Francois Tigeot has updated the radeon driver in DragonFly to match what’s in Linux kernel 3.19.8. No, wait, I took too long to post this cause there’s been so many things, so now it’s up to 4.4.180.
There’s now a read-only sysctl ‘jail.jailed’ that can be checked to see if the current environment is running within a jail; useful for scripts that should not run in that environment, etc. I link to it mostly because it’s an odd sort of meta-signifier of reality, like being awake or in a waking dream, and that entertains me.
Aaron LI’s fixed a bug in rconfig tag names. This is minor, but I think rconfig(8) is a very powerful and underappreciated utility, so I point it out whenever possible.
I’ve mentioned dbus and DragonFly a few times; here’s one of those “you will eventually do this” tidbits: if for some reason you are installing it for the first time, remember to start it with the rc script.
Thanks to Aaron LI, st (“suckless terminal” I assume) is supported in termcap in DragonFly.
If you are running an em(4) or igb(4) device in DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the drivers. This brings it to Intel driver versions em-7.7.4 and igb-2.5.6.
DragonFly’s tcp keepalive was changed from milliseconds to seconds. This happened in both DragonFly-current and in the 5.6 release, and it changes the networking API, which means a dports rebuild is needed… or a pkg upgrade, for which happily all packages have been rebuilt. So, on your next update of the system, be sure to update packages too.
BSD Now 306 is up, with the normal mix of stories about multiple BSDs… Except two separate ones are about DragonFly, so this week is extra good.
You’re probably used to the ‘make buildworld; make buildkernel; make installkernel; etc etc’ dance on each upgrade at this point. ‘Tse’ has created a script that rolls that all up into a single action.
The module formerly known as ‘radeonkms’ is now just plain ‘radeon’. There have been changes in other commits, but this is the only usage change.
‘evdev‘, a driver for input device events, is now built by default in the DragonFly kernel. Update your custom config to match, if you have one.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s scheduling system His further tests show an improvement in basic forking.
In a larger users@ thread about multiple BSD development systems and how to set them up, I spied this tip on making multiple local virtual machines all reachable via SSH.
There’s several bug fixes that have gone into DragonFly over the past few days, in an attempt to track down an odd bug. They’ve been committed to 5.6, too, so you can pick them up if you update.
I imagine this will turn into a 5.6.2 release, but not until we find the cause of the error mentioned in that link.
You’ll all be happy to know ACPI errors are less noisy now. (And it was updated to 20190509, before the 5.6 release.)
Matthew Dillon’s made a change to the DragonFly kernel that could be disruptive, but will help make sure chromium runs. If you update after this point, make sure to update your dports, too, just to be sure everything is in sync. This applies to 5.6 and 5.7.
Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.
DragonFly now has retpoline turned on (stats included in that link) as a side effect of having gcc-8 as default, and SMAP/SMEP are also supported. I enjoy just saying these words out loud. SMEP SMEP SMEP SMEPSMEPSMEPSMEP.
I’m still backlogged, so here’s a May 14th mitigation in DragonFly for MDS attacks possible with Intel CPUs from 2011 onward. It’s in the current release.