There’s a bug with shared libraries in pkg(), which may bite you when upgrading. It’s present in version 1.10.1 at least, so you may want to wait for this fix to be applied before your next upgrade.
Polling and how to try it
If your DragonFly system’s Intel network device doesn’t seem to pick up on DHCP, try turning on polling. This may already be a nonissue, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it.
Update: fixed.
ADMA2 transfer support in DragonFly
Imre Vadasz added support for ADMA2 transfers in DragonFly. It doesn’t lead to a huge performance boost – yet. It can be turned on and off, but requires Intel chipsets.
Skylake, i915, and power management
Mobile Skylake CPUs appear to have issues with power management and direct video rendering. There’s potential fixes on the horizon, but until then, be aware if you have that specific hardware and software mix.
DRM from Linux to DragonFly to Haiku
Bad network vs. pkg
A tip that might be useful for some readers: Mohammad BadieZadegan posted that he had a poor network connection, and so was having a hard time installing packages. If that bites you too, there are some pkg.conf options – starting with FETCH_TIMEOUT and FETCH_RETRY – that may help.
Macbook Pro video and DragonFly
I noted commits about this before, but here’s the instructions: how to use DragonFly on a Macbook Pro with dual GPUs.
New Radeon updates and what to do with them
There’s an update for Radeon DRM that matches it up (mostly) to what’s in Linux kernel 4.7.10. If it gives you problems, there’s some workarounds. Remember, this is in DragonFly-current, so anyone running 4.8 is unaffected.
Installation video
It’s always nice to see this out of nowhere: How to Install DragonFly BSD 4.6 + Xfce Desktop + Apps on VMware.
Something for Apple dual-GPU users
Francois Tigeot has brought in the ‘apple_gmux’ driver. If you have a Macbook with both Intel and NVIDIA video hardware installed, this driver lets you switch to the Intel hardware, and I assume take advantage of DragonFly’s accelerated i915 driver.
DragonFly and bhyve
If you are using bhyve, and you want DragonFly on there as a ‘guest’ (not sure if that’s the right term), there’s a template available. (via)
Minor module modifications
For those of you who build custom kernels, the if_sl, if_ppp, and if_faith devices are now built as modules, not in the kernel. This means you can remove references to them in your custom kernel config – if you have one.
ASLR, PIE, NX, and other capital letters
As part of a larger conversation about security measures, NX bit capability was added to DragonFly. You can turn it on or off, and it’s off by default so it doesn’t cause any surprises. As the first link in this post points out, your installed third-party software is more of a security issue than processor features, in any case.
machdep.cpu_idle_hlt reminder
In my ongoing quest to actually catch up to all the DragonFly commits recently, here’s a recent update to machdep.cpu_idle_hlt. Set this to affect power usage. I’m linking to this list of the different settings because, like RAID levels, nobody can or should remember every one.
HAMMER version 7
Continuing my catchup on recent commits, there’s now a ‘version 7’ internal to HAMMER 1. It changes the CRC code to a faster version, but since this instruction isn’t used (yet), there’s no real world impact. Remember this for next time you want to run ‘hammer version-upgrade’.
Mount and HAMMER2 labels
If you’re mounting a HAMMER2 filesystem, you can refer to it by label instead of by device.
No, it’s not ready for use yet and I don’t have a date other than “when it’s done”, to preanswer the next questions.
Hammer and PFS notes
randread on DragonFly
Did you know there’s a randread utility on DragonFly that will report on disk performance? Well, you do now. The very terse comment in the source code will tell you how to compile it and the arguments.
DragonFly 4.6.2 released
Yes, I know we just released 4.8. This is a rollup release, capturing everything that was committed to the 4.6 branch after 4.6.1 and before 4.8 came out. If you are going to upgrade, it’s worth it to go to 4.8, but this way there’s a clean final version in the 4.6 branch.
(Hat tip to Sascha Wildner for reminding me to do this.)
New ‘efisetup’ script in DragonFly
I am late in mentioning this, because it was added just before the DragonFly 4.8 branch: there’s a new ‘efisetup(8)‘ script added to DragonFly. Use to to perform a complete a UEFI-bootable installation to a given disk.