Category: Committed Code

In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:

• The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default.  (that’s bit me in the past)
• There’s a new callout*() implementation.
• cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates.
• libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which because of library versioning support, won’t cause compatibility problems for older vs. newer DragonFly versions.
• C++11 support is also now available.

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.

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.

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.

 

Matthew Dillon’s added the reapctl() call, which gives a process control over all sub-processes, even when detached.  This is initally useful for bulk builds of dports, but can probably be extended farther…

Chrome runs on DragonFly now, apparently possible now because of this ported fix from Joris Giovannangeli.

As Francois Tigeot has pointed out, recent Mesa upgrades have made very old graphics drivers using DRM1 no longer work.  They’ve been removed.  This won’t affect you unless your graphics card is 10+ years old.

Matthew Dillon has added /dev/upmap and /dev/kpmap to DragonFly in two commits.  (er, three.)  It’s an optimization of some sort, and it is unfortunately over my head.  Please, someone comment in a way that fills it in.  I’m tired.

John Marino updated wpa_supplicant (in dports).  He then suggested moving it out of base into dports, so that it could be updated independently of the base system.  (this update, for instance, took years.)   Since wpa_supplicant is necessary to get some systems online – and it can’t be installed if missing if you don’t have a network link – it may be too risky.  I think other packages could be moved out, myself.

Robin Hahling volunteered to update OpenSSH in DragonFly, which is good news.  It’s a jump from version 6.1 to 6.7, so there’s some feature changes.  tcpwrappers support is gone, for instance.  If you have a reason to object to this change, speak up now.

John Marino has upgraded gcc, libedit, xz, and grep in DragonFly.  Also, tzdata has jumped from version 2014e to 2014h, thanks to Sascha Wildner.

Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent changes to UDP in DragonFly mention some performance gains to sheer packet count.

You can now see the packets, bytes, and drops in altq by using the -altq arg to systat, thanks to this recent commit from Matthew Dillon.

This very long commit message from Sepherosa Ziehau details the UDP changes he’s made.  It’s mostly technical details, but at the end he mentions this little tidbit:

“For ‘kq_connect_client -u’ test, this commit gives 400% performance improvement (31Kconns/s -> 160Kconns/s).”

You can now start moused with an argument, so it will look at the right device.  In most cases, I imagine “/etc/rc.d/moused start ums0” will be what anyone wants.  Credit to Michael Neumann for the update.  Perhaps moused_flags="ums0" will do it too?  I haven’t tried yet.

This will overwrite your /etc/devd.conf.

DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully.  This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link.  Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.

Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly.  (It’s always good to see a new contributor name.)

Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius.  He’s been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I’m linking to this as a ‘signpost’ commit.