A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.
There’s some DragonFly material in here, though I normally confine that to the rest of the week. It’s inextricable from the rest of the links.
I admit I never thought about it much, but I’ve also never had enough RAM to matter: there’s a memtemp(4) tool that monitors temperature sensors for your system’s memory. Sepherosa Ziehau has updated it on DragonFly to support some newer processor setups.
This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system. The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.
(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)
Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
Well, might rather than will , but I had to make a music reference. There’s a bug in versions of pkg from 1.4.6(ish) to 1.4.11 that can make it accidentally delete itself while updating packages. If this happens to you, there’s an easy fix, as posted to users@:
# cd /usr && make pkg-bootstrap
Once you’re on version 1.4.12+, you’re fine.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
John Marino has removed gcc 4.4 in DragonFly, and replaced it with gcc 5.0. Two things to note: gcc 5 does not yet successfully build world, and DragonFly is an officially supported platform for gcc with this release.
If you have a em(4)/emx(4) card, AKA ‘Intel(R) PRO/1000’, Michael Neumann has an update for you. It’s from Intel’s 7.2.4 release of the code. This is to support the new I218 cards. Initial reports are positive.
This week is relatively quiet.
Matthew Dillon brought in some wireless networking updates – the ath(4), iwn(4), and wpi(4) drivers are updated. There’s porting notes if you need them, too. In related news, rum(4) is also improved. The updates apparently benefited DragonFly and FreeBSD at the same time.
Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 drivers in DragonFly (remember the call for testing) to match what’s in Linux 3.10, which means you should get excellent accelerated video performance on most any recent Intel video chipset, on DragonFly.
Here’s a number of DragonFly links to clear out my backlog:
If you have very recent alc(4) hardware, it may be supported now. If you are booting over NFS, it may be faster now. These changes are unrelated other than both being recent – NFS is improved for any chipset.
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
… He could use your testing and feedback.