A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released. This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2. Matthew Dillon did some informal testing of the VM improvements, and posted results to the users@ list.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading (pay no attention to my 5.4 typo), as do the release notes.
Francois Tigeot updated ttm and radeon DRM in DragonFly to match what’s in I assume the Linux 3.18 kernel. Please try if you have the appropriate hardware. This was at the start of May, so you may have already done so without realizing if you run -current. It’ll be in the 5.6 release, too.
ISO and IMG files of DragonFly 5.6rc1 should start showing up at mirrors over the next few hours. This is the release candidate, not the release, so don’t install unless you want to test.
This will turn into a real 5.6 release probably by weekend if no problems are found. See the tag commit message for a list of the commits since 5.4.
‘daftaupe‘ has updated the installation page for DragonFly to note what different steps you use when doing a manual install over encrypted HAMMER2.
Thanks to a suggestion from Lassi Kortela, man.dragonflybsd.org now exists and takes you directly to the online man page interface, similar to man.(free/net/open)bsd.org.
A question on starting up a virtual kernel on DragonFly and sticking it in the background led to some suggestions – follow the thread.
The next release of DragonFly should be smaller; Sascha Wildner and Rimvydas Jasinskas have removed or substituted enough packages on the installer image to drop the package disk usage 50%.
I am posting this so it can help someone else, someday.
I have a DragonFly-5.4 system. I installed mysql56-server, and started it up. By default, it listens on “*”, which meant it listens on a local socket and IPv6 ::1 – not 127.0.0.1.
2019-06-04 13:35:03 15833 [Note] IPv6 is available.
2019-06-04 13:35:03 15833 [Warning] Failed to reset IPV6_V6ONLY flag (error: 45). The server will listen to IPv6 addresses only.
I put bind_address=127.0.0.1 into my.cnf to get IPv4 loopback to work. Local socket connections still worked either way. I’m not using IPv6 on this machine, so this solution works in this situation. I’m not sure my mysql decides to go only IPv6 based on a strange flag, but mysql is reliably unreliable.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has done the tedious but useful work to update a number of utilities in DragonFly to newer vendor versions: LibreSSL 2.9.1, libarchive 3.3.3, xz 5.2.4, ldns 1.7.0, and OpenSSH 8.0p1.
Remember the commit that autocreates human-readable disk device names under /dev? (Here’s a reminder.) It’s now in 5.4 – technically, since 5.4.2. Anyway, it will automatically identify the root USB disk when you boot from a USB .img file, so you no longer have to guess which /dev/daX file it was – usually da8 but sometimes you got a surprise instead.
That sounds like a good thing, right? No automatic bugs, just manually placed ones. What it really means is that bugs.dragonflybsd.org no longer autocreates users, cause there was a certain amount of spam coming through freely created accounts there. It may be hard to tell the next step.
Sascha Wildner has committed mandoc(1) to DragonFly to use for man, whatis, apropos, and other functions. One less GNU utility, and also means groff can come out of the base system. That is almost the last C++ code in base… I am not sure what remains.
Because of the ongoing pmap work from Matthew Dillon, building vkernels may not work for a short period in DragonFly-master. “A short period” usually means a few days for this sort of thing.
Update: all better now.
Here’s something that might be useful: an example cleaning file for creating an AWS DragonFly image. Here’s the blob if you want to see what’s in it. I assume you will want to install awscli to use.
I’m jumping ahead in my very full queue of DragonFly items to post to something new: Matthew Dillon has committed extensive work to the virtual memory system in DragonFly. He has a message to users@ that sums it up.
If that’s not enough reading for you, I’ll point at commits where he reports speed improvements, changes to systat(1), or just 2-decade-old copyright items.
DragonFly 5.4.3 is out. My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes. This release has a fix for an Intel floating-point bug.
Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process. There’s a brand new complete build of all packages uploaded, too, so plan on a ‘pkg update’.
This may never ever matter if you manage to avoid fdisk your whole life. But if you don’t pull that off, here’s the reminder: label your DragonFly slices with 108.
(Yes, I do in fact have a backlog of two months with DragonFly material. It’s been that constant.)
The callout_* API in DragonFly has been rewritten. This will only affect you if you are doing some very specific programming – but it will be intensely interesting if so. I mentioned it before, but don’t forget debugging.