A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Francois Tigeot has made a number of updates to the ttm and radeon code, bringing it line with the Linux 4.9 kernel version. If you have a radeon(4)-using video card, you may find this useful.
Also, evergreeen and radeonsi chipset users have acceleration disabled. You may not notice depending on your workload.
There’s been a fresh binary build of dports – and then some more updates to cover a variety of security issues in some of those ports. Now is a good time for a ‘pkg upgrade’.
It hasn’t been updated or used for some time, but libc_r was 20+ years old. Now it’s gone. You know someone younger than this code, or maybe even younger than the last time I talked about it.
If you are like me, you’ve typed “make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel …” about a zillion times. Now, you can encapsulate that process in a shorter statement: ‘make build-all install-all‘. The real benefit is these new steps also run in parallel to match the number of CPUs present, and logs to file instead of the console, automatically.
Some of the larger application sets on DragonFly have had trouble building, and inconsistent problems with that build. i.e. rust would fail, but in different parts of the build process, every time. It looks to be a problem with signal interaction, and there’s now much safer ways to do that on DragonFly.
That is going to require a full buildworld/buildkernel if you are on DragonFly-master, 5.7. Release/5.6 users are unaffected.
I link because they are good: 10% speedup. Or, because they made me laugh: “Basically, don’t use this.”
Remember how I said dsynth defaults to txz (tarred, XZipped) ? I was apparently wrong and it was using tgz (tarred, gnuzipped). Now it really truly defaults to txz, for space.
There’s a vulnerability in file(1), CVE-2019-18218. It’s fixed in current and release versions of DragonFly. Update when you get a chance.
As an example of how old design decisions have lasting effects, the POSIX standard still calls for terminal output to accommodate mechanical delay, as noted in this DragonFly commit – i.e. if output was still a line printer instead of a glass TTY, or, as it is 99.9% of the time today, xterm or puTTY or etc. etc.
I thought this would happen: the nrelease(7) process can use binary packages to build DragonFly. (For the dports packages, not the base system.) This is very interesting to me, but also useful for anyone who wants to build a custom DragonFly; something I think more people could do.
After 56k, I stopped paying attention, but apparently there’s stated baud rates of 460,800 and 921,600. And your DragonFly terminal can handle them, too.
This may be of most interest to me, since I’m usually the one building DragonFly releases. nrelease(7), which is used to build each release of DragonFly, now sticks to the default kernel config, and may use binary packages in the future. There’s some other changes but these are the ones I can describe most exactly; there might be more on the way.
Do you have a Coffee Lake Intel CPU? Cause corepower(4) in DragonFly now supports it.
If you were used to kldloading i915kms(4) and radeonkms(4)… they are now named i915 and radeon, respectively.
Pluggable Authentication Modules on DragonFly have gone through some changes. pam_ssh has been removed, along with pam_tacplus, and pam_radius, in favor of the more frequently updated versions in dports. ppp(8) still supports radius, though.
As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!
There’s now (well, for DragonFly 5.7 users) an /etc/os-release file to show the installed DragonFly version. This is similar to the de facto Linux standard, which of course evolved separately from the not-consistently implemented general standard. Evolved cross-platform standards are fine with me.
If you have a whole lot of I/O on a HAMMER2 system, this change will help. This is I assume an outgrowth of dsynth testing, cause that causes many, many threads to be reading and writing.