pages of 2mb on most of architectures ... It is an option for a reason as true it might brings relative performance gains but it is mainly for java application using large objects. Otherwise it would be more waste than anything else ... And also just last weekend I thought it would be a little nice idea to support FreeBSD's SO_USER_COOKIE socket option and seems it s been approved ... we shall see once he comes back and eventually cherry pick all of these for openjdk 12! In parallel, I had my first bite into nodejs by fixing openbsd build and also trying to port Linux only, for now, large page option support on FreeBSD. They are approved so might be merged in a near future, And ... to my surprise I have been granted commit access to botan project :-) so I just pushed a small change to take in account the new mmap flag which was committed just few days ago in current. Happy beginning of summer ;-)

End of the marathon

Finally pleased to announce LMMS got its long awaited 1.2.0 release ... The summary reflects perfectly the long work undergone for the last couple of years. Indeed, being of the few real portable audio platform software, not just the "big three" but also the *BSD ; enough complex to please advanced users while being understandable for hungry learners ; it is worth to be highlighted ... Happy to see they were able to freeze the code in decent time while looking forward the future features (awaiting personally the Microwave synthesiser being merged). Time to update the related ports ;-)

Noted that Thomas Debesse still pushes his efforts towards Xonotic and related projects. I am glad there is someone taking care of these, he seems to have the persistence to go through :-)

In my side, I still update slowly the openjdk repository for FreeBSD, filling the missing feature gap with other platforms ; still have few further plans we shall, hopefully the vast majority will make it.
Just remembered that gcc ports a subset of compiler runtime library from LLVM and spotted that my writable/executable page request detection exist now on the 8 and 9th branches ... also the Mac OS base compiler had been updated and supports this feature too.

Enter praise things...

Hi folks,

Soon the promising sunny summer even though it is a bit hard to believe here with days going on with rain :-)

Does not mean nothing happen, quite the contrary ...
First noticeable things, the famous FreeBSD Quarterly report, notably you can hardly say FreeBSD and desktop does not go together, as you can see KDE and GNOME are still evolving. What parts interest me the most is the kernel fuzzing, it definitely helps getting better quality, fixing bugs we would not spot otherwise, which benefits everyone for sure. Awaiting patiently the BSDCan 2019 resources
And also the C runtime change, especially mentioning the well known libpthread issues (brought its share of issues for LLVM work for example) so I am hopeful things will evolve for the best and put these headaches behind. Otherwise awaiting patiently BSDCan 2019 material. And oh, I almost forgot the BSDNow episode 300  ... does not happen every day and the content is pretty nice !

In my side, did not do much of video games contribution more enterprise at large, python, aimed for the next 3.8 release (the NetBSD part might get merged soon-ish) and for the first time openjdk when I try to improve the BSD support in general (starting modestly with FreeBSD for now) ... I ll try to go further in the near future. There are still my little change for the cassandra C++ driver awaiting but that's their usual pace, I am used to it, the review will occur when they see fit.