shutdown(8) and reboot(8) have some changes, which I find entertaining: “harder to kill“.
DragonFly’s sysclock_t is now a 64-bit value. This is a dramatic change, but should be invisible to userland. Meaning, you don’t have to recompile world/update packages/etc. It’s interesting but not eventful.
The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.
HAMMER2 just became a little more DWIM: the pfs-list and pfs-delete directives will now look across all mounted filesystems, not just the current directory’s mount path. pfs-delete won’t delete any filesystem name that appears in more than one place, though.
If you have UEFI hardware, there’s been an update in DragonFly of the TianoCore EDK II headers. If you are like me, you will find the tianocore.org site helps to understand what this is for.
If you’re looking to use jails, there’s been a brief discussion about them on users@, which will be useful if you want to install packages or figure out how the loopback address works.
DragonFly’s patch(1) is now at 2.0-12u11. I mention this not because it’s a dramatic change but because it’s a basic tool. Also, a benefit from our new committer.
Updates to third-party utilities happen often in DragonFly, and I don’t often link because they may not affect users much – but I’m noting a change to xargs(1) cause given what xargs does, any mistake you make will be repeated many times.
Thanks to Daniel Fojt, wpa_supplicant(8) in DragonFly jumped from version 2.1 to 2.9. There’s a nice changelog for the curious.
Thanks to Aaron LI and Daniel Fojt, libpcap and tcpdump in DragonFly have been updated. The vendor does The Right Thing and provides easy-to-find changelogs for both.
Martin Ivanov has completed his multiboot + DragonFly tutorial. You can read his users@ post on it now, though it should show up in dragonflybsd.org documentation soon.
You can now use newsyslog(8) to rotate logs being written by daemon(8), thanks to this commit from Peeter Must.
tcplay(8) in DragonFly jumped from 2.0 to 3.3. This will be most relevant to you if you encrypt your disks. It’s nice to see DragonFly mentioned specifically on the GitHub source site.
This thread on having a tmpfs /var/run led to this commit, making it as easy as setting a rc.conf variable.
The recent 5.8.1 release of DragonFly includes, among other things, a fix for a de-duplication bug in HAMMER2. If you are curious, here’s the commit / details.
DragonFly 5.8.1 is released, a bugfix update for 5.8.0. The release tag commit has the list of changes, or you can go right to the release page. My users@ post has upgrade instructions.