A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The list is shorter this week; I blame the Christmas holiday.
BSDNow isn’t slowing down for Christmas, cause there’s a new episode up. There’s two interviews this time – Erwin Lansing, about BSD in Europe, and Cristina Vintila, about BSD conferences. The rest of the episode is a bunch of “How did you get into BSD?” stories from viewers, both in text (i.e. read out from email) and the occasional video answer.
One way to keep file history on an very active Hammer disk from eating up all the space: more snapshots. This may seem counterproductive, but disk pruning eliminates historical data between snapshots, so you can keep older data at the cost of some temporal accuracy.
As part of another thread, Steve Petrie posted an in-depth description of how and where and why he’s using DragonFly. Worth looking at either for workflow tips or for just seeing the use case.
BSDTalk 249 is an 11 minute interview with Scott Long, who is involved with Netflix’s FreeBSD-based local caching appliances. This conversation is from MeetBSD 2014, though I heard Scott talk about the same subject at the last NYCBSDCon – it’s an astounding amount of data flowing through those machines.
I am slightly confused about which day it is.
I sort of lost a day this week because of an accidental 20-hour workday, but I still have the links:
Note: corrected VPS hosting link.
BSDNow 068 has a large number video links to various BSD conference videos, a bunch of other article links,, and an interview of Michael W. Lucas about his new FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.
From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.
If you really, really want to make sure you aren’t pulling in any parts of X when installing dports, and you’re building from source, there’s a few options you can set to keep X11 off your system. You can even go farther.
I had to type it that way because it rhymes. Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer. What’s it do? It’s a machine management standard.
Minimal link text this week. It just happened that way.
Get ready for some reading.
It’s possible, if you are several releases (years) behind, to end up with a DragonFly system that can’t compile and install the current release, due to incremental changes over time. It’s rare, but it could happen now between, say, version 3.4 and 4.0. The usual solution would be to incrementally upgrade in order, which is a lot of building and updating. The alternative is the new installworld-force option from Matthew Dillon that forces a new set of binaries into place. Use as a last resort.
If you want to help I/O performance when DragonFly is virtualized, here’s a short checklist of what to work on. I haven’t noticed any problems – but I’m not taxing any of my VMs that heavily.
BSDNow’s episode this week focuses on the just-released Bitrig 1.0, and has an interview with Patrick Wildt of that project. There’s also coverage of other topics, including the new poudriere release – that’s the tool that bulk builds packages for DragonFly and FreeBSD, though I don’t know if it’s unified across both operating systems yet.
bycn82’s rewrite of IPFW2 is available as a git branch to try out; he’s posted the link. Please try, especially if you are still working with the original ipfw.
(note: remember, ‘ipfw’ in DragonFly is what was called ‘ipfw2’ years and years ago because it was a replacement of the original ‘ipfw’ in FreeBSD. It was called ipfw2 but referenced as ipfw so that the same commands worked. Technically, this branch bycn82 is working on would be ipfw3, but he keeps referring to it as ipfw2. Confused? Good.)
If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.