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.
DragonFly now has the same math library (libm) as OpenBSD, replacing an earlier combined version of I think what NetBSD and FreeBSD ran. This doesn’t necessarily directly affect you, but it’s work worth doing; matching the underlying frameworks between BSDs helps everyone.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been doing a lot of work with various processors states to save power on DragonFly. He’s published a summary of how well the various P-state/C-state/mwait settings work. He found that setting a lower C-state can perversely improve performance.
For those saying “but how do I set these lower power states?”:
sysctl machdep.mwait.CX.idle: AUTODEEP
sysctl machdep.cpu_idle_hlt: 1 (or higher)
Do you have a ValleyView GPU? It now works much better in DragonFly, and there’s a new accelerated rendering branch to try out, too, if you follow that link.
Hey, my stickers arrived! You can order your own.
There was a newer release of OpenSSL (1.0.1p) last week, so there’s a new revision of the DragonFly release – 4.2.3. There’s little major change other than the security fix for OpenSSL.
Those readers who can count past 2 may notice that there wasn’t a 4.2.2. We went straight from 4.2.1 to 4.2.3. That’s my fault. I screwed up tagging and Git doesn’t like repeated, deleted tags.
I don’t know enough about Erlang and LFE to say much other than “Hey, look at this article about installing LFE on DragonFly!” (via)
Here’s how you test the console frame buffer on DragonFly, even though X is the way to go.
There’s yet another security problem with OpenSSL, and it’s been updated in DragonFly. I’ll probably roll 4.2.2 this weekend so that it’s in the release image.
Some time ago, I acquired a Chromebook with the help of all you kind readers. Here’s a mini-report on how DragonFly works as a desktop.
The hardware: what I have is an Acer c720 Chromebook. The C720p is the touchscreen model, and is equally well-supported by DragonFly. A larger-capacity M.2 SSD (which is relatively easy to install) is the only real need, as the installed one is only 16G. It’s easy enough to see what the laptops look like; it’s nothing fancy but it’s suitably light.
The software: There’s a wide-ranging and complete install/tweak guide for the c720 and c720p on the DragonFly site. Note that it goes down to the point of even changing the keymap for the special keys on the keyboard.
Things I don’t like:
- The mousepad needs a physical click, not a tap, which decreases accuracy.
- There’s only 2G of RAM, and not expandable. You will notice this if you tend to open a lot of tabs when web browsing.
- I’ve had mousepad trouble, but I’m the only one reporting it, so I think it’s just bad hardware luck on my part.
Things I do like:
- pkg is a godsend, making installation and upgrades almost effortless. I’ve gone binary-only so far.
- Many things Just Work – for example, the xfce4 battery plugin.
- xscreensaver works great; even the 3D modules. I don’t know why it entertains me so.
- I haven’t run the battery out to make sure, but it looks like it would last a few hours. Suspend/hibernate are not supported, but low power modes are.
- There’s a lot of multi-touch shortcuts built into the touchpad.
It’s an excellent BSD laptop, for light use, at low cost. The next step up would be into Thinkpad territory, which raises the cost or increases the age – and may not be as consistently supported.
Something I’ve wanted for a long time: DragonFly stickers. Or ‘decals’, if you want to sound fancier. Markus Pfeiffer has them set up on Stickermule.
I just created an account there, and apparently I can supply a referral link which gets you and me both a $10 credit, if you use that. It’ll make you sign up, then you’ll probably have to go back in with the direct link for the DragonFly sticker.
Insert fireworks graphic here.
- OpenBSD from a veteran Linux user perspective. (via)
- Call for Testing: Valgrind on OpenBSD.
- 10.2-PRE-RELEASE and 11.0-CURRENT Images Available for Testing. (PC-BSD)
- BSDCan 2015 trip reports: Zbigniew Bodek and Vsevolod Stakhov.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/29.
- DistroWatch Weekly talks about running FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 2 computer. (via)
- BSD Magazine: “Web server security”.
- FreeNAS 10: A developer’s perspective.
- NetBSD on NVIDIA Jetson TK1 (Tegra K1)
- New binary releases for NetBSD on Raspberry Pi
- BSD dmesg collection service
- OPNSense 15.7 is released.
- finding bugs in tarsnap
- FreeBSD gets a graphical front-end for pkg-ng. (probably works for DragonFly dpkg too) (via)
- User account administration for Linux/BSD
- moving from Linux to BSD and the Acer C720. I already replied all over that.
There’s a minor update for DragonFly 4.2 – this covers a problem with i915 support, so it’s worth upgrading if you have an Intel video chipset.