A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The DragonFly boot menu has been cleaned up a bit, and Fred, the dragonfly drawn on DragonFly, is now in better color. In fact, there’s even an option to turn him blue.
Update: I wanted to see what this looked like, and I realized screenshots might help everyone else.
In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:
I’m running behind so this is a bit old, but: Matthew Dillon commited svc(8), a service manager program. Take a look at its man page to see the potential uses.
Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.
I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week. No simple hacks, these.
Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.
Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.
This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.
With a recent commit from Sascha Wildner, DragonFly now loads XHCI (meaning USB3) by default. If you had previously tried to install DragonFly via USB stick, and it inexplicably refused to mou t the installer drive… It may work much better now.
There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.
The 4.0 release of DragonFly is out! Quoting from the release page:
Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.
The more eagle-eyed downloader will notice it’s version 4.0.1, not 4.0.0. That’s because nobody trusts .0 releases I tagged 4.0.0 just before a few useful commits went in, and it’s better to retag to make sure everyone got them. See also my message to kernel@/users@
I’ve placed an image slider over on the right side of the website; it’s all BSD-related books. Each image is linked to a page about the book where you can buy it. It’s not paid advertising, or perhaps advertising at all; there’s no in-kind benefit. It’s specifically books I think people would find interesting to read, and we’d all benefit by the expansion of the BSD ‘ecosystem’.
The most recent edition added is Michael W. Lucas’s FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, which is out in ebook form today, and printed form soon.
I’m working on the 4.0 release, but in the meantime, I wanted to point at a slew of updates from Sascha Wildner: ACPICA 20141107, pciconf(8), axge(4), and the kernel part of the netgraph7 Bluetooth stack.
Lots to read this week.
Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.
I actually got this started early, for once, instead of completing in a panic on Friday night.
BSDNow 064 (somehow, 64 seems a nicer milestone than 50) links to a huge pile of EuroBSDCon 2014 videos, including 2 DragonFly presentations. There’s also an interview with Justin Cormack, who must be cool; I can tell from his name. There’s a lot more material just written on the page after the video, so I’ll point you at the actual content instead of repeating.
I hadn’t caught this yet cause I am working extra hours, but Matthias did: Matthew Dillon talks about DragonFly and the 4.0 release for a good 43 minutes on BSDTalk.
A fellow whom I’ve only seen named as Bill is working on what he calls ipfw2, though technically what’s already in DragonFly is ipfw2, since it’s the second version of ipfw. Either way, he has a project page up describing what he’s done so far, and what he plans.
Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.
Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.