Thanks to Magliano Andrea Andrea Magliano, a new version of ACPI has been added to DragonFly, acpica-unix 20110527.
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, libpthread was broken for a short period. If you built anything in the last … 12 hours? You may want to rebuild it. If that doesn’t describe you, it’s a nonevent.
It’s funny that I’m reporting a short-term break in bleeding-edge operating system code as any sort of surprise. It shows something about how stable DragonFly-master is most of the time.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making various updates that conform to standards lately, including “RFC4653 Non-Congestion Robustness (NCR)” and “RFC3517bis“. I’m not familiar with what they do, but you can follow the links and read the RFCs if you are curious.
(Not sure if I got that 3517 one correct…)
Apparently Apache 2.4 has a bug that will cause network stalls when sending data that doesn’t line up with segment size. Sepherosa Ziehau has put in a workaround for the issue. Alternately, you can use www/apache22.
John Marino has updated libncurses, libedit, gdb, libgmp, and zlib. The release notes are helpfully contained within each commit. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also added terminfo, a future replacement for termcap, if I understand correctly.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in two different places:. The 3.0 release now has OpenSSL 1.0.0j, which fixes several security issues (see link for CVE IDs). DragonFly 3.1 now has OpenSSL 1.0.1c. As for a changelog… this, maybe?
You’d think everything that could be done with grep has already been done, but no: grep, which is an externally-produced program, has been updated in DragonFly to version 2.12 by John Marino.
A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog. Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).
In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.
Sepherosa Ziehau added “Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm” in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy. It’s on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!
Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There’s also the vquota(8) man page.
DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.
(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu. Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments. It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment. You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.
(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)
It’s now possible to specify a jail ID when using pgrep and pkill(1), to capture processes specific to a jail. It’s similar to the same option in FreeBSD, except no compatibility issues since this option did not previously exist in DragonFly.
Have you ever tried to run a service and realized you forgot to make an entry in rc.conf to enable it? It’s mildly annoying. There’s now a “one’ keyword (via NetBSD) that lets you enable a service, once. It still apparently performs sanity checks, unlike the otherwise-similar ‘force’ keyword.
Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.