Here’s something I haven’t see before: at the time of me typing this, there are commits in DragonFly, FreeBSD, and I assume NetBSD (haven’t found the commit), but the 2019-5612 CVE entry is still shown as reserved and not public. This may change by the time you read this article, of course.
AM4 fix, Corsair fix
If you have an AM4 motherboard and also can’t EFI boot DragonFly on it, this recent change may fix that for you.
Also, if you are using a Corsair keyboard, this commit may be useful to you.
Colo upgrade for dragonflybsd.org, plus future
Matthew Dillon posted an extensive writeup about the hardware changes for dragonflybsd.org; price to performance ratio has been improving so much for multiprocessor machines that we can jump forward both for hosting hardware and for a testbed.
He also mentions his immediate thoughts on what to tackle next, since SMP has been so relentless improved in DragonFly. It resulted in a very long conversational chain as people weighed in with opinions, so I’ve held off posting it until the conversation finished. (I chimed in too.)
dhcpcd and DragonFly, continued
Roy Marples, the ‘upstream‘ for dhcpcd(8), noticed that DragonFly was working with it as a dhclient/rtsold replacement, but the process wasn’t complete. So … welcome new committer!
tap/tun device changes
DragonFly’s tap(4)/tun(4) devices have been historically precreated – tap0, tap1, tap2, tap3. They are now auto-cloned, which might surprise any software counting on the prior behavior. I don’t know of any specific packages that are affected by this, though. DragonFly version 5.6 is unaffected by this; it’s in -current only.
pkg and pkg-static
If you upgrade DragonFly and one of the shared libraries used by pkg gets updated, you can’t run pkg until you get files, but pkg is the program you use to bring in new files. This chicken-and-egg problem is solved with pkg-static, a version of pkg built without shared libraries.
You may have noticed some format flip-flopping between pkg and pkg-static if you had to run it after the most recent DragonFly upgrade; that is fixed. There’s a larger issue of certificate installation identified there; I don’t know a solution to it, but I do want to mention this for next time pkg breaks for someone – pkg-static will work as backup, including to bring in a new version of pkg.
DragonFly 5.6.2 released
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
Disk encryption and non-QWERTY keyboard layouts
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.
A new upgrade method
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
DragonFly kcollect(8) improvements
DragonFly has a utility called kcollect(8), for gathering about the last day’s worth of kernel statistics. It recently gained some extra flags and details, and should work well if you want to collect stats in a low-impact way.
Zen 2 and DragonFly
It’s supported, and given how well DragonFly supports SMP and the number of processors Zen 2 supports, it’s a no-brainer if you’re in the market for a new server.
user logging changes for DragonFly
taskset for DragonFly
Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one. It’s apparently similar to usched(8).
HAMMER2 now default
This slipped in just before the 5.6 release, and I thought I had already noted it: DragonFly now defaults to HAMMER2 for disks during install, instead of HAMMER1.
A ps tip
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
Several layers of radeon update
Francois Tigeot has updated the radeon driver in DragonFly to match what’s in Linux kernel 3.19.8. No, wait, I took too long to post this cause there’s been so many things, so now it’s up to 4.4.180.
Am I in jail?
There’s now a read-only sysctl ‘jail.jailed’ that can be checked to see if the current environment is running within a jail; useful for scripts that should not run in that environment, etc. I link to it mostly because it’s an odd sort of meta-signifier of reality, like being awake or in a waking dream, and that entertains me.
A small rconfig update
Aaron LI’s fixed a bug in rconfig tag names. This is minor, but I think rconfig(8) is a very powerful and underappreciated utility, so I point it out whenever possible.
First time dbus reminder
I’ve mentioned dbus and DragonFly a few times; here’s one of those “you will eventually do this” tidbits: if for some reason you are installing it for the first time, remember to start it with the rc script.
st supported in DragonFly
Thanks to Aaron LI, st (“suckless terminal” I assume) is supported in termcap in DragonFly.