Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.
After some testing of different ways to pre-zero out memory pages, Matthew Dillon came to the conclusion: page zeroing doesn’t matter any more. The idea dates all the way back to CSRG, and he’s removed it from DragonFly.
DragonFly 4.6 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, or update your source files and build – my users@ email describes the steps.
I did all of this in a hour, because I had so many tabs saved from during the week. Don’t get overwhelmed!
- EuroBSDCon 2016 schedule has been released.
- OPNsense 16.7 released.
- 2016Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
- SemiBUG has a Twitter. Here’s their last meeting, and the next is 8/23.
- August 3rd: NYCBUG Installfest. Go just to see what weird hardware shows up.
- Attacks against FreeBSD Update components. (via)
- How do I dual boot FreeBSD 10.3 with Windows 10?
- Steam on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. (via)
- ZFS and RAID.
- OpenBSD 6.0 pre-orders up.
- OpenBSD 6.0 to be released September 1, 2016. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016 talks and tutorials. (via and via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/25.
- Why FreeBSD? by Hamza Sheikh.
- pfSense 2.3.2 is out.
- AWS VPN config supports pfSense 2.2.5+.
- FreeBSD 11 Beta2 is available.
- n2k16 hackathon report: Stefan Sperling on dhclient bugs, iwm(4) issues.
- Will switching to FreeBSD give me an advantage over Linux when it comes to gaming?
- Translation Status for 1.0.0. (Lumina)
- one reason to hate openbsd.
- Status of wireless support for MacBook Pro (late 2011)
- Am I doing it wrong?
- VirtualBox 5.x finally on FreeBSD.
- Some notes on our new generation of ZFS-based file servers.
- A Grand Experiment by Leo Laporte. Shifting to BSD. (via)
- Announcing PacBSD (Formerly named ArchBSD). (via)
- OpenBSD: Release Songs: 6.0: “Another Smash of the Stack”. (via)
Bonus DragonFly items, sent by Rolinh on IRC:
- Migrate UFS drive from FreeNAS to DragonFly BSD
- Ask HN: DragonflyBSD – Do anyone use it in production?
I’m a bit late on this, but: If you are using DragonFly-current, you will need to rebuild world. If you are on 4.4, this won’t matter until you go to 4.6, and you’d be rebuilding world and kernel for that anyway.
(4.6 will probably be tagged this weekend.)
DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 has been tagged. You can pull it directly from the master site in img or iso form (check your local mirror instead if possible), or shift to the new tag.
“Where is RC1?” you may ask? I tagged the first release candidate some days ago, and this bug was immediately found right after. It was easier to go right to RC2 once a fix was found.
This candidate will probably lead directly to a release version, so if you want to run the release version exactly, wait a few days.
Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!
the i915 support in DragonFly now matches the Linux 4.4 kernel, which is good news if you have a Broxton, Skylake, or Cherryview processor, plus it adds a variety of fixes.
If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.
I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)
A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.
karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?
That’s one tip per subject, really. If you need to set up a ‘video’ group for xorg, here’s the one-liner to do so. If PulseAudio annoys you, which is not uncommon, ‘chmod -x /usr/local/bin/pulseaudio’ and it’ll go away.
It’s exactly what the title is: ipfw3 now does NAT in-kernel, without locking. I have no benchmarks to point at, unfortunately. The commit has usage examples.
This is a specialized use case, but Mono 4.x has some issues on DragonFly. Some minor testing has been done, but if you are already using it, please contribute.
Place Independent Executables are now supported on DragonFly, thanks to sumbitter ‘shamaz’.
The system I had for running a go builder died. I am running out of extra hardware. Is there someone who is using Go and DragonFly and is willing to commit to running a semi-dedicated builder?
There’s a new digital library in Kisumu, Kenya – and it’s running DragonFly for file storage.
Hammer2 now has inode indexing, which Matthew Dillon was avoiding while trying to create more efficient hardlink support. The result is now with that problem solved, more updates can come in: NFS support, mtime updates, output changes, code removal, and lots of other changes, not all of which I’m even linking.
If you have a NVMe chipset under DragonFly, you now can use a special utility to retrieve status information: nvmectl. Right now, only ‘info’ is implemented.