DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.
Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device. You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.
Matthew Dillon changed the default keep-policy in DragonFly to:
set keep-policy keep state (pickups, sloppy)
This is to match other BSDs (which? I don’t know) and reduce overhead, according to the commit.
Predrag Punosevac noticed that turning on pf was slowing his machine down. Rearranging the rules fixed a lot of it for him. However, Matthew Dillon decided it was time to make pf work concurrently instead of in a single thread, and 24 hours later, it does. Quick, someone benchmark this!
Sepherosa Ziehau implemented a UDP echo response tool, which not surprisingly meant he also had some UDP performance improvements. As he points out in the commit, it makes lockless firewall state tables possible.
The obvious joke should be “how can you tell?” Anyway, the csprng in DragonFly has been updated and IBAA is being used more often, and there’s more updates on the way.
Sepherosa Ziehau has enabled GSI target CPU auto selection, by default, on x86_64. He says to let him know if there’s problems. I’m not sure what form the problems would take, cause I’m not sure what this does.
libpcap has been updated in DragonFly by Matthew Dillon, and file has been updated by Peter Avalos.
ATM support is gone in DragonFly, and frankly, I’m surprised it was still there.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to version 20140424. Will that help you? Perhaps with newer motherboards; otherwise check the changelog.
Here’s the announcement from Francois Tigeot: DragonFly now uses dynamic binaries in the root filesystem. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if on 3.7 and upgrading.
DragonFly now has a ‘rescue’ system added in, which also functions as a way to mount encrypted filesystems. Does PAM work yet? I don’t know; I may be linking to this earlier than I need to.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Sascha Wildner brought in ACPICA 20140214, and his commit message has a list of the updates.
See the announcement, and the commit. I’m not totally sure what this affects.
There seems to be a lot of ACPI-related updates lately: Sascha Wildner has updated ACPICA in DragonFly to what I think is the very latest version. See his commit for the differences.
John Marino updated daemon(8) on DragonFly. For some reason, I didn’t know it was a standalone program. I knew about the idea of daemons as helpers based inside the computer, which is why so many server programs end with a ‘d’ – sshd, ftpd, and so on. Inexplicably, I never actually saw the program itself.