Here’s a nice advantage for dports and DragonFly: since it’s an overlay on FreeBSD ports, it’s possible to move to newer or different versions of software without waiting for it to happen in FreeBSD. For example: there’s a newer version of the xorg intel driver now in dports – newer than what’s in ports.
If you are tracking DragonFly master, your next kernel build should be full, not quick.
If you have a DragonFly system with an iwn wireless chipset, and you are having trouble connecting and running in the 5Ghz part of the spectrum only, here’s a tip: the -ht switch may fix it.
It took me a little while, but DragonFly 3.8.2 images are uploaded now to the main site. Check the 3.8.2 changelog if you didn’t before. This is a recommended upgrade for the newer OpenSSL, and should otherwise have little impact on the programs you have installed.
There’s been good progress in Francois Tigeot’s work on Haswell graphics support in DragonFly. If you have one of those newer units, you should be able to use the i915 driver with it now – as long as you keep acceleration off. (You won’t notice any difference in 2D anyway.)
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.8.2, which exists mostly to accommodate the latest release of OpenSSL. (Security fixes, which should not be a surprise.) I will build images as soon as I get a chance.
If you have a i915 video chipset (which appears to be most every recent laptop), Francois Tigeot would like you to try his huge patch. It doesn’t support Haswell chips yet, though it lays some of the groundwork for it.
If you have a particular favorite thing in DragonFly, Damian Vincino would like to know about it.
There’s a new version of pkg out – 1.3. (via) That’s an announcement on the FreeBSD-ports-announce list. Since DragonFly also uses pkg, that means it’s available for DragonFly too. John Marino reported on IRC that he’s testing a bulk build now, using it on DragonFly.
A frequent question people ask when trying Hammer is “How can I do software RAID to cover a disk failure?” Hammer provides for streaming one volume to another, so you can duplicate drives, but there isn’t an automatic failover mechanism as there is with a RAID setup. The first answer is usually “get hardware RAID“; my preferred solution. The remaining software solutions are vinum, ccd, and lvm for DragonFly.
Rust has been ported to DragonFly by Michael Neumann. His blog has implementation details, and you can pull from his repo to get a buildable version. This may be useful, as he notes, for anyone wanting to build Rust on other BSDs.
Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly. (It’s always good to see a new contributor name.)
Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius. He’s been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I’m linking to this as a ‘signpost’ commit.
If you were looking for something to do, finishing Francois Tigeot’s sound update would help a lot of people. He’s currently tied up with i915 support work. The patches need device cloning to work with devfs, and midi removal.
As mentioned before, the mrsas(4) driver works best for ‘Thunderbolt’ RAID controllers. Now, the switch has happened.
Tethering now works via the urndis(4) device, from a patch contributed by Sascha Wildner/tested by Yellow Rabbit.
(Updated for correct attribution)
While Matthew Dillon was testing the new up-to-256-processor support for DragonFly, he added a few sysctls, one of which helps qemu performance when emulating a lot of processors. I note it here in case it’s helpful to someone else.
DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs. However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf. By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher. I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.
Thanks to Nicolas Thery, there’s a POSIX semaphore test suite on DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD. Anyone want to integrate it into dfregress?
There’s a recently talked about bug in SYSRET that apparently affects a lot of operating systems, including Linux and several BSDs. It looks like DragonFly is not affected, but Matthew Dillon has put in changes just in case.