You can now use compilers.conf(5) to switch to clang10/llvm10 for building Dragonfly. Untested yet!
kernel vs. userland check
This seems so minor, but such a good idea: a regular check to make sure kernel and userland are in sync.
libedit update in DragonFly
Daniel Fojt’s updated libedit in DragonFly; not huge, but I mention it cause I’ve seen the very first bug fixed in the commit listing; garbled history.
Existential structural tracking in DragonFly
Matthew Dillon added “existence locks” to DragonFly, which as usual he committed with a long, descriptive message.
A little more in uname
There’s now -K (kernel) and -U (user env) options to uname. Minor, but good to know the change.
sh as cross-pollination tool
I always thought of cross-pollination – sharing of code between BSDs – as a good thing. This seems like the most basic way to do that: same base sh.
How to lose all your packages
If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.
New dports binaries available
A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade. Update to 5.8.3 if you haven’t yet, while you are at it.
DHCPCD update
Roy Marples helped out with the news drought (for me) by committing dhcpcd 9.3.0 to DragonFly. There’s a few user-affecting changes in there.
DragonFly 5.8.2 released
I tagged and built 5.8.2 today, and it should be appearing on a mirror near you, momentarily. The tag commit has a list of the changes, and of course there’s a users@ post to match. It’s a bugfix release, so no major changes – but there’s plenty of little updates.
DragonFly + iwm
If you buy a Lenovo Yoga 500, or any laptop with an iwm(4) chipset, here’s how to get it going with DragonFly.
Finding where a file came from
Here’s a recommendation (and a usage lesson) on pkg-provides, a tool for matching a file to the installed pkg that brought it. It goes with the pkglocate article some weeks ago; it seems like this should be standard functionality. Thanks to Nelson H. F. Beebe.
Update catchup
Recently updated in DragonFly: dhcpcd to 9.2.0, nvi2 2.1.3 to 2.2, tpm, libressl 3.1.3 to 3.1.4, TianoCore EDK II, and of course the pciconf database.
Hopefully you don’t care about ftpd
There’s a security update for ftpd(8) in DragonFly, both current and release. As the note about it says, you shouldn’t use it anyway.
Screen switching, briefly
Screen switching, where an xterm’s contents return to what it was before starting a full screen program, was turned on and then back off for DragonFly. It would have only affected DragonFly-current users, and even then only for a short window of time. If you encounter it anywhere else, though, here’s how to turn it off using Xresources.
DragonFly has a firstboot
You can now add something to run on first boot after install, only, on DragonFly. This is probably of most use to you if you are building a custom image.
Projects for the pulling
If you want to bring in the DragonFly projects repo, the option has been added to /usr/Makefile. (cd /usr; make projects-create)
A new calendar for DragonFly
Aaron LI has rewritten calendar(1) to support Chinese (lunisolar) and Julian calendars, and along the way added support for other calendars, more options, and generally improved the program. His original source archive is available, as is his reference book.
HAMMER2 and growth
HAMMER2 now has a ‘growfs’ directive, so if there’s room in the partition, you can expand your HAMMER2 volume to fit. Related: gpt(8) and disklabel(8) now have similar options. fdisk(8) does also.
IOAPIC and Google Cloud
Apparently DragonFly used to disable IOAPIC when booting in a virtual machine. This helped with some old virtual machines, but broke newer ones. It’s now enabled, which helps boot DragonFly on Google Cloud.