If you happen to have a Intel Centrino advanced 6035 wireless card, it now works on DragonFly, thanks to Tobias Heilig.
Bear with me; this is the history: wpa_supplicant is the program DragonFly uses to connect to most wireless networks. It’s been part of the base system for some time, but if you start it up, you will see a warning (at boot time) about how this version is deprecated. Installing from dports puts a newer version in place.
As is the case with most third-party include in any operating system’s base, there’s always lag between the newest version of software and what’s been included in. Dependencies creep in, or it’s duplicated work between packaging and basic OS maintenance, etc. (Who here used Perl on FreeBSD 4? That was frustrating, but a good example here.) Anyway, the dilemma is that since wpa_supplicant is a program that may be required in order to get online, it must be in the base install. However, since it has / had vulnerabilities, it must be updated. The base install doesn’t update as fast as the origin of the software, and there’s the mismatch.
All that’s a long explanation as to why network/wpa_supplicant is now on the DragonFly install CD, and gets automatically used if installed. Thanks for Aaron LI and Matthew Dillon for making it happen. The base package is still there, in case someone deletes their installed ports and needs to get online before they can reinstall. This is in master now and will be in the 5.4 release.
I tagged the first release candidate for DragonFly 5.4 last night. The commit message has summary lines from all the commits in this release, if you want to go through them – or wait for the release notes. I’m happy to see some new-to-me committer names in there, too.
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
Aaron LI has brought dhcpcd into DragonFly-current, as a replacement to dhclient(8) and rtsold(8). dhclient does support IPv6 but it’s bundled with server and BIND applications, so it’s harder to support.
Aaron LI’s added ip6addrctl(8) to DragonFly; on by default. There should be a man page entry for it within a couple hours, online.
arp(8) can now be limited to a particular interface on DragonFly; a minor change but I mention it because otherwise you may not realize it.
There’s a fix for memory contention in NUMA (meaning Threadripper in this case) configurations on DragonFly; the commit has before-and-after numbers. They are somewhat context-free, so I can’t easily translate to what this means for performance.
Matthew Dillon’s moved tty_token from a global to per-CPU token in most cases in DragonFly. This is good for performance as with any global->local shift, but I can’t tell you what aspect it improves.
Something I didn’t know existed but makes sense now that I do: a virtualized randomness device, added to DragonFly. Entropy is usually provided through hardware, so of course you’d need something for it in a VM.
If your kernel panics, the current state of memory can show why. That memory dump needs to be saved somewhere. ‘dumpon’ is the command to specify the device that will keep it. If you want to turn it off, you end up using the odd syntax ‘dumpon off’. Thanks to Aaron Li, there’s now a linguistically-sane command: ‘dumpoff’.
As a fix for wpa_supplicant, the upper limit on socket datagrams has been increased. What else does this affect? We’ll find out the hard way, which is why I mention it here.
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.
If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems. It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process. I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.
Intel’s ACPICA 20180810 is now in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner. Nothing really user-affecting, but it does fix some memory leaks. You can tell it’s very new just by the version number.
If you have a mangled HAMMER2 disk, and you have inodes that are clearly mangled (the built-in CRCs don’t match), you can now remove them manually. This seems like Hole Hawg territory…