A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’m pulling a quote off of IRC to show some of the testing on HAMMER2, specifically as the background for this commit:
14:22 <@dillon_> ^^^ hammer2 bug, could reproduce it around once a day doing a continuous rm -rf on hardlinked snapshots. reproduced about once every 500 million directory entries or so
I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after deleting half a billion directory entries.
SemiBUG meets tonight at 7 PM, and James Turner is presenting about BHCS. I rarely say this, but: I wish I was closer to Michigan. Go, if you are near.
Update: the files referenced during the talk.
I’ve tagged and built DragonFly 5.2.2. This is mostly so that our current release image includes the fixes for the LazyFP bug, CVE-2018-3665. My email to users@ has upgrade details.
I’m going heavy on history this week.
Lots of different items, probably because of BSDCan.
I am typing BSDXXX phrases a lot, it seems. BSDNow 250 goes over the just-finished BSDCan. There’s a ton of events, so get reading/listening.
DragonFly has had NX (Non-eXecutable) support for some time. It’s now on by default for read operations in DragonFly master – not the current release. You can step it up to level 2, for write operations, with a loader tunable, but it may cause issues with dports.
Matthew Dillon’s added some patches to DragonFly related to securing floating point state, following similar work in OpenBSD. There isn’t a reported catchy-name issue to match it, like Spectre/Meltdown – yet.
(If anyone has a good link to the similar OpenBSD commits, please share; I did not find them on a cursory search.)
Update: the fix is now in 5.2 and an update is recommended.
There was an optional ‘make initrd’ step in the DragonFly build process, where you can create a small binary to use for mounting encrypted root drives.
Aaron LI has removed mkinitrd in favor of ‘make initrd’, which builds a separate binary to use in exactly those situations. See the commit message for more detail. It incidentally creates a ‘/rescue’ directory and works as a rescue ramdisk, similar to other BSDs, if you should ever need it. (See updated MOTD for details)
It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have overflow from last week to help, so these are very fresh links.
cmd.exe tricks: Changing directories with forward slashes instead of backslashes. I find this entertaining.BSDCan is running this weekend. There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.
If you have a serial card add-in, DragonFly can now output the console to it – a way to run completely headless. It’s not quite like a normal on-motherboard serial port boot, so look at the commit notes for implementation details.
BSDNow 249 is covering a really wide range of topics including an uncommon amount of NetBSD, so I’m going to do the easy thing and repeat the summary: “OpenZFS and DTrace updates in NetBSD, NetBSD network security stack audit, Performance of MySQL on ZFS, OpenSMTP results from p2k18, legacy Windows backup to FreeNAS, ZFS block size importance, and NetBSD as router on a stick.”
NYCBUG is having an outdoors meeting in Bryant Park, today, 6:45 PM. Go, if you are near.
Treat this week: footage of a college animatronic project I was slightly involved in. See below.
One of these links will be very useful to someone.
BSDNow 248 has an interview with Patrick Mooney, talking about bhyve, along with the usual news summaries.
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has added a few options to the buildworld process in DragonFly. These options let you skip rebuilding the compiler and binutils rebuilds, for a significant speedup: buildworld times cut in half.
See his excellent commit message for all the numbers. Note that this is for development work, so it’s not advisable for regular upgrades.