There’s a new ‘ifconsole’ option for /etc/ttys on DragonFly that may help you if your serial output device is a bit strange.
Matthew Dillon has been doing a lot of Hammer 2 work lately. Well, he’s been doing it for quite some time, but the recent commits contain the sort of things that are easier to link to, like deletion speedups, freemap changes, and stats tracking/compression results.
If you were running a version of DragonFly 4.1 (i.e. the master version, not release) built between the 20th and 25th, rebuild. There’s a UFS bug introduced in that short timeframe.
If you are running 4.0.x release or built your version of DragonFly-master outside of that date range – you are unaffected.
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon means users of Intel Haswell or later CPUs will see reduced power usage, if I’m reading this commit correctly.
Hammer will perform daily housekeeping tasks each night. If you’re up late enough, it may kick off while you are working. If you want to stop the process after it’s already started (since it’s disk-intensive), John Marino has added the ‘abort-cleanup‘ command.
Experimental automatic crypting of swap is now available in DragonFly-master. Recently added, though it may have been possible another way.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where the DragonFly website is hosted, is temporarily down while a disk is replaced. Images and binary packages are still available.
This may not be a huge surprise, but the Minnowboard MAX can run DragonFly just fine, modulo some dmesg complaints.
Sepherosa Ziehau has introduced a new sysctl:
net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_creation_failure
Set this to zero and you won’t get endless ARP events from networks you aren’t on. For example, I’m hooked up to a cable modem. I only get a public routable IP address, but the network used for the cable modem network itself bleeds ARP packets out where my DragonFly machine can see it. Since it’s on a different network segment than the address I receive through DHCP, it always fails and the system logs it. For example:
May 11 05:20:52 www kernel: arplookup 100.68.112.145 failed: host is not on local network
I can’t do much about it since that layer 2 leakiness is going to happen, but I can shut it up with this sysctl – and thank goodness, cause I’ve been seeing these messages since first using a DOCSIS modem in… 2001 or so?
Francois Tigeot has committed his Broadwell work, which has a longer-than-I-realized list of benefits. Does anyone have a 4k screen to try?
Jesse Wattenbarger wrote in with his success story of switching to DragonFly, both for server and desktop. Of note is his noticeable speedup with swapcache.
If you’re running DragonFly-master and you have an Intel video chipset, Francois Tigeot has an update for you. It brings accelerated Intel video up to match the Linux 3.14 version, adds Broadwell chipset support, and should generally improve performance. He lists how to test right in the message.
DragonFly committer Joris Giovannangeli has a Google Summer of Code project. He’s bringing Hammer2 to OpenBSD, in single-node form. It’s a very difficult project, but Joris is a very talented worker.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been quietly making a lot of commits to Hammer. I haven’t been linking them because they don’t necessarily equate to new features, but here’s an recent exception: the -A argument will make your Hammer command run on every PFS. It only affects reblocking/rebalancing – for now.
It’s been a relatively calm week, for once.
- New Delhi has a BSD user group. (via)
- PC-BSD and 4K — Oh my!
- Is nvidia the best option for gaming on FreeBSD?
- EuroBSDCon 2015 has extended the time for paper submission, cause they have so much to work through.
- Hipster keyboard layout on NetBSD
- The pkgsrc-security GPG key has changed.
- Binary packages of pkgsrc-2015Q1 for illumos and OS X are available.
- I like cross–pollination.
- PC-BSD can now restore encrypted volumes over iSCSI.
- Two more mentions of OpenBSD (though any should work) on Vultr.
- Better OpenBSD performance on KVM via x2apic mode.
- OpenBSD rolls their own file(1).
- OpenBSD has W^X support for i386 userland now.
- 2-factor authorization on FreeBSD. (via)
- My switch to OpenBSD, first impressions (via)
- Microsoft .NET Running on FreeBSD 10.1/amd64 (via)
You can now export Hammer slave volumes as NFS mounts – but since slave volumes are updated from master, you’re mounting a snapshot of that point in time. That may actually be an advantage.
DragonFly builds two compilers by default. If you weren’t interesting in building both, there were switches to build only the default, like NO_GCC47. This changed with every compiler update.
With the switch to GCC 5, the new switch is “NO_ALTCOMPILER”. That will last through compiler changes. I’m mentioning this now because sooner or later, you’ll want to gain back some time on a buildworld.
DragonFly now has GCC 5.1 release. If you are running DragonFly master (i.e. 4.1), you’ll probably want to both rebuild world and kernel, and update your packages so they all match. There’s already packages built with GCC 5.1, so binary package upgrades can happen quickly. There’s GCC 4.7 packages still available if you aren’t making the jump yet.
If you’re on DragonFly 4.0.x – nothing’s changed.
I’m late posting about these, but they go together: Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ability to read CPU temperature through various sysctls, and the same for DIMM temperature readings.