Matthew Dillon bought a system with a Broadwell series CPU, installed DragonFly, and wrote up his experience. Read it if you plan on purchasing this hardware any time soon.
Here’s some comments from Matthew Dillon on page coloring in DragonFly; a topic that comes up every year for some reason.
The release candidate for GCC5 (5.1.0) is out, and it’s in DragonFly too. It’s not yet switched over to run as the default – that’ll require the release.
The default compiler in DragonFly is going to change over from GCC 4.7 to GCC 5.x very soon, to match the GCC 5.1 release. This means that packages built for DragonFly-master won’t be compatible with the old ones. You will need to reinstall packages when you next ‘pkg install’. John Marino has an extensive writeup detailing what’s needed, and the actual change is some days off.
If you are using DragonFly 4.0.x (the release), this doesn’t affect you at all.
Francois Tigeot has a new update to the drm/i915 driver for testing. It matches, feature-wise, what’s in Linux 3.12. Try it if you’ve got the hardware. (and dragonfly-master)
I have had trouble with my daily/weekly periodic reports never making it to my GMail account. Sascha Wildner pointed out to me that periodic.conf has its own answer already:
daily_output=”/var/log/daily.log”
daily_status_security_output=”/var/log/security.log”
weekly_output=”/var/log/weekly.log”
monthly_output=”/var/log/monthly.log”
… and newsyslog is already set to take care of them. There’s more in the periodic.conf man page.
There’s been some linking to the updated HAMMER2 design document. The Reddit link doesn’t have anything specific, but the Hacker News one has some details (including a credit code!) for installing DragonFly on a Vultr VPS.
Noticed in the most recent time zone data update for DragonFly: some people keep Mars time.
The most recent (well, this is the mostest recent) update of ACPICA for DragonFly, by Sascha Wildner, is different from the usual import: it happens to include actual upstream support for DragonFly
This week’s BSDNow talks with Baptiste Daroussin about developing and using pkg, for ports and for packaging the base FreeBSD system. (Baptiste has been seen on #dragonflybsd, since pkg is on DragonFly, so I’m sure there’s some relevant bits there, too.) There’s also the usual news summary.
I haven’t been drawing enough attention to it, but there’s been a bunch of HAMMER filesystem activity lately: First, Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on HAMMER – these posts are a small subset of his commits. Second, Matthew Dillon has been working full steam ahead on HAMMER2. The HAMMER2 design document has been updated (read this!), and he’s already accomplished master->slave disk syncing.
It’s not ready for production, of course, which you may already realize, so don’t install it unless you want to work on the code.
If you’re part of a BSD user group, please let me know your schedule. I’m able to catch NYCBUG announcements cause I’m on their announce@ mailing list – but I could use more.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/30.
- Lumina 0.8.3 is released.
- Building PC-BSD Utilities From Source. (video)
- BSD Magazine for March.
- Directly building FreeBSD AMI images.
- FreeBSD daily status reports, a little more human-readable.
- 4 new commands in FreeBSD DDB.
- The FreeBSD boot loader can now take your GELI passphrase.
- A probably definitive answer on OpenBSD and clang.
- pf tables mean no reloading.
- BSD contributor Paul Schenkveld has died.
- If you are in the UK, there’s a mini OpenBSD ports hackathon happening now.
- NetBSD systems can now resize / on reboot, if space is available.
- LibreSSL in pkgsrc, soon.
- NYCBUG’s next meeting is April 8th, with Christos Zoulas presenting blacklistd.
Do you use info pages? Yeah, me neither. John Marino’s removed or converted the various info pages already in DragonFly, and removed texinfo since it’s no longer required. (I’ve linked to a few examples, but there were a number more commits than this.)
The default .cshrc in DragonFly has had some changes, which shouldn’t be anything but handy… assuming you are using tcsh. Also: the loader menu defaults to a blue Fred, now.
In the process of committing binutils 2.25 to DragonFly, John Marino also broke its build into parallel parts and removed the build of the gold linker. Buildworlds should be noticeably faster now, though I don’t have a before/after.
John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.
If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.