Francois Tigeot has pushed in some significant updates from Rimvydas Jasinskas, updating the radeon driver to match Linux 3.17. Try it if you have the corresponding hardware.
Matthew Dillon posted an extended description of how to run Firefox in a way that completely locks it away from your user account. As a side effect of this, the current crop of dports binaries has been updated.
Did you know that AT&T maintains a regex library and test suite? I did not, but now DragonFly has both, in part for better multibyte character support.
(corrected to note that the regex library is not from AT&T – thanks, anonymous commenter)
Most of the news is about Intel video support, but Radeon direct rending improvements are coming too. ‘zrj’ have brought up drm/radeon support to match what is in Linux 3.12. Worth trying if you’ve had problems with your Radeon and audio, going by what I’ve seen people report in IRC.
The vi in any BSD is not the original Berkeley vi – instead it’s usually nvi. However, thanks to John Marino, DragonFly has the up-to-date, multibyte-supporting nvi2. (I know I’ve made reference to the nv/nvi difference before.)
If your DragonFly-running c720p (the touchscreen model) occasionally decides to go perma-bonkers, Matthew Dillon has added a method to reset it, either on reboot or by setting debug.atmel_mxt_reset=1.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted some information on a project for anyone interested: ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control. It’s an extension of p-state power management, and he’s already done a lot of groundwork to support that in DragonFly.
There’s been a bugfix-release to the release version of DragonFly, bringing it to 4.2.4. This is to fix a rare crash on issuing ‘shutdown -h now’. If you haven’t had this problem, there’s no rush to upgrade.
Francois Tigeot has updated i915 support to match what’s functionally in Linux 3.16. Accelerated video on Broadwell chipsets is now fully supported, plus a bunch of other changes mentioned in his commit message.
If you are running DragonFly-master, there have been fixes for a wrong uname (my fault) and initrd image booting with encrypted drives. Update if you are running on the bleeding edge, if you haven’t already.
If you are sure you don’t need to look at your boot menu for very long in DragonFly, you can make it zip by quickly.
It’s an unexpectedly diverse list this week.
- The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t. The best explanation for the much-linked OpenSSH story last week: PAM is the problem.
- pfSense 2.2.4 is released.
- OPNsense 15.7.4 Released.
- A week of pkgsrc #11.
- The 2015Q2 FreeBSD status report is out.
- FreeBSD 10.2-RC1 Now Available.
- Introducing BSDHistory, and how it is set up.
- BSD Graphics.
- What BSD do you use, and for how long have you been using it and how?
- NetBSD on the Nvidia Jetson TK1 (via)
- A new fancy FreeBSD boot screen.
- Switching a static blog to OpenBSD’s new httpd server. (via)
- Three new c2k15 reports on Undeadly: one, two, three.
- HardenedBSD Completes Strong ASLR Implementation.
- FreeBSD on the c720. (via)
- Yay cross–pollination.
- Fixing the GPT booting bug with FreeBSD and some Thinkpads. Also, asking Lenovo for a BIOS fix. (thanks, Warren Block)
- pkgsrc-2015Q2 binary packages for illumos now available.
- Anyone here use DragonFly? Not an ‘other’ BSD, but this was a good place to put the link.
If your DragonFly machine can do it, it will now run an accelerated console by default.
A DragonFly machine with a lot of network traffic will have a significant amount of memory consumed by all the running network connections. (as with any system) It’s now possible to adjust the amount of memory set aside for those operations, live. This sort of fine-tuning will only matter if you run an extremely busy machine, but it’s worth it if you do.
Francois Tigeot has a new i915 video branch for testing, if you are running DragonFly-current. It will be especially useful for people on a Broadwell chipset.
I’m globbing these DragonFly updates together in a single post because I’m running behind:
ACPICA was updated to Intel’s newest version: 20150717.
GCC in DragonFly was updated to the 5.2 release.
DragonFly DRM (that’s Direct Rendering) now supports ValleyView chipsets.
hostapd, for creating a wireless access point, has been included in DragonFly along with wpa_supplicant, for a long time. Like wpa_supplicant, there’s a version in dports that is the latest version and is easier to update (e.g. no system update required to get a newer version.) Unlike wpa_supplicant, there’s no chicken-and-egg installation problem if it’s not in the base system – so out it goes.
If you’ve previously tried to install DragonFly using a USB thumb drive, and it would somehow not be found to boot from, there’s a potential fix.
DragonFly ships with wpa_supplicant, for setting up WiFi. However, there’s no guarantee it’s the latest version. A solution exists: security/wpa_supplicant in dports. However, this has a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need wpa_supplicant to get online and download the dports version of wpa_supplicant. So, DragonFly still includes wpa_supplicant in the base system, but you should upgrade to the dports version when possible.