Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
Default compiler changed to gcc-8
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
New ena(4) driver for DragonFly
DragonFly now has a port of the ena(4) driver from FreeBSD. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s the Elastic Network Adapter used for running on Amazon EC2. That link for the commit message points at several dports tools useful for anyone wanting to try the next logical step.
Ravenports, and picking out packages
A little while back I linked to an excellent deep dive into Ravenports, and added my own bit of statistical guessing at popular packages. John Marino wants to know what packages people find most useful/most required. If you have opinions, and I’m sure you do, post something on the Ravenports Google Groups page.
If you are saying to yourself “Gee, what packages did I install and what came in as a dependency?”, here’s an easy way to find out:
pkg query -a '%n %a' | grep 0 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | less
This lists all “vital” packages, which usually means ones installed with intent, rather than automatically. This might be a useful thing to post for Ravenports…
Some package statistics
The article I linked yesterday about Ravenports got me wondering about what package are most popular. avalon.dragonflybsd.org is the default binary package archive for pkg, and it has httpd logs back to 2013, so I collated some information.
I read out a list of packages, and weighed them according to how recently they were downloaded. I also mushed together all the py/ruby/p5/php numbered packages, and excluded lib*.
After all that… there’s a lot of noise. One install of any desktop environment pulls in hundreds of packages automatically, so it’s hard to tell what’s installed by a human and what’s installed by dependency. That being said, here’s some highlights. This is me applying an arbitrary value and then arbitrarily snipping out a list… but it’s fun to see if nothing else.
18596 python27
13564 xorg-server
13499 perl5
13391 xterm
12098 xorg
8512 cups
8453 bash
8389 ffmpeg
8367 spidermonkey170
7884 python
7432 firefox
6997 sudo
6896 bind-tools
6702 openldap-client
5651 nano
5529 xfce4-conf
5052 xfce
4663 ruby
4447 vim
3133 tmux
2578 chromium
2248 zsh
2175 samba44
2132 python36
2007 mate-desktop
1765 mysql56-client
1699 fluxbox
1690 vim-lite
1517 CoinMP
1407 openjdk8
1395 samba46
1384 lumina
1367 kde
1355 mpg123
1353 spidermonkey24
1340 vlc
1338 thunderbird
1329 wpa_supplicant
1252 firebird25-client
1164 gimp
1103 zip
1083 youtube_dl
1044 php
941 freerdp
931 mercurial
927 lynx
866 evolution
848 gnome3
845 openjdk
842 openbox
842 epiphany
799 nmap
798 go
796 mutt
796 gnuchess
743 apache24
726 rxvt-unicode
722 irssi
652 firefox-esr
652 htop
649 rust
619 smartmontools
575 fvwm
529 windowmaker
477 openvpn
472 synth
451 fish
406 npm
403 inkscape
402 enlightenment
367 firefox-i18n
351 dwm
347 neovim
341 R
339 emacs25
320 emacs
320 unbound
312 tor
310 lua
300 cinnamon
300 wireshark
282 netcat
272 pidgin
258 postfix
258 joe
252 GraphicsMagick
251 dillo
249 icewm
242 mosh
236 rtorrent
225 weechat
219 audacious
218 smtube
216 calibre
190 xmms
187 pdksh
184 redis
184 openssh-portable
183 tk85
173 rdesktop
172 nedit
164 terminator
161 fetchmail
160 KeePassX
156 dnsmasq
A deep dive into Ravenports
eerielinux has written an exploratory article about Ravenports. It’s worth a read; Ravenports has been growing actively. You can install it in parallel with dports on DragonFly, or on a number of other operating systems.
Building your own DragonFly
Mixed in with the other documentation on the DragonFly website is a “how to build a release” explanation. I use it every time there’s a new DragonFly version. If you were wanting to build a DragonFly ISO/IMG with changes or different preinstalled dports, I’ve added some notes about what’s relevant for non-release building.
We used to have “GUI” releases of DragonFly which were based on the nrelease process installing pkgsrc packages and adding some configuration files. It doesn’t happen now mostly because nobody has had the time to reconfigure for dports; if you were looking for a project this weekend, may I suggest…?
NX on by default for reads
DragonFly has had NX (Non-eXecutable) support for some time. It’s now on by default for read operations in DragonFly master – not the current release. You can step it up to level 2, for write operations, with a loader tunable, but it may cause issues with dports.
Tools for building DragonFly
If you’ve ever wondered what packages are needed to build a DragonFly release: here they are in one dports metapackage.
