DST changes, maybe

If you are running a DragonFly system older than version 1.6, and you are in North America using something other than UTC time, you will need to manually update your tzinfo files to reflect the changed (in 2005, taking effect this year) Daylight Savings Time start and stop dates.  If you are on UTC or are running 1.6+, you are fine.

1.8 ISO with NATA

Sascha Wildner has a version of DragonFly 1.8 compiled using NATA, the new ATA system, available on leaf.dragonflybsd.org.  (Link goes directly to a bzipped ISO)  Try it if you’ve had trouble getting DragonFly to install on a system with a very new SATA controller.

More about the filesystem

It looks like Matthew Dillon is going for his own filesystem to meet DragonFly’s clustering goals.  According to his recent post, it will be a (deep breath) 64-bit fsckless logged filesystem with collapsible snapshots limited only by disk space, local caching, and logical-level multi-master replication.  It should have a lasting effect. ETA: summer release, in some form.

How to use NATA

Thomas E. Spanjaard has NATA, the ‘new ATA’ code from FreeBSD, in the DragonFly source tree.  It’s in, but not yet enabled, in release 1.8.  If you want to try it out, or if you have certain newer hardware that demands it, he’s written how a document on how to enable NATA, on the wiki.