Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.
DragonFly now has retpoline turned on (stats included in that link) as a side effect of having gcc-8 as default, and SMAP/SMEP are also supported. I enjoy just saying these words out loud. SMEP SMEP SMEP SMEPSMEPSMEPSMEP.
I’m still backlogged, so here’s a May 14th mitigation in DragonFly for MDS attacks possible with Intel CPUs from 2011 onward. It’s in the current release.
A last-minute drm change in DragonFly 5.6 turned out to cause a reproducible lockup, so there’s changes in place for it. This means 5.6.1 will need to be rolled, which I will do in a day or two. If you want to update now, the normal buildworld/buildkernel process will get you this change.
This will turn into a real 5.6 release probably by weekend if no problems are found. See the tag commit message for a list of the commits since 5.4.
The next release of DragonFly should be smaller; Sascha Wildner and Rimvydas Jasinskas have removed or substituted enough packages on the installer image to drop the package disk usage 50%.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has done the tedious but useful work to update a number of utilities in DragonFly to newer vendor versions: LibreSSL 2.9.1, libarchive 3.3.3, xz 5.2.4, ldns 1.7.0, and OpenSSH 8.0p1.
Sascha Wildner has committed mandoc(1) to DragonFly to use for man, whatis, apropos, and other functions. One less GNU utility, and also means groff can come out of the base system. That is almost the last C++ code in base… I am not sure what remains.
Because of the ongoing pmap work from Matthew Dillon, building vkernels may not work for a short period in DragonFly-master. “A short period” usually means a few days for this sort of thing.
Update: all better now.
I’m jumping ahead in my very full queue of DragonFly items to post to something new: Matthew Dillon has committed extensive work to the virtual memory system in DragonFly. He has a message to users@ that sums it up.
If that’s not enough reading for you, I’ll point at commits where he reports speed improvements, changes to systat(1), or just 2-decade-old copyright items.
DragonFly 5.4.3 is out. My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes. This release has a fix for an Intel floating-point bug.
Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process. There’s a brand new complete build of all packages uploaded, too, so plan on a ‘pkg update’.
This may never ever matter if you manage to avoid fdisk your whole life. But if you don’t pull that off, here’s the reminder: label your DragonFly slices with 108.
(Yes, I do in fact have a backlog of two months with DragonFly material. It’s been that constant.)
The callout_* API in DragonFly has been rewritten. This will only affect you if you are doing some very specific programming – but it will be intensely interesting if so. I mentioned it before, but don’t forget debugging.
I’m still playing catchup so it’s as of a few weeks ago, but the version 8 branch of gcc in DragonFly has been updated from 8.1 to 8.3, with backported fixes.
Related: gcc 5 is out.
Matthew Dillon’s committed some performance work for HAMMER2, dealing with write-clustering. I don’t have statistics to note, so here’s the commit message.
Matthew Dillon has committed two changes, both to DragonFly 5.4 and to DragonFly-current. His note to users@ explains the details. I don’t have a date for 5.4.2 being rolled out, but I expect soon.
This is the commit I should have linked to yesterday, and was reminded by an anonymous commenter: git: sys/vfs/fuse: Add initial FUSE support. It’s not complete, and so isn’t built by default; check the commit for details.
Tomohiro Kusumi has committed more work on FUSE support in DragonFly. I am not sure if this is more foundational work or if it makes a user-level difference. At least the commit notes are nice.