Daniel Bilik has found there’s an issue with i915 acceleration, Baytrail CPUs, and some AUTODEEP low-power states. This will only affect you if you are using that specific hardware combo and setting certain low power modes. Interestingly, it affects other platforms, too, as it appears to be a symptom of how the video is addressed, not a DragonFly-specific bug.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
Francois Tigeot has again updated Intel i915 video support in DragonFly, bringing it even with what’s in Linux 4.2. This will be very useful for Broadwell and Skylake users, and even Broxton, apparently the newest Atom platform.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
BSDNow 129 is available. Along with the normal news summary, it has an interview with John Marino, the fellow behind DragonFly’s dports system, and author of recently-noted-here synth, which has reached version 1.0.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.
I have DragonFly shirts, helpfully printed up by Sepherosa Ziehau in China. I have a list of people that are interested in shirts, most of whom remembered to give a shirt size. I don’t have anyone’s email address or mailing address on that list.
If you are on that list, send me your mailing address.
The shirts are marked L/XL/XXL/XXXL, but they run smaller than U.S. versions of those sizes. I usually find a U.S. XL shirt baggy, but “XXXL” is the one that fit me, for instance. I’ll do my best to place the appropriate one. This is just an advance apology, since it’s too late to change anything if it turns out tight.
I’ll mail these out as I have the spare cash and time on hand. (I hope most of you live in the continental U.S.)
If you have a Broadwell system, the drm.i915.enable_execlists tunable added by Imre Vadász may keep your system stable. (thanks, zach on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Rimvydas Jasinskas has consolidated/restored/updated a large number of papers into share/doc on DragonFly. I’m not going to link to his large number of commits, but instead point you at the directory where they all went. There’s a number of design documents in there that date back to 4.4BSD and beyond (and some much newer), which may interest or educate you. Of special note: The Guide to the Dungeons of Doom, for rogue, or the KAME IPv6 implementation notes.
If you’re building from dports, and you want to include debugging information, you’ll want to put ‘WITH_DEBUG=yes’ in /etc/make.conf. Note that this affects anything you build at that point, including world, which you’d want to rebuild anyway.
These probably apply cross-BSD, but in this case, it’s DragonFly tips for printing with CUPS.
If you have a Core2 processor in a DragonFly system, it may not work with accelerated video. If that happens to you with this (admittedly old) processor, switch to VESA for now.
For those of you running DragonFly-current, the already-mentioned library privatization going on means that ports have to be rebuilt. You will want to do it yourself, or wait a little bit before upgrading if you want to install binaries.
BSDNow 126 has an interview with Ken Moore and Kris Moore of PC-BSD, along with the usual news roundup. There’s a DragonFly mention in the “open source work helps your career” news item that I did not know about but am happy to see.
That’s a pretty cryptic headline, isn’t it? John Marino has ‘privatized’ several libraries in DragonFly, so that they can’t get included involuntarily as part of a port build. That may mean you will need to perform a full rebuild of your system if you are tracking DragonFly-current.
(This is the way to fix ‘system’ languages like Perl was in FreeBSD 4.x – keep them clearly separate from the port version. It’s about a decade too late for that idea to work out, though.)
This has no effect on the actual operation of DragonFly, but it makes me feel better that it’s done: Rimvydas Jasinskas has gone through DragonFly source and removed the unnecessary 3rd BSD license clause, which is no longer needed.
For those of you with i915 video on your DragonFly system, there’s another update bringing DragonFly support to match what’s in the Linux 4.1 kernel. ValleyView and Skylake processor owners will benefit, along with a slew of other bugfixes and improvements.