Markus Pfeiffer has imported FreeBSD’s if_lagg to DragonFly. It’s for talking LACP over multiple network ports, so that the traffic from those multiple ports can be aggregated – if what’s on the other end generally understands LACP. (Failover mode may not count.) Please test if you have that sort of surfeit of network ports.
Matthew Dillon hasn’t committed anything to DragonFly in several days… cause he just got married! Congratulations to the newly married couple.
There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.
The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600 CPU in it. It works, however.
Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward. Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages. I went for XFCE4 because I could. Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.
Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:
moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0"
The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:
Option "NoAccel"
Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.
I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:
git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)
It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time. (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)
I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.
And… that’s about it. It’s a working desktop. Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive. I wish I had done this a long time ago.
Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.
In a bit of perfect timing, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, Lumina, has been ported to DragonFly, thanks to mneumann! It’s not in dports yet, but it should be buildable from source…
You can now see the packets, bytes, and drops in altq by using the -altq arg to systat, thanks to this recent commit from Matthew Dillon.
Why is it so warm out? I want autumn to start.
- BSD compared to Linux, an explanation.
- A description of what rcctl does. (via several places)
- NetBSD runs on the OpenRISK 1000.
- tmux-resurrect, making tmux survive machine restarts.
- OpenBSD version numbering explained.
- PC-BSD has its own subreddit.
- Lumina is now available as a port – will it work on DragonFly? Someone try!
- DiscoverBSD news for 2014/09/01.
- NetBSD 5 systems now use modular xorg.
- The 2014Q3 pkgsrc freeze is coming up.
- PXE installs of OpenBSD with Serva.
- Are you a “connoisseur of old time stamps“?
- FreeBSD has some support for the Altera SOCFPGA.
- Your cross-pollination moment of the week.
- Yes, it runs (Retro)BSD.
This very long commit message from Sepherosa Ziehau details the UDP changes he’s made. It’s mostly technical details, but at the end he mentions this little tidbit:
“For ‘kq_connect_client -u’ test, this commit gives 400% performance improvement (31Kconns/s -> 160Kconns/s).”
If you are on DragonFly, using pf, using altq, and using fairq to control usage, there’s a latency bug that Matthew Dillon recently fixed. He’s posted an announcement and committed fixes to master and 3.8, so it’s only an upgrade away.
Thanks to Francois Tigeot, the drm/i915 driver now supports Haswell processors, and the special FDI and DDI ports they use. I am late posting this.
You can now start moused with an argument, so it will look at the right device. In most cases, I imagine “/etc/rc.d/moused start ums0” will be what anyone wants. Credit to Michael Neumann for the update. Perhaps moused_flags="ums0" will do it too? I haven’t tried yet.
This will overwrite your /etc/devd.conf.
If you are using the ATI Mach64 drm driver on DragonFly, Francois Tigeot would like to know. He’s done something that breaks it, but he’s making the educated guess that this more-than-10-years-old card is no longer in use.
Because of some structure changes made by Matthew Dillon while chasing a pf bug, you will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel on your next update – if you are running DragonFly-master. 3.8 users are unaffected by the bug or the change.
The server that hosts shiningsilence.com is getting old, and it’s time for me to go to 64-bit DragonFly. It’s audience opinion time: what have you purchased lately, and liked? What would you suggest?
It seems pkg 1.3.6 was slightly scrambled. If you happen to have built and installed it, John Marino has special instructions on how to update to 1.3.7. If you are on DragonFly 3.8, you can follow those instructions now, and if you are on 3.9, that repo should be ready for an update in the next few days.
You should perform a full world and kernel install if on master.
Several people (including me) have been getting bit by a problem: when performing an installworld with a changed kernel, the vn kernel module is loaded, but it was built by the previous kernel and may cause problems when it doesn’t match up.
To fix that, vn is now built in, instead of being a separate module. The rescue initrd (which is what is being mounted when it has this problem) is now installed via a ‘make rescue‘ command that can wait until a successful installworld and reboot.
Another long list. These are making my Friday nights take some extra effort.
- Oolite, an open source game based on Elite. Yes, it runs on BSD. I’m surprised I haven’t posted about it before. (via)
- My Experience Switching from Slackware Linux to FreeBSD.
- A week of pkgsrc, #3.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/08/18.
- OpenBSD is gaining a rcctl(8) tool for automation.
- Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes.
- 20 years of FreeBSD ports.
- “Does BSD perform disk caching less aggressively?” I bet the person asking was using two different machines at different times with different loads, which means he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s August Update is out.
- Some people don’t like pkg.
- The EuroBSDCon 2014 travel grant has been extended, and Google has grants to bring more female computer scientists there.
- Spatializer support in NetBSD.
- NetBSD is keeping up with the gpl2 version of GNU Make.
- PC-BSD 10.0.3-RC1 has been tagged.
- FreeBSD has a new automounter.
- FreeBSD has a set of keymap conversion tools. Might be useful to someone?
- FreeBSD now goes up to 256 CPUs. (I thought this already happened?)
- Yay cross-pollination!
- Apparently people don’t pay attention to file contents.
- IPv6 tunneling on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has replaced BIND with unbound in the base system.
If you remember the earlier work to support DragonFly on An Acer c720 Chromebook, it’s been repeated for the c720p. The “p” means it’s a touchscreen.
DragonFly’s using pkg 1.3, at least on master, and I’ve seen a few people report an error message when performing ‘pkg upgrade’. The error message usually includes something like:
pkg: need to re-create repo Avalon to upgrade schema vers
If you get this, do ‘pkg update -f’ and it will complete.
DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully. This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link. Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.