A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
DragonFly has a utility called kcollect(8), for gathering about the last day’s worth of kernel statistics. It recently gained some extra flags and details, and should work well if you want to collect stats in a low-impact way.
It’s supported, and given how well DragonFly supports SMP and the number of processors Zen 2 supports, it’s a no-brainer if you’re in the market for a new server.
Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one. It’s apparently similar to usched(8).
This slipped in just before the 5.6 release, and I thought I had already noted it: DragonFly now defaults to HAMMER2 for disks during install, instead of HAMMER1.
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
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.