I like pointing out how political world events push their way into computer updates.
Thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas, GCC 8.0 has been imported into DragonFly. It’s not built by default, so you’ll need to set WORLD_ALTCOMPILER to get it. Rimvydas mentions this is part of a 3-year upgrade cycle.
Note that he went the extra mile and made sure dports could handle it too.
A recent and new CPU bug, CVE-2018-8897, is fixed in DragonFly. THis applies to both Intel and AMD processors. I’m happy to see that the CERT page lists equal notification timing for a whole lot of operating systems, rather than the few that heard about Spectre/Meltdown early.
Following that topic, Matthew Dillon has “fleshed out” Spectre mitigations, and his commit message details the current state. The sysctl ‘machdep.spectre_mitigation’ will tell you what’s set at any given point.
Update: update.
systat in DragonFly has gained some new fields when using -pv. Read up on the tool if you have not used it before.
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to the scheduler, with the result that nice(1) is really vigorous now about enforcing priority.
Here’s something that doesn’t have an immediate impact now, but will be useful down the road: Francois Tigeot has been working on DRM support in DragonFly, and has been quite successful with Intel video support. His strategy has been to adopt Linux methods where possible, to reduce the amount of support work. The payoff has been excellent, and prompt, accelerated video support in DragonFly. The most recent work is “git: drm: Implement parts of the Linux irq subsystem“, which is going to come in handy for someone, I’m sure.
IPSEC hasn’t been maintained in basically forever in DragonFly, so it’s been removed. It was only still mentioned in the VKERNEL configs, so if you have a custom VKERNEL config file, remove any mention of IPSEC, IPSEC_ESP, or IPSEC_DEBUG. Otherwise, nothing to worry about.
I like code that travels through multiple BSDs.
I haven’t been able to say this in a while, but: I like cross-pollination.
For anyone wanting to try out ipfw3, there’s now a rc script. Make sure to set up a rules file, or you’ll kill all incoming traffic.
According to Tomohiro Kusumi, libfuse compiles on DragonFly. This is only one-half of the equation, however. Kernel-side FUSE needs to be ported in order to use FUSE-based filesystems, so there’s a project ripe for the taking…
I branched DragonFly 5.2 last night, and built a release candidate, which should be available at most any mirror by now. If no surprises turn up, the release should be this weekend or a little after, because of the holiday.
BSDStats was in DragonFly as a default-to-disabled rc script. It’s been removed. It’s still available, and updatable, in the form of the dport. The bsdstats.org website should have more info about what it does. (though the site appears to be down right now)
Sepherosa Ziehau presented on DragonFly’s network stack at the just-concluded AsiaBSDCon 2018. He posted a link to the badges, his paper, and his slides.
If you are using virtio drivers, there’s no longer a need for ‘device virtio_pci’ in your kernel config. It’s autoloaded as a dependency. If you run a custom kernel, remember to take it out. You’ll want to do that now if you’re on 5.1, or later at the next version upgrade if you are on 5.0.
The default options on the math/py-numpy port slowed it down. Francois Tigeot noticed, and committed a change that takes advantage of all processors. Read his note to users@ for details.
Remember: there’s a separate document about porting FreeBSD drivers to DragonFly. I note it cause it’s useful and because Rimvydas Jasinskas just updated it.
This isn’t really a dramatic event, but Rimvydas Jasinskas has added support for DWARF-4 line number tables in binutils 2.27. I am linking it to remind everyone that a little bit of Tolkien, in the form of elves (elfs?) and dwarfs (dwarves?) lives in your computer. We need a ORC standard. Oh. Hobbit? Hobbit.
Tomohiro Kusumi has brought in exFAT support to DragonFly from FreeBSD. Useful for cross-platform drives when FAT32 isn’t enough, and NTFS brings its own problems.