Did you use the digi(4), rp(4) and si(4) serial device drivers in DragonFly? I don’t think so, but you definitely can’t now.
Virtual DragonFly: memory balloon
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, ‘ddegroot’ has put together a virtio_balloon driver for handling memory usage. (An explanation of the term) Try it if you can; he wants testers.
Laptop recommendations for DragonFly
In case it’s useful to you, here’s several laptop recommendations for DragonFly.
OverTRIMmed
Matthew Dillon recently fixed a TRIM bug, where a TRIM command was being issued unconditionally, regardless of the mount flag, and duplicating the action if it was set normally. It’s fixed now. This would only have any significant slowdown on UFS, which means it would only affect installworld – the rest of your mounted volumes are HAMMER, right?
virtio_random in DragonFly
Something I didn’t know existed but makes sense now that I do: a virtualized randomness device, added to DragonFly. Entropy is usually provided through hardware, so of course you’d need something for it in a VM.
DragonFly, Cygwin, and PuTTY
To add to my ongoing slow fiddle with DragonFly: I’ve noted how to install in Hyper-V, and how to use Cygwin to connect to run X. Here’s another step: if you are using PuTTY/Pageant, as I am, and want to connect, Cygwin/X needs to be told to listen on TCP. Find your /usr/bin/startxwin file in Cygwin and change serverargs to:
serverargs=”-listen tcp”
And then in PuTTY, under Connection -> Session -> X11, check “Enable X11 forwarding”, set X display location to “:0.0”, and locate your .Xauthority file. It will be in your user’s Cygwin home directory. (tips found here)
plink can be used to create shortcuts – open an xterm directly into your DragonFly VM from your Windows desktop, for instance, with a shortcut that runs ‘plink <sessionname> xterm’.
If you are running a slightly newer version of Windows and aren’t trying to accommodate a ‘legacy’ PuTTY install, using Windows Subsystem for Linux may work better; I have not yet tried.
DragonFly on Hyper-V, locally
For the future edification of others: I mentioned I installed DragonFly under Hyper-V on a Windows 10 laptop. I wanted to be able to open a terminal on DragonFly while in my Windows environment. I have that now; here’s what I did:
- Installed DragonFly in Hyper-V (see my prior install notes)
- Installed xorg on DragonFly. (pkg install xorg)
- Installed Cygwin/X on Windows 10 – specifically, the xauth, xorg, xterm, xclock, cygutils-x11, and openssh packages.
- In DragonFly, set these items in /etc/ssh/sshd_config :
- X11Forwarding Yes
- X11DisplayOffset 0
- XAuthLocation /usr/local/bin/xauth
- Run XWin Server on Windows 10.
- Run CygWin64 Terminal on Windows 10
- export DISPLAY=:0.0
- ssh -Y (address of DragonFly host)
- Once logged in, type ‘xterm’.
At this point, a terminal window should pop up on your Windows machine, showing your DragonFly username@hostname as the prompt. You are set!
Next steps – getting this working with PuTTY, Pageant, and Plink.
Dumpoffon
If your kernel panics, the current state of memory can show why. That memory dump needs to be saved somewhere. ‘dumpon’ is the command to specify the device that will keep it. If you want to turn it off, you end up using the odd syntax ‘dumpon off’. Thanks to Aaron Li, there’s now a linguistically-sane command: ‘dumpoff’.
New limits for unix socket sysctls
As a fix for wpa_supplicant, the upper limit on socket datagrams has been increased. What else does this affect? We’ll find out the hard way, which is why I mention it here.
Hyper-V and DragonFly
I tried Hyper-V, and of course, I had to install a virtual DragonFly system. Sascha Wildner very helpfully pointed out that DragonFly on Hyper-V requires a legacy network adapter and a gen-1 image type; both changes you can make during initial setup. I’m noting it here for the benefit of future people walking down the same path.
Note: pick ‘legacy BIOS’ during the actual DragonFly install, too.
Chromium on BSD
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
Ryzen buying advice
For anyone considering the purchase of a Ryzen system given the good benchmarks/power usage, here’s some discussion on users@ about which model is which.
autorehash now set for root
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
Contributing to Ravenports
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
Mirror updates for DragonFly
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
Notes on overclocking Threadripper on DragonFly
I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
Default compiler changed to gcc-8
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
One more Threadripper feature
It turns out Threadripper (well, a Ryzen CPU) delivers good performance at relatively low power usage. As I sit in a room made too warm by a single desktop machine running, this lower wattage sounds pretty good to me.
Updates to tuning(7) in DragonFly
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
NUMA work, which means Threadripper
Following up on the DragonFly/Threadripper benchmarks, DragonFly now has some NUMA work to accommodate the non-uniform CPU and RAM layout on those boards.