A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’ve got a long backlog of things to link to, so here’s the start: ifconfig now has an ‘lscan’ option, to show long SSIDs. “Long” means 14+ characters, in this case.
(Can you use emoji to create a SSID? That breaks character count and it’s just plain hard to read. Hmm.)
You can make them, but you can’t mount them. Tomohiro Kusumi’s note that mkfs_hammer2 works on Linux is of little wide practical use, but it’s a sign of progress to a larger goal.
I should have linked this with yesterday’s post: Sepherosa Ziehau put together some extended benchmarks on his changes between DragonFly 4.8 and 5.0, and their effects on latency using nginx to serve a lot of requests.
An optimization that applies to you only if you are on DragonFly, running nginx, and dealing with many requests: there’s a sysctl that specifically increases available sockets, which will decrease latency; Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message gives stats.
Cobbled together Friday night because my new job oddly has less hours of work but less time to screw around. That’s for the best.
SSH in DragonFly 5, by default, does not make a password authentication request on outgoing ssh sessions. You can manually add the option or change the config. Or use public keys, which is really the best idea if at all possible.
Because of the major version number change, there’s no packages built for DragonFly 4.9. Your options are to either update to 5.1 (which you probably meant to do anyway if you are running current) or manually point to the newest packages. Or just build from dports.
For clarity, this does not affect you at all if you are running 5.0 release. It only affects you if you are running DragonFly-current and have not updated in a while.
DragonFly 5.0.0 has been released. HAMMER2 is available in the installer. Multi-volume/clustering support isn’t in there yet, but support for deduplication/snapshots/booting and so on all are. My post to users@ has upgrade instructions.
Tomohiro Kusumi has made the userspace tools for HAMMER1 compilable on Linux, so you could create a HAMMER1 volume on a Linux system. No, it’s not the ability to read/write HAMMER1 in Linux, unfortunately – just some manipulation of volumes. I don’t know what his future plans are for HAMMER1|2 on Linux, if any.
DragonFly has also gained the vmx(4) virtual network driver. This is in DragonFly-current now and will be in the 5.0 release.
If for some reason smartmontools seems to think your disks aren’t SMART-capable, force smartd to use SCSI ioctls. has a snippet to use in your smartd.conf for just that.
Assembled all on Thursday!
Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented direct input support for polling, which will affect you most directly if you have an 10G ix(4) card. His commit message lists the performance improvements.
I tagged DragonFly 5.0 (commit message list in that link) over the weekend, and there’s a 5.0 release candidate for download. It’s RC2 because the recent Radeon changes had to be taken out.
If you are starting KDE on DragonFly, you’ll want to be sure dbus is started too. Mentioning it juuuuuust in case…
kcollect(8) (see previous mention) now supports saving data to dbm files, thanks to Harald Brinkhof.
I installed a DragonFly snapshot on a Lenovo x220 last night. I went for a EFI install, even though the x220 has a “Legacy” option. When I booted, it looked like this:
It successfully booted, but once it hit the kernel load, it started printing to the top of the screen in that lovely repeating pattern you see.
Matthew Dillon helpfully pointed out that the DRM and i915 modules needed to be loaded. Hitting ‘9’ during the bootloader countdown got me to a prompt where I could type:
drm_load="YES" i915_load="YES"' kern.kms_console=1 menu
Which brought me back to the boot menu, but this time it loaded those additional modules to support the Intel video chipset – and it worked!
These lines can go in /boot/loader.conf for permanent use.
Update: accelerated X will need a different setup – see my later post.
In addition to the already-mentioned ipfw per-CPU state tracking, Sepherosa Ziehau has added per-CPU state tables to ipfw, and his commit documents the improvement in performance/latency. He’s also added ipfw support to sshlockout(8).
HAMMER2 is now available by default in DragonFly, and can be used in the installation process. (It was possible, but manual, before.) The next DragonFly release should be soon.
Already overflowed to next week.