DragonFly 4.2 is officially released! You can go to the 4.2 release page for details, go to the mirrors page to download, or read my users@ post for upgrade steps.
Update: news stories and commentary seen on lobste.rs, Hacker News, and linux.fr.
If you wanted to try IPFW3 and NAT, nans_nans1 has done the experimentation for you, and wrote down the steps.
Sascha Wildner has been removing the no-longer-needed bits of i386 support in DragonFly. One of the things going away is APM, the 32-bit power management superseded by acpiconf. If you still type ‘apm’ out of habit, it’s aliased so you won’t be surprised.
Now that DragonFly can (in most cases) offer video outside of X with KMS, not just text, more console options are possible. By default, your accelerated console will scale to 80×25, but you can now tell it how many columns you want and it’ll automatically scale to fit your resolution. Or you can turn it off.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, powerd will now start the shutdown process if you are down to 2% battery on your DragonFly laptop. It also will delay for 60 seconds if you just booted up and are desperately searching for a power cable.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 4.0.6 ISO and .img files. (Does that capitalization make sense?) They should be available at your nearest mirror, or will be shortly. I am still working on the 4.2 release candidate images.
The more eagle-eyed may have noticed a branching for DragonFly 4.2, and for DragonFly 4.0.6. The 4.2 branch is currently only a release candidate, so don’t necessarily change over yet – it’s for testing, not release. Note that packages for 4.2 are not yet built, so you’ll have to manually specify a package path to install with pkg on 4.2 – for now.. That won’t be the case for the actual release, of course. DragonFly 4.3 users will have to specify PKG_PATH manually to use 4.2 images until new ones are built. 4.2 release candidate users will be fine. (see comments for correction.)
The 4.0.6 release is mostly to get the recent OpenSSL update into a 4.0.x build.
I am working on image building for both.
This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
Matthew Dillon’s already using a 4K monitor on DragonFly, and he’s written notes on the various performance tweaks that went with it.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
Even sysctl accesses can be made to handle multiprocessor environments. This can actually make a difference when you’ve got a lot of processors building a lot of software, as in all of dports.
From IRC today:
“19:43 <@dillon> I’m bored at the moment. lemme try to speed up module builds“
Buildkernel, depending on your processor count, now may have tripled in speed.
Those changes I mentioned yesterday for text console support? They’re in DragonFly-master now, along with a loader tunable to turn it on and off.
If you are using a DragonFly system with accelerated video, and you have noticed that you can’t return to a text console after exiting xorg – Sascha Wildner/Imre Vadasz have a branch for you to try. Please do so if you have time and are on master; this is the last big item to fix before the next release.
You can now get temperature readings from your Radeon card under DragonFly.
If you’re using nginx on DragonFly, version 1.9.1 has specific DragonFly speedup options built in.
A short but more interesting list this week, I think.
- ZFS Mastery is out in print and electronic versions.
- BSD management with Puppet.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/05/25.
- Dell Networking OS 9 powered by NetBSD.
- Lumina Desktop Status Update/FAQ.
- PC-BSD 10.1.2: an Interview with Kris Moore.
- A FreeBSD Foundation visit to the (a?) NYI datacenter.
- “Patrol Read” support in OpenBSD.
- syslog-ng and ELK on OpenBSD.
- Yay for compatibility!
- The Linuxulator on FreeBSD now does 1:1 threads and x86_64.
- See this “Low Cost 10G Router” post on NANOG? Follow the very long thread, and you’ll notice a reoccurring theme: set up a BSD machine.
- Bitrig at NYCBUG on 2015/05/06, video.
Your Not BSD link of the week: Never fix anything.
Hammer 2 now uses LZ4 compression by default. It also uses a new CRC algorithm that performs much better, and there’s numbers to prove it. It helps iSCSI too. When I say new, it appears to be from the 1980s? I may be looking at the wrong place.