DragonFly – Page 18 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/03/032020/03/05

DragonFly 5.8 released!

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.

2020/02/28

More optimizations for package building

One side effect of repeated package builds is that you start looking at ways to optimize for intense, repeated, parallel software compilation.

2020/02/26

Massive random improvement

Yes, that is ambiguously phrased for fun. Matthew Dillon committed some benchmarks inside rdrand() code to show the actual performance improvements.

2020/02/24

Excessive rdrand harvesting on DragonFly

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.

2020/02/21

tmpfs paging speedups

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.

2020/02/212020/02/20

Writeups of problem solutions are the best

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.

2020/02/19

DragonFly 5.8 tagged

I tagged version 5.8 a few days ago. Release will be soon, but not before this weekend.

2020/02/142020/02/13

Cross-cross pollination

I like seeing cross-pollination, as I’ve said before. I really like it turning into informal cross-BSD standards.

2020/02/10

Setting UTF-8 in the shell

Linked cause I always forget the right shell command for UTF-8, to reduce the amount of ???? ??? ??? ??????? ??.

2020/02/07

DragonFly on other platforms

Rimvydas Jasinskas has been making DragonFly world buildable on other system. I don’t know what for, but it’s interesting. There are many more commits than the ones I linked.

2020/02/04

RNG rejiggering

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.

2020/02/032020/01/30

CVE-2020-7450 fixed

libfetch has a vulnerability, now fixed on DragonFly in current and release, plus it also affects FreeBSD.

2020/01/312020/01/29

A new daemon(8)

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.

2020/01/292020/01/28

HAMMER2 and how to use

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.

2020/01/28

It’s always snd_hda

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?

2020/01/22

Font installation in DragonFly

I imagine this may work for any BSD, really. Aaron Li has the instructions, which may be especially useful for non-English readers.

2020/01/172020/01/16

Easy bsdstats fix

If you installed BSDStats but it didn’t work, here’s why – with a fix.

2020/01/15

dragonflybsd.org line height

I for some reason set line height properties in the style sheet for dragonflybsd.org years ago, and it made scroll bars appear around all <pre> text. It’s taken me years, but I finally removed it. Anyone notice other effects than the lack of those odd scrollbars?

2020/01/14

Learning 2 things

Sometimes you get 2 nice tips: I like seeing this NetBSD->FreeBSD->DragonFly cross pollination in this commit, and also now I know I can fsck a FAT volume on BSD.

3rd bonus: that last sentence sounds terribly rude.

2020/01/08

cpdup and microseconds

cpdup(1), a DragonFly copying tool that really should be more used, now uses microseconds for comparison. This is probably related to the sysctl vfs.timestamp_precision also now using microseconds.

This probably won’t affect your usage of cpdup unless you are copying some very actively modified files, but I like to mention it in case someone feels like porting it to OpenBSD/NetBSD – it’s already in FreeBSD, though I assume it’s a slightly older version.