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NetBSD gets New sysctl Infrastructure
jschauma writes "NetBSD's Andrew Brown has committed a complete rewrite of the kernel's sysctl infrastructure. To test these changes, he cross compiled 150 kernels for 30 architecures to see where some problems might come up. Additional information can be found in Andrew's email to current-users."
That's dedication. Kudos.
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
Slashdot lets subscribers have first dibs on stories, but it seems you can get to them from the "old stories" link anyway...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Hell, half of the interesting stuff that shows up on slashdot has already been on Fark for half a day.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I am sure the OpenBSD developers will check it out and add it if it makes sense to them, without affecting security. I recall they had to add sysctl variables for pf, which is what makes thing brittle to change.
Kudus, that is a lot of dedication!
What are the benefits to having this new sysctl infrastructure?
Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.
Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:
This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.
There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.
This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.
On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.
This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.
Tell you what. From what I've seen of Linux, and what I've read about improvements wise in BSD, this seems pretty accurate. Linux is wanding around in a kind of undeath where each Linux zombie is missing a different hunk of flesh.
At first blush it certainly seems that if I want something powerful that gets me all misty-eyed thinking about my old shell account, BSD is the obvious choice, but if I want a windows replacement, Linux is the hobbiest's go-kart to Microsoft's Lexus.
Boy, that looks like moderation is working for me. But, perhaps there was some lag in this effect. Also, I give a -1 Anonymous modifier. You might try it. (Granted, it would be valuable if modifiers and thresholds could be made per section or dependent on the number of comments, but beggars can't be choosers.)
The issue, I believe, is that troll patrol is done in large amounts by the slashdot admins who have infinite moderator points. As was shown in the early days of Slashdot, one admin with infinite mod points per 100 users spread across 10 articles is sufficient. The same works for the small sections like Developer and BSD. It just takes more lag time for admin to notice these things in small sections because they're concentrating on more highly commented stories. Once more, as you noted, there are less people with mod points reading. So, as near as I can tell, the system works, albeit maybe a little more slowly than you like.
Now, then there's your reaction. To be honest, the grandparent post was mildly humorous. Since I don't see many troll posts, I don't know if these is a unique post, or just another unoriginal copy and paste. The reason it was made, however, in either case, is because of people -- well -- like you. You're reacting strongly to a stupid post of relatively little significance which most people won't see. The post offends you and raises your ire. But consider the lack of talent required to make such a post and how little effect it truly has. It's a dying joke that anyone who reads Slashdot has seen before in some form or another.
If that doesn't help you, consider this strategy: give anonymous posters -6. Give foes -6. Foe logged in trolls. You won't see trolls. But, as always, please don't feed the trolls.
You really want to be paranoid? For EVERY time someone metamods you as unfair, even if everyone else mods you as fair, you lose karma. Don't believe me? Check out metamod.pl in the CVS. Now if that makes you uncomfortable, I think you lack perspective. If you're not a troll yourself and have useful things to say, your karma will recover. And that second part isn't wholly necessary.
Trolls exist because some guys just plain don't have the right chemical balance in their brains, and they will always be that way. They can destroy a community if not properly regulated because to be a troll is to simply not see value in that community. But it looks to me that they are being properly regulated on Slashdot. Consider that it only takes one active non-troll moderator on average to cancel the effects of an active troll moderator. How many active troll moderators do you think there are? How about non-trolls like you and me? The bad thing is that in individual cases, someone might be poorly treated by the system, but I don't see any reason for your prediction of chaos. System works fine for me, on average.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Have to post AC as I've moderated here also (usually post as citog). Have to say I agree whole-heartedly with your sentiments. Slashdot is suffering hugely at the moment. On one hand we've got the cut-n-paste trolls and on the other we've got the fanboys who do the MS is bad, Linux r0cks/RedHat are bastards for trying to stay profitable/f*** you n00b etc. etc. This was supposed to be 'news for nerds and stuff that matters' but has just denegrated into a shouting rabble who have no interest in contributing, rather self-massaging of ego.
I've no idea how I'm meta-moderated but that could be interesting...
Although it goes against the grain here, we could do with a large number of dedicated and committed mods here. By dedicated and committed, I mean people who are interested in well thought out *and* researched discussion. So much of what is rated +n informative etc. is just fanboy adoration.
You've gotta understand, the trolls here mostly don't give a flying flip about BSD and its future. It's just that their posts _always_ get attention, and even your well-written thoughts on the situation just make you look like bait, sadly. So the best option is to totally ignore them.
For some reason, people want to reply even when they _know_ it's a troll. I've seen this first hand; I wrote the Gentoo Zealot Translator and that always gets stacks of responses. Some people are just touchy.
M
YHBT!
If you read his message he compiled but he didn't test them.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimize doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save *BSD at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dead
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