DragonFly – DragonFly BSD Digest

A DPorts explanation

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:11:25 +0000

The DragonFly site has a recently-updated page describing how DPorts is assembled and the process to contribute.

It does need the criterion for when it’s ready to release – either a number of working ports, or certain key ports buildable, or a combination of the two. Something like “Chrome, Apache, nginx, MariaDB, Postgres, and X11 build, and over 75% of packages in general are successful, with less than a 10% decrease in buildable packages from the last dports release”. I just made that up, so it’s not an actual threshold. But it could be?

Some USB updates

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:26:13 +0000

libusb in DragonFly has had a few updates, mostly for compatibility with nut. Nut, incidentally, replaces the APC tools for backup power management I’ve always used.

Oddly, searching for a nut manpage led me to a utility I haven’t seen before – nut(1), for nutritional analysis.

Make sure your Hammer cleanup cleans up

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 04:14:45 +0000

I meant to link this months ago: if you run DragonFly intermittently in a virtual machine, and it’s not left on overnight, it’ll never get around to automatic cleanup of the Hammer volumes. You could then run out of space. The fix is manually running the cleanup process.

vi improvements

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:15:27 +0000

nvi2, which is what you get in DragonFly when you type “vi”, has been updated to version 2.2.2. The nvi2 README gives a little history of how many years this has been around. Close to 50? A family tree would be interesting.

Related: turning on vim mode in Obsidian gets you this entertaining dialog:

Shouldn’t it be “vi mode”? Oh hey, look, an esoteric definition argument, just what you came to the Internet for.

gpt show shows more

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:38:15 +0000

The show option to the gpt(8) command now has nicer output, with a summary line and ‘humanized’ units.

Keyboard recognition

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:31:34 +0000

This is from a while ago, but: your Framework Laptop keyboard should be recognized now on DragonFly.

vkbd(4), cuse(4) added to DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:21:31 +0000

DragonFly now has vkbd(4) (virtual keyboard) and cuse(3) “character device in user space” added in.

Disable console bell globally

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:25:22 +0000

DragonFly now has a sysctl that will disable the console beep everywhere, not just in a particular shell. This is either unimportant to you or a massive relief.

Camera support via uvc in DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:23:36 +0000

Michael Neumann has completed an initial port of uvc, for webcam support, to DragonFly. His commit message lists both how he did it and how to use it.

Do you need crypto/opencrypto?

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:45:41 +0000

Not tokens of agreed value, but specifically, crypto(4) and crypto(9). Michael Neumann doesn’t see a use for them any more, so speak up if you need them.

dm_target_crypt change in DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:22:44 +0000

Are you encrypting your disk in DragonFly? If you are using dm_target_crypt, the ‘ng’ version is now the default. You may want to change your loader.conf.

DragonFly DRM updated

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:48:28 +0000

DRM in DragonFly has been updated to match Linux vers. 4.20.17. See the commit message for the newly-supported video chipsets.

I waited to post this cause there’s a few setup details that may or may not affect you when you try it.

certctl(8) not needed

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:59:07 +0000

I missed this some time ago, but: you may see errors about certctl(8) when upgrading your packages. It’s not necessary, yet.

IPv6 and proxying on DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:45:18 +0000

ifconfig now has ‘proxy’ and ‘-proxy’ options. The ‘proxy’ option is now on by default, so a given IPv6 interface will respond to neighbor solicitations when forwarding is on. Use ‘-proxy’ to turn it off; the previous default.

(This was back in May, and I missed posting it before.)

hda updates in DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 21 May 2025 21:07:01 +0000

If you have an hda(4) sound device – and you probably do – it’s been updated. This is not in the 6.4.2 release.

DragonFly 6.4.2 released

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 10 May 2025 16:10:24 +0000

6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download. Why so soon? A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed. These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.

Webcam driver progress

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 07 May 2025 22:25:30 +0000

Michael Neumann posted a progress report on his webcam work for DragonFly. The short description is: it’s recognizing hardware but not recording yet. You can try it now.

Changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4)

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:32:02 +0000

Michael Neumann proposed a lot of changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4); his initial proposal is I think now complete and committed, other than that tcplay(8) was updated instead of removed. Here’s a sorted list of his commits. These are not in the 6.4.1 release.

DragonFly 6.4.1 released

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:14:25 +0000

6.4.1, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4, is ready to download. The commit log from 6.4.0 to 6.4.1 is available if you want the details.

Timeout(1) updates

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 03:38:15 +0000

Aaron LI has made a whole lot of POSIXy updates to timeout(1), of which I think these two are the most informational, but there’s a bunch more if you look at the month. I’m also linking to it cause I didn’t know timeout(1) existed; never used it.