If you are running DragonFly 4.5 (i.e. bleeding edge), Sepherosa Ziehau made an ifnet change that will require a full buildkernel/world if you want things like netstat to keep working.
This is limited to some users of specific Intel video chipsets, but: if you get odd screen artifacts in X, the ‘vesa’ driver may work just fine for you. Or turn acceleration off. Or set ‘drm.i915.enable_execlists=0’ according to zrj on #dragonflybsd.
(Updated to reflect all the answers in the thread and elsewhere.)
If you didn’t already know about it, you will find this useful: DragonFly has a tuning(7) man page, about getting the best performance from your system. Matthew Dillon recently updated the man page with some tips about SSD setup.
Tomohiro Kasumi wrote a lengthy explanation of what “@@” means, in the context of the Hammer file system. It acts as a sort of signifier for each actual Hammer pseudo-file-system, since it’s possible to null-mount these anywhere in DragonFly, under all sorts of names. Don’t trust my summary, though – read his.
Sepherosa Ziehau needs to run DragonFly under Hyper-V at work, so he’s making improvements .
There are USB devices out there that are sort of like a mouse, as in they work as a pointing device, but they don’t show up as a mouse device. For example, the PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller. It’s possible to pipe the events from this or similar ‘weird’ devices to sysmouse, and use it the way you’d expect, with this fix from user tautology.
As part of his NVMe work, Matthew Dillon found I/O speed so fast that CRC checking actually got in the way of disk activity. He’s brought in a new CRC algorithm called xxHash. He also brought in Mark Adler’s hardware iscsi_crc32 implementation, but did not add it to Hammer2. There’s some work on read-ahead operations too, to deal with the NVMe throughput.
Remember how DragonFly now has autofs? That obsoletes amd, amq, and so on, in the am-utils suite. Now, am-utils has been removed. This may affect nobody, as am-utils wasn’t working well.
Did you know there’s a rescue image, created with crunchgen, in DragonFly? If your system can boot to single-user mode, you can use it to at least manipulate data on disk – it includes mined as a simple small editor. (Since vi assumes /usr is mountable.) This rescue image now includes undo, so you can back out changes on a Hammer volume.
Matthew Dillon has been testing on more NVMe hardware, or at least what is supposed to be NVMe hardware, and he has a writeup of the results that may be useful for anyone planning a shopping trip soon.
Remember Sepherosa Ziehau’s nginx tests on DragonFly? He’s using the same configuration to test performance of the accept(2) and close(2) calls. The result? Over 8000 concurrent connections, for 580,000 connections per second. That’s on one DragonFly machine.
Matthew Dillon has written a new, from scratch, driver for NMVe in DragonFly. If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s SSD access over PCIe, which gives better throughput than ATA. He’s posted a summary of his work, and it’s possible to load it now as a module. It supports MSI-X, and there’s test results from using dd on supported NVMe hardware.
Tomohiro Kusumi has finished his port of autofs to DragonFly; you can now have a filesystem automatically mount when accessed, rather than requiring it at boot.
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, there’s been some improvements to virtio(4). Update and try if you’ve had problems in the past.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been working on network performance, including making more network calls asynchronous. His test case using nginx shows that a single DragonFly machine can now take enough traffic to max out 2 10Gb links. That’s with 16Kb requests, and 30,000 of them at the same time.
If you have a ral(4) wireless card that didn’t function as expected, it may suddenly work for you now on DragonFly 4.5 due to the large wifi update. The ral(4) driver covers a lot of hardware, so check the man page for all the commercial names.
Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd have updated the wifi setup in DragonFly, incorporating Adrian’s FreeBSD changes (and merging back some of Matt’s from DragonFly). This affects the ath, rum, iwm, iwn, run, bwn, urtwn, wi, ral, iwi, ndis, and wpi drivers. The ‘an’ driver has been removed, too. I’m not going to even try to link to all the commits.
If you’re on DragonFly master and are using one of these devices, now is the time to update and try. Note that this removes the separate network interface that’s specific to the device and creates only a wlanX device.
Update: Matt reminded me that at least half the work came from Imre Vadasz; I missed it because I was only looking at the commit email names – mea culpa.