I said “USB ethernet drivers should work now” yesterday, but didn’t specify what works with the new USB structure in DragonFly. Sascha has fixed that by explicitly porting aue(4), cue(4), ipheth(4) and kue(4) from FreeBSD. As his commit notes, there’s still a few more devices to go.
If you’ve got a USB Ethernet device on DragonFly, it should work. Also, some cell phones tether correctly now, when they may have had trouble before.
The release candidate for DragonFly 4.0 came out last week, and normally the release would happen after a week. There’s still a few people reporting an odd freeze, so until we can find a cause, we’ll continue to wait.
Chrome runs on DragonFly now, apparently possible now because of this ported fix from Joris Giovannangeli.
If you can read French, or can translate, here’s an article covering the use of DragonFly as a desktop system.
Despite my complete lack of good planning, John Marino and Francois Tigeot have packages available for the DragonFly 4.0 release candidate that I assembled. Point at this directory to use them.
As Francois Tigeot has pointed out, recent Mesa upgrades have made very old graphics drivers using DRM1 no longer work. They’ve been removed. This won’t affect you unless your graphics card is 10+ years old.
If you are running DragonFly, and also using nginx, the so_reuseport option will give you a significant speed boost. I’ve mentioned it before, but not this directly.
Your local mirror should have a copy of the release candidate for DragonFly 4.0.0 by now. Please try it out and report problems. Note that this is a x86_64 only version; there’s no i386 version though you may be able to manually build on i386.
It’s been possible to install and run clang on DragonFly for a long time, of course, and at least build world with it. However, John Marino is putting in significant work to make clang one of the system compilers, replacing the older gcc44 that’s in DragonFly now. (The newer gcc47 stays.) This won’t be part of the next release, but it should be available soon after.
I noted the last few things that should be committed before the DragonFly release. People have spoken up for most of them, but it wouldn’t hurt to try recent -master with the upmap/kpmap work that recently went in. Benchmarks wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
Sascha Wildner brought in led(4) from FreeBSD. It’s a driver for flashing LEDs, as you might have guessed. I’d like to see someone make Blinkenlights, whether BeBox-style or just generally mysterious.
Francois Tigeot gave talks at EuroBSDCon and XDC 2014, and he’s posted slide and video links. He covers DragonFly and Postgres and video drivers, or at least I assume so cause I haven’t watched them yet. There’s other BSD-specific material available too, according to his post.
John Marino updated wpa_supplicant (in dports). He then suggested moving it out of base into dports, so that it could be updated independently of the base system. (this update, for instance, took years.) Since wpa_supplicant is necessary to get some systems online – and it can’t be installed if missing if you don’t have a network link – it may be too risky. I think other packages could be moved out, myself.
Robin Hahling volunteered to update OpenSSH in DragonFly, which is good news. It’s a jump from version 6.1 to 6.7, so there’s some feature changes. tcpwrappers support is gone, for instance. If you have a reason to object to this change, speak up now.
John Marino has upgraded gcc, libedit, xz, and grep in DragonFly. Also, tzdata has jumped from version 2014e to 2014h, thanks to Sascha Wildner.
This week’s BSDNow has an interview about mentoring with Steve Wills of FreeBSD, the usual array of news. This week has more small device news than normal – NetBSD on Raspberry Pi and pfSense on a mini-ITX system. And a mention of my desktop article! I’m relevant!
The powersaving page on dragonflybsd.org has seen a bunch of updates; this should be handy even if you aren’t on battery power that often.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent changes to UDP in DragonFly mention some performance gains to sheer packet count.