I tagged DragonFly 5.6.3, and built images. You should run 5.8, cause it’s the most recent, but this means there’s an image that captures all the last bugfixes in the 5.6 series. You can see them in the tag message if you are curious.
I moved the 4.x ISO/IMG release files for DragonFly out to an existing “older” directory. If you’re looking for a old release image, it’s available via the web.
Note that it’ll be a few hours until this change filters through to the mirrored directories. The 4.x images are all older than 2 years, so this is of most benefit to mirror sites.
If you follow the upgrade instructions in my 5.8 update post, there is one ‘gotcha’. If your copy of /usr/src was downloaded using “make src-create-shallow”, you will not have any git history – or any branches other than 5.6.
The easy, cheesy way to fix it is to remove /usr/src, then type “make src-create” in /usr, and proceed from there. There’s probably a way to edit in the other branches, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m counseling the brute force method for now.
DragonFly 5.8.0 has been released. This version brings dsynth, with matching optimizations to fit dsynth running many parallel builds of ports.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading, as do the release notes.
Note that you will get some noise in dmesg until you remove opie from where it’s mentioned in /etc/pam.d/ files. It’s cosmetic unless you use opie, and you probably don’t. I mention it because I noticed it. Check /usr/src/UPDATING after pulling in the 5.8 source to see details of this and other changes.
Yes, that is ambiguously phrased for fun. Matthew Dillon committed some benchmarks inside rdrand() code to show the actual performance improvements.
This recent commit changes how random number provision is seeded on DragonFly. It sounds interesting, but I don’t know if the performance improvement translates to real-world activity.
tmpfs on DragonFly now clusters writes better, so performance is improved in high-activity environments… which is probably why you are using tmpfs anyway. The post says 2-4x improvement when paging out.
If you post about a problem and later solve it, you will help many people in the future if you summarize the problem and (very important) the fix. In this case, Nelson H. F. Beebe installing DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on his Dell Precision 7920 workstation.
I tagged version 5.8 a few days ago. Release will be soon, but not before this weekend.
I like seeing cross-pollination, as I’ve said before. I really like it turning into informal cross-BSD standards.
Linked cause I always forget the right shell command for UTF-8, to reduce the amount of ???? ??? ??? ??????? ??.
Random number generation on DragonFly now runs per–CPU, and a bit faster. No real user effect, but randomness is one of those endlessly complex topics that are fun to read about.
daemon(8) has been updated, cause there’s ports that expect daemon to have some specific flags – especially -T.
There is a certain correlation between this utility and certain BSD logos.
If you’ve been following HAMMER2 for some time, these questions and answers will not be new to you – but they are useful notes all the same.
Just like it’s always DNS, if you have to ask what your sound device is… it’s probably hda. That’s been the answer I think I’ve seen every time for maybe a decade?
I imagine this may work for any BSD, really. Aaron Li has the instructions, which may be especially useful for non-English readers.