It’s based off 2022Q1 from FreeBSD Ports, and it’s available now through pkg.
There’s a new page on the DragonFly site covering how to install DragonFly as a guest system under KVM.
If you run pkg on DragonFly and get a warning about “Meta v1 support ending”, it’s only a warning. It will go away on its own.
I know I’ll need this again, so I am making a post out of it. If you are running a DragonFly system through NVMM using the excellent site instructions, and you want X apps to display on a local Windows workstation, you need to:
- Install VcXsrv (or your X server of choice) on Windows and start it up.
- Install xauth and xterm on the DragonFly host.
- On the DragonFly host, set these three options in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. They are already there but commented out with different arguments.
X11Forwarding yes X11DisplayOffset 0 X11UseLocalhost yes
- Reload sshd: ‘service sshd reload’.
- ‘Enable X11 Forwarding’ under Connection -> SSH -> X11 in the puTTY setup dialog.
Connect to the DragonFly host with puTTY, type ‘xterm’, and a terminal window should appear on your Windows desktop within a few seconds. This could be turned into a shortcut with puTTY to avoid having redundant terminals, but I’m not writing that out yet.
I use date(1) just rarely enough that I can never remember the right arguments to create a human-readable result. Now, there’s an -I arg to date(1) that uses a word instead of a format string to get ISO8601 output.
I realize my title is a little bit buffalo buffalo buffalo, but it makes sense: getopt(3) now has a double colon option to indicate an optional argument. I link to it because I like seeing the length of the trip to DragonFly. It started as a GNU option, then showed up in NetBSD, brought to FreeBSD, and now I’m posting about it.
This is pretty esoteric, but all of DragonFly’s syscalls can be found in the links Aaron LI provided in this post. There’s code in there that dates back to Berkley UNIX.
If you are using AMD graphics on DragonFly, Aaron LI’s “how I set this up” post may be useful to you.
There’s a reported bug with NVMM and QEMU if you boot a guest using UEFI. Until it’s fixed, use BIOS.
It may be because I am a nerd but I enjoy reading detailed explanations of bugfixes like this one for HAMMER2. This fix is present in the 6.2 release, of course.
If you have a newly installed Firefox on a newly installed DragonFly system, you might be unable to load your Firefox account on first load, like in this screenshot. A workaround is to load your profile on a different machine and copy it over. My guess is permissions for profile creation, but that’s just a guess.
But wait, you say, what about 6.2.0? I performed my biyearly tagging error and screwed up the 6.2.0 tag, so we’re releasing with 6.2.1. On the plus side, this last minute redo let two bug fixes creep in that would have been in a later 6.2.1 anyway. This will be your first chance to try NVMM/Qemu support if you follow releases and not bleeding edge.
The release notes have the details, including the new, improved build process, and a link to the surprisingly-large list of all the changes and closed bugs.
If you have a WhiskeyLake Intel CPU, the i915 driver on DragonFly now recognizes it for hardware acceleration. This will be in the upcoming release.
I tagged DragonFly 6.2, and I’m planning for release later this week. Release notes and ISO/IMGs to come with the release, as usual.
If you have a NVMe disk that happens to let’s say report inaccurate capabilities (i.e. lie cause it was built cheap), the NVMe driver in DragonFly can now attempt to survive the surprise.
CBSD, the virtualization-management-on-FreeBSD tool could be made to support DragonFly and NVMM. Here’s a tracking issue for it.
DragonFly and Hyper-V’s virtual disk support do not appear to co-operate well, according to this bug report. Anyone have a Hyper-V host where they can confirm?
Longtime readers won’t be surprised by any of the content, but there’s a DragonFly overview at MakeUseOf.
You didn’t need it or use it, but the name itself has a certain symbolism.