DragonFly 5.0.2 is released. As you may guess from the version number, this is a bugfix release. The release tag has the full details. Update through the normal process of a buildworld/buildkernel, at your leisure.
This is not as catastrophic as it may seem. I did not know this, but there’s a utility called dm(8), for Dungeon Master, used to control game access on a BSD system. It’s now gone on DragonFly, since its controls aren’t needed, and its setuid ability definitely isn’t needed.
Thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas, it’s possible to ‘make NOSHARED=yes buildworld‘ and build a complete DragonFly world without shared libraries.
If you’re booting DragonFly in UEFI mode, and you have unsupported video (i.e. NVIDIA), there’s the scfb driver for xorg. It doesn’t support NVIDIA chipsets either, but it gives more options than the generic vesa driver. It appears to be present in all the BSDs to some extent.
For your ease of use: a Vagrant box with shared folders enabled. (via)
If you are like me and have a long weekend, dig into /usr/share/examples. Not all of it is necessarily up to date, but there’s examples there on running rconfig, diskless, different pf and ipfw examples, and so on. Actual documentation is in corresponding man pages – and there’s examples on how to write them, too.
I just wasted an hour trying to figure out why xorg had strange output but no errors on this laptop, and it’s because I had i915_load=”YES” in /boot/loader.conf instead of i915_load=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf. I’m almost nearly sure I’ve mentioned that before, but if not: here you go.
(though if you never plan to run X, you can put it in loader.conf and everything will just work.)
(Title updated for a more correct sentence)
The Areca driver, arcmsr(4), has been updated to version 1.40.00.00. This comes right from the company, too, which is very nice of them.
There’s several ‘lockmgr’ test programs in DragonFly that can be used to test locking performance. Matthew Dillon used them recently to test some locking optimizations.
Welcome new DragonFly committer, Peeter Must!
Do you have a terabyte or more of RAM? You can boot DragonFly. In theory over 32 terabytes will require changes – but oh, to have such problems…
Noted from this commit: if you are routing over IPv6 directly to another address, the sysctl net.inet6.icmp6.nd6_onlink_ns_rfc4861 must be set to 1.
rdist has been removed. Does anyone mind? I don’t think so.
sys_pipe has been modified to avoid contention on DragonFly, which means better performance as tasks get handed between processors. See the commit message for details.
Matthew Dillon has added KVABIO, an API for avoiding the need to sync the TLB across all CPUs before continuing. What’s this mean? The more CPUs you are dealing with, the longer it takes to make sure all of them have the same cached view of the virtual memory. There’s a tradeoff – caching that view speeds up memory access, but the time cost of the synchronization can erase those benefits.
This API is now supported for NVMe and swap, HAMMER2, and tmpfs. Note that those last two links show a huge drop in IPI messaging. In the real world, this showed about a 5% improvement in performance for CPU-intensive work like complete synth builds. (Based on IRC conversations.)
The ppp kernel module has been removed. It’s still possible to run ppp(8) in userland, with tun(4), so it’s only a change in strategy, not result.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an update for the Realtek re(4) network driver. Try it if you have the hardware, whether older or newer.
This is a bugfix release, adding HAMMER2 support in initrd, among other cleanup commits. The tag message lists the changes. There’s no huge changes, but it’s only a bugfix release.
A writeup that may help someone in the future: if you decide you want to encrypt your /home directory, on DragonFly, this is how you do it.