This is a little thing, but so useful: the Wi-Fi indicator light on your iwm(4)-using device will now show its status under DragonFly.
Please welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Rimvydas Jasinskas. He’s already done some adding and removing, and he’s been making a ton of dports changes for some time.
Francois Tigeot has updated DragonFly to match the video support found in the Linux 4.0 kernel. This will benefit you most if you are running Skylake, Cherryview, or Valleyview chipsets. Don’t ask me how to tell; the improvement has been so rapid I’ve lost track of which model codename is which.
There’s some DragonFly links I snuck in here because why not?
- OpenBSD Innovation List. (via)
- How to block traffic based off country – pFSense (via)
- pfSense 2.2.6 is released.
- Orchestrating multiple FreeBSDs?
- Hacking the PS4, part 3: FreeBSD Kernel exploitation. (via)
- PIC32-RetroBSD Open Source Hardware Board running Unix like RetroBSD OS. (via)
- Is there a way to cite the FreeBSD handbook and other documentation in APA format?
- Newbie testing out new OS’s
- OPNsense 15.7.23 Released
- [PSA] 1920×1080 on DragonFlyBSD 4.4 under QEMU/KVM.
- The DragonFly 4.4 release article on linuxfr.org – always in-depth.
- Faces of FreeBSD 2015: Erin Clark.
- n2k15: bluhm@ on MP networking (out from under biglock)
- n2k15: vgross@ on deep surgery in TCP/IP stack code
- n2k15: krw@ on fdisk, installboot, dhclient, GPT fixes
- n2k15: reyk@ on hosting a hackathon, vmd, and the switch
- n2k15: mpi@ on MP networking progress
- n2k15: stsp@ on 11n mode wifi, testing
- OpenBSD’s sndiod: now with privsep
- Problems with Systemd and Why I Like BSD Init. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/12/21.
- AsiaBSDCon 2016 is happening March 10-13, 2016, in Tokyo. The call for papers is out and due by January 8th. Tutorial proposals are due at the end of the month.
A number of people have reported problems with qemu and DragonFly, both running locally and on a host. It turns out to be a problem with the getcontext(), setcontext(), and swapcontext() functions, but Matthew Dillon fixed it in a way that doesn’t affect performance very much.
That apparently wasn’t good enough, so he added _quick versions of those same functions, so it became not just a fix, but an improvement.
In related qemu news: qemu-devel can use vknetd similar to a vkernel, now.
I was going to point at a new igb(4) update for testing, but Sepherosa Ziehau has already merged it. Try it if you have the right Intel networking hardware.
For those of you that are very bandwidth-constrained, or just impatient, there are xz-compressed images of DragonFly 4.4 available. (see ‘download live image’ area) The mirrors should have them too.
The DragonFly installer has been modified to produce disk arrangements that will generally match between UFS and Hammer installs, plus directories where you usually don’t want Hammer history or backups (like /tmp or /usr/obj) are now under /build and null-mounted to where you’d expect, since null-mounting works transparently well on DragonFly. Matthew Dillon has a note explaining the whole thing.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new version of drivers for em/emx(4) and igb(4). The initial versions had trouble, but testing is ongoing. Try it if you have the correct hardware.
Update: never mind.
For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
If you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4), Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to try out his Intel NIC driver update. He’s already updated the ix(4) driver to support more hardware.
As mentioned previously, Sepherosa Ziehau is printing up some DragonFly T-shirts for WeChat users. He’s going to have a few left over, so he is sending them to me to hand to non-China people. If you want one, leave a note saying so in the comments. Here’s the front and back.
You need to provide some way for me to contact you – preferably email, and the size you’d want. (Use the Land’s End Men’s Shirts chart for sizing, because why not.) I’ll only have a few, so no guarantees.
Update: I have more responses than probable shirts at this point – sorry! I’ll get in contact with each of you once the shirts come in and arrange delivery.
Hammer now defaults to ‘noatime’, meaning the date and time of last access are not updated on every file action. Note that creation and modification date and time are still recorded. This will help with speed and disk activity.
This may cause a problem with any software expecting this to change – mutt, possibly? We will find out. This change was done after the 4.4 branch, so it’s not in the current release of DragonFly.
If you are a WeChat user and want a DragonFly BSD shirt, send your Chinese address and mobile number to seallyhs@dragonflybsd.org, or scan this image to join the WeChat DragonFly BSD group.
This is exclusive to China right now, as it’s being done by DragonFly developer Sepherosa Ziehau – who, as you might guess by now, is based in China.
John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
Matthew Dillon has added two Hammer2 directives – ‘info’ and ‘mountall’. See his commit message for a explanation of each. This predates the 4.4 branch, so it’s available in the current release. The usual caveat applies: Hammer2 is for development only; don’t use this to store data you want to use.
I am taking this moment away from my significant backlog of things to post to note that there have been a lot of games fixes in DPorts lately. Thanks to Rimvydas, many small bugs that kept games from compiling on DragonFly are now fixed. The easiest way to see is to look at the commits from December 8th and back, but the best way is to pick one and play.
DragonFly 4.4 is released! The release page has the information, and your nearest mirror should have the images by now. To update an existing 4.2 system, see my users@ post.
Sharp-eyed users will note that release is happening with version 4.4.1, rather than the 4.4.0 you’d expect. That’s because I tagged 4.4.0, built the images, and then OpenSSL 1.0.1q was released. Rather than make everyone who installs DragonFly need to immediately update, Sascha Wildner brought in the OpenSSL update to the 4.4 branch, and I built 4.4.1 instead.
I’m combining two items because news happens faster than I can post: Tomohiro Kusumi has added a ‘dm-flakey’ target to the disk mapper, so you can simulate an unreliable disk, reliably.
Also, the DRM support for radeon chipsets has been updated to match the Linux 3.18 kernel, same as i915. Remember, you can control backlight brightness with it now.