A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.
Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.
The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
If you’ve ever wondered how having multiple swap devices can work, here’s your DragonFly-specific answer.
If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.
(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
If you’re using qemu and DragonFly, the latest update of ACPICA to version 20160422 may fix some issues introduced in a previous update. (I don’t have a specific bug report to point you at; sorry!)
The DragonFly 4.4.3 point release is out. There’s a commit page listing the changes between 4.4.2 and 4.4.3. Nobody will be surprised that there’s an OpenSSL update in there.
If you want a complete image, it’s available for download at your nearest mirror. If you want to upgrade an existing install:
cd /usr; make src-update
(or src-create-shallow if you don't already have source)
make buildworld && make buildkernel
make installkernel && make installworld
make upgrade
reboot
This is one of those weeks where a bunch of release all tumble together by chance.
Tomohiro Kusumi would like to port Hammer (1) to FreeBSD, as noted in this bug discussion. It’s not even begun to happen, but if you can contribute, please do.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been creating a near-constant stream of bugfixes and cleanups to Hammer for quite some time. I don’t often link to it, because they are incremental improvements and hard to linkblog, so to speak. In an effort to make up for this deficit, I do want to draw attention to his two recent commits: “Make hammer commands print root volume path“, and “Print volume list after volume-add|del“. Small changes, but this is what makes complex systems usable.
If you remember this Baytrail problem, Daniel Bilik has gone and found a fix, as this appears to be a cross-platform bug, and he has patches for DragonFly. If it’s affecting you, you don’t have to wait for the patches to be added in; he’s made them available directly.
Update: it’s committed to DragonFly now.
I keep posting about Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on sustaining extremely high traffic loads in DragonFly. Now I’m posting about a tool to create that load: kq_sendrecv. It creates tens of thousands of TCP connections, without creating a process for each, and uses kqueue, as you might guess from the name. This may be useful if you really want to tax another system.
Do you have a Cherry Trail SoC? For example, a HP x2 210? Imre Vadasz’s recent commit may be useful for you, if you are running DragonFly on this detachable … thing?
Tim Darby is looking for motherboard recommendations. Specifically, mini-ITX with 4 SATA ports and at least one decent network link. Who’s got hardware to recommend? There’s already one set of suggestions.
By the time you read this, I will have already been at my second job for 5 hours.
If you have a Radeon video card in your DragonFly system, and are running bleeding-edge, there’s an update for you. This is a partial sync with Radeon code for Linux 3.18, with no additional notes in the commit but you can always check elsewhere.
unzip has been added to DragonFly, making it present in every BSD but I think OpenBSD.
Imre Vadasz has added the ability to create a UEFI bootloader in DragonFly. Can you use it? I don’t know; I haven’t tried it yet and I can’t tell from the commit.