Reduce on DragonFly and other BSDs
Reduce, the “second oldest computer algebra system”, has been ported to DragonFly (and there’s work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you’re a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.
pkg-provides on DragonFly
There’s a plugin for pkg, called pkg-provides, which will tell you what package(s) contain the filename you provide – installed or not. I didn’t even know pkg had a plugin system. Anyway, it works on DragonFly, as the author notes.
In Other BSDs for 2018/04/14
Totally last-minute summary, but I’m hitting every BSD category.
- Godot running on OpenBSD, though I didn’t know what Godot was.
- Finding what you’re looking for on Linux. BSD too. I link it because I always forget arguments to find(1).
- OPNsense 18.1.6 released.
- New M-Series storage devices from iXSystems.
- How to write ATF tests for NetBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2 – Install. (via)
- Using FreeBSD Text Dumps. (via)
- Transparent network audio with mpd & sndiod. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas’s Penguicon 2018 Schedule. Several BSD presentations.
- pkg vs. underlying OS upgrades.
- The BSDCan 2018 schedule is posted.
Note for numpy users
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.
One more microcode tip
I say “one more” like I know when this saga will end. If you are using the devcpu-data port to update your processors, you’ll need to add
microcode_update_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out.
In Other BSDs for 2018/01/13
A full slate of BSDs this week.
- Church of BSD. From 2005, and it is accurate for that timeframe. (via)
- ADOM, newly updated at 3.0.6, but only at 1.1.1_6 in ports/dports, pkgsrc, and two years gone in OpenBSD. But the ADOM download page lists new BSD versions? I may not have investigated far enough.
- OPNsense® 18.1 Release Candidate 1.
- Does anyone run OpenBSD as a desktop (ie not a server)?
- SMB V2+ client on FreeBSD 11.
- Intel microcode updates now available for NetBSD. (via)
- Bitcoin Full Node on FreeBSD.
- July – September 2017 FreeBSD Status Report.
- Hijacking Your Free Beasties. (via)
- Operating System of the Year 2017 : NetBSD Third place. (via)
- A positive look at GhostBSD 11.1. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/08.
- OpenBSD-current now has ‘smtpctl spf walk’.
DragonFly 4.9 users and dports
Because of the major version number change, there’s no packages built for DragonFly 4.9. Your options are to either update to 5.1 (which you probably meant to do anyway if you are running current) or manually point to the newest packages. Or just build from dports.
For clarity, this does not affect you at all if you are running 5.0 release. It only affects you if you are running DragonFly-current and have not updated in a while.
New system: Ravenports
John Marino has assembled a new packaging and building system. It’s called Ravenports, and he wrote a short intro, and has a filled-out site to go look at.
This is big news, in part because he knows what he’s doing (John worked on dports and created synth) and because it’s cross-platform. The prior work on synth is part of the reason DragonFly works so well under pressure – the “build everything as fast as possible as complete as possible” strategy makes a great stress test.
There’s no need to change software management strategies yet. It can be used at the same time as dports, so it doesn’t necessarily change anything for the next DragonFly release.
In Other BSDs for 2017/09/02
Lots of links this week – so many I’ve already started next week’s post.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA available. I’m prewriting this part of the post so there may be a new beta by the time this publishes.
- Introducing sandboxfs.
- “TIL GhostBSD has a patreon” (via)
- OpenBSD rtables and rdomains. (via)
- Setting up OpenBSD’s LDAP Server (ldapd) with StartTLS and SASL. (via)
- Ansible OpenBSD Cookbooks. (via)
- This crazy hardware porting example thread led me to some new hardware, some of which may run a BSD? The Pinebook is apparently bootable but I don’t know if that means usable.
- Also: using the audio port for serial? First time I heard of that. (referring to previous crazy hardware links above)
- Eventually all packaging systems eat an operating system. And then they aren’t packaging systems any more. (via)
- DFS with Freenas for data replication between multiple sites?
- openbsd changes of note 627
- yet another introduction to yacc
- OpenBSD 6.1, a an overview.
DragonFly and node.js
If you’ve had odd behavior with node.js (which I have) on DragonFly, it may be fixed now.
Dports, Rust, and updates
I’ve waited to post this because it’s a bit complicated, but here is the summary: dports didn’t get updated with new binary builds for a while because Rust stopped working, which killed Firefox. Michael Neumann got Rust working again, and packages are updated.
(Use -f if you have upgrade troubles.)