DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.
The CAM layer in DragonFly has had its big lock removed/been marked MPSAFE, so you will notice a performance increase when using multiple disks. (assuming you aren’t throughput-limited, of course.)
That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.
There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)
Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a note that V4-mapped addressing is no longer supported in DragonFly. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you are running master. Also, TCP MTU path discovery is on by default. Also also, he’s added a SOL_SOCKET/SO_CPUINT socket option for use to reduce load in heavy network activity. As usual, I don’t quite comprehend.
You can now control your backlight settings through sysctl and enjoy greater video support/stability – as long as you are using a i915 video chipset on DragonFly.
John Marino has created something very useful: a graphical tool for Hammer file history. It’s called ‘Slider’, and it uses curses to work in a terminal. It shows historic versions of files and can restore those old versions as needed. This was already possible in Hammer, of course, but it required a sequence of commands that were not straight-forward. I’ve been slow enough posting it that version 2.0 is already out, offering a way to see files that no longer exist, but are still in history. (i.e. deleted some time ago) ‘Time Machine’ sounds like the best name, but that seems to be taken.
One way to keep file history on an very active Hammer disk from eating up all the space: more snapshots. This may seem counterproductive, but disk pruning eliminates historical data between snapshots, so you can keep older data at the cost of some temporal accuracy.
As part of another thread, Steve Petrie posted an in-depth description of how and where and why he’s using DragonFly. Worth looking at either for workflow tips or for just seeing the use case.
I sort of lost a day this week because of an accidental 20-hour workday, but I still have the links:
- I love cross-pollination. (plus)
- “Why I (mostly) hack on BSD licenced stuff: so I don’t have to deal with this.“
- Tips on pkgsrc packaging.
- Kerberos IV is going away in pkgsrc.
- The pkgsrc-2014Q4 freeze is on.
- A new way to build NanoBSD.
- A new ZFS ARC tunable you may need.
- I could have sworn vigr(8) already existed.
- PC-BSD is moving to Qt5.
- A domain blocking script.
- Showing remote programs on your Mac using X.
- Long thread about BSD VPS hosting. (consensus: try RootBSD or Vultr.)
- OpenBSD man is now really mandoc.
- freebsd-update issues for 10.1.
- Steam on PC-BSD 2. (video)
- The (new) PC-BSD upgrade to 10.1 is available.
- Sunday Morning Linux Review on “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials”
- Sudo: You’re Doing It Wrong.
- “…what’s the best place to start learning about BSD?“
Note: corrected VPS hosting link.
From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.
If you really, really want to make sure you aren’t pulling in any parts of X when installing dports, and you’re building from source, there’s a few options you can set to keep X11 off your system. You can even go farther.
I had to type it that way because it rhymes. Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer. What’s it do? It’s a machine management standard.
Get ready for some reading.
- There’s some packages moving from pkgsrc-wip to pkgsrc proper.
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 branching is planned for Monday the 15th.
- PC-BSD now has an automatic package/security patch upgrade mechanism.
- Steam on PC-BSD. Holy grail, there.
- PC-BSD needs testers for the new Update Manager, for moving from 10 to 10.1
- NetBSD has imported BIND 9.10.1-P1.
- OpenBSD has added skgpio(4), a driver for the Soekris net6501 GPIO port and LEDs.
- OpenBSD has updated Unbound to 1.5.1.
- Some Japanese input methods for OpenBSD that may work on other BSDs, too.
- pfqstat, a replacements for pfstat designed to work with Charted.
- I don’t know what the ‘BERI Virtio Networking Frontend’ is, but FreeBSD’s got it.
- fstyp(8), the filesystem detector.
- FreeBSD has added AES-ICM and AES-GCM modes to OpenCrypto.
- If you’re stopping in NYC, NYCBUG would like to hear you talk on a topic of interest.
- The case for distributed operating systems in the data center. Sounds like DragonFly’s original charter. (via)
- BSDNow wants to hear your getting-into-BSD story.
- OpenBSD libc version 78.
- There’s a lot of FreeBSD systems at NYI.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is now in physical print.
- “Networking for System Administrators” is next to come out.
- And “Tarsnap Mastery” is next to be written.
- …We’re all benefiting from Michael Lucas going full-time on writing.
It’s possible, if you are several releases (years) behind, to end up with a DragonFly system that can’t compile and install the current release, due to incremental changes over time. It’s rare, but it could happen now between, say, version 3.4 and 4.0. The usual solution would be to incrementally upgrade in order, which is a lot of building and updating. The alternative is the new installworld-force option from Matthew Dillon that forces a new set of binaries into place. Use as a last resort.
If you want to help I/O performance when DragonFly is virtualized, here’s a short checklist of what to work on. I haven’t noticed any problems – but I’m not taxing any of my VMs that heavily.
bycn82’s rewrite of IPFW2 is available as a git branch to try out; he’s posted the link. Please try, especially if you are still working with the original ipfw.
(note: remember, ‘ipfw’ in DragonFly is what was called ‘ipfw2’ years and years ago because it was a replacement of the original ‘ipfw’ in FreeBSD. It was called ipfw2 but referenced as ipfw so that the same commands worked. Technically, this branch bycn82 is working on would be ipfw3, but he keeps referring to it as ipfw2. Confused? Good.)
If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.