It’s always helpful to see other people’s questions and answers; in this case it’s a conversation about HAMMER2 snapshots and how to manage them. (Follow the thread)
DragonFly on a terminal, for fun.
I managed to find an ancient Wyse-185 terminal at my workplace today, left in the corner of the server room. For entertainment purposes only, I booted DragonFly in VirtualBox and attached the physical terminal to the physical serial port on my Windows laptop docking station, mapped through to that virtual machine.
I have already discovered that the character output will often pause until the keyboard is used, which may be a settings issue. Mash the keyboard enough and VirtualBox dies. I’d use different emulation but Hyper-V doesn’t support serial and Qemu I haven’t figured out.
It’s entertaining, though I am not sure what I will do, other than maybe run GRDC once I figure out the reason for output pausing.
HAMMER2 fix in release
The aforementioned HAMMER2 fix is now in 5.4. You can update using the normal make buildworld/make buildkernel process to get it in place. I plan to roll a 5.4.2 release this weekend.
Shutting up ACPI
If you want to hear nothing at all from ACPI, no matter what, set debug.acpi.silence_all to 1. In related news, DragonFly has just updated to Intel’s ACPICA version 20190329.
HAMMER2 corruption bug and fix
It’s possible to have data corrupted on a HAMMER2 volume during a specific combination of a bulkfree operation and a lot of writing to disk. Matthew Dillon has a potential fix already. As he announced, it’s scheduled to go into 5.4 this weekend. It’s a rare bug, but if you want to check for it, look for CHECK FAIL entries in /var/log/messages.
And because every cloud has a silver lining: some not-yet-quantified performance improvements.
Need a new top
top(1) is no longer in DragonFly contrib/ directory, for a number of reasons. It’s still present in the system, of course, and I think needs to have someone re-add as a vendor branch – a relatively easy project for a volunteer, hint hint.
Callout debugging in DragonFly
There’s some code changes for callout, where the actual lines of code that trigger it are stored in the callout structure. It’s a little thing, but it’s a big thing if you need it.
In Other BSDs for 2019/04/06
Lots of BUG news this week; thank you all for the leads on groups to watch.
- Talking Jails at Semibug, 9 April 2019. Note the meeting has been moved up a week.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” and a new novella.
- April 9th Meetup. ChiBUG.
- Rusted ravens: Ravenports march 2019 status update. There’s some DragonFly stuff in there I haven’t had a chance to link to.
- How to use NetBSD on a Raspberry Pi. (via)
- Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-compatibles. Almost UNIX, almost BSD. (via)
- Before Unix: An Early History of Timesharing Systems. Influences on BSD.(via)
- OpenRA imported – game engine recreation for RTS games of the Command & Conquer family. (via)
- Project Trident 18.12-U8 Available. (via)
- Removing PF. (via)
- Silent Fanless FreeBSD Server – Redundant Backup. (via)
- LLDB/LLVM report for March 2019. NetBSD.
- Continuation of signal semantics improvements. NetBSD.
- iked curve25519 group number change. OpenBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/04/01.
- Sega Dreamcast Running NetBSD. (via)
- UNIX and BSD Discord/Matrix Servers.
- BSD Router Project 1.92 is now available. (via)
‘gpt show’ improvements
The show subcommand for gpt(8) has had some improvements including a way to connect it to the device UUID; I link to it cause depending on the age of your machine, you may have never even needed to use gpt yet.
ixgbe(4) updates
If you are so lucky as to have an ixgbe(4) card, the version 3.3.6 driver (from Intel) are in DragonFly.
Note that I’ve managed to catch up to March commits! There’s been a lot.
No more gcc50
GCC 5.0 is no longer needed in DragonFly, so it’s not being built, and can be removed on your next ‘make upgrade’. As a bonus, buildworld is a little faster.
Where’d I boot from?
On DragonFly, booting from a USB stick means your boot volume is usually /dev/da8. That’s a rather arbitrary distinction. As a bonus from the recent part-by-label device change, you can now find the boot disk in /dev/part-by-label/, named by the booted kernel rather than a device number. The commit message has a slightly better explanation.
DragonFly Aarch64 bounty
There’s a bounty entry for Aarch64 support for DragonFly, on the bounties page. This is a difficult goal, but I think worth it. Add to it if you agree.
Disk labels now have labeled parts
That somewhat symmetric title is to note a new device feature on DragonFly: if you use disklabel to label a disk, its parts will automatically appear under /dev. So, if you label a disk MYVOLUME, and it has 3 parts, a, b, and d, you will automatically gain a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.a, /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.b, and a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.d.
Stop ifconfig module loading
Thanks to Aaron LI, you can now (actually, since December) run ifconfig without involuntarily loading associated kernel modules, with the -n option. See his commit message for an example.
Serial detection in the installer
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
Dports update for DragonFly-current
The binary package repository for DragonFly-current has been updated with the latest build of all packages, thanks to tuxillo and others on EFNet #dragonflybsd doing a lot of work.
Tuxillo noted: there’s new rust, thunderbird, firefox, nginx, several llvm versions, and a new chrome (version 72). freerdp is temporarily broken; use remmina with the rdp plugin instead. openvpn isn’t upgraded yet cause the build was with libressl, which is a broken combination – it’ll all be built with openssl in a future run.
vm_page_list_find2() fixes
A little thing: Matthew Dillon has made changes to vm_page_list_find2() which should improve performance in low-memory situations, though how much I don’t know. Mentioning it, cause every little bit helps – for knowledge and speed.
New dports build for 5.4 in place
As mentioned last week, there’s a new build of dports for 5.4, now available. No surprise, but a reminder to keep third-party software up to date is never wasted.
Temporary smartctl breadkage in DragonFly master
Because someone decided years and years ago that the CAM structures should be passed through to userland, smartctl, camcontrol, cdrecord, and some other tools will be broken in DragonFly-master for a few days. If you are on -stable (5.4) this won’t affect you.