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.
Francois Tigeot has been working on making i915 video support work better; with his latest update, it’s worth trying the Intel-specific driver instead of vesa if you have both the 915 chipset and are running X.
Matthew Dillon changed powerd on DragonFly so that the system is set to max performance if powerd is killed. Now you’ll know why your fans turned on!
Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device. You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.
Finally, a much more eventful week. I already noted LibreSSL’s release.
- DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/07/07.
- PC-BSD Digest 31 – there’s now a PC-BSD IRC channel.
- Your server can probably tell you the temperature.
- Future of pf in FreeBSD? Follow the thread. (via)
- DragonFly’s pf alterations discussed for OpenBSD. It wouldn’t be easy without some of the underlying DragonFly architecture, but something for everyone to remember: Henning Brauer is generous with his time and will help people updating pf.
- mfiutil on FreeBSD.
- ia64 processor support is gone from FreeBSD.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.10.0-P2.
- FreeBSD now has bmake-20140620.
- OpenBSD now has lynx 2.8.8rel2.
- OpenBSD’s relayd now has a new filter language.
- pkgsrc 2014Q2 binaries are out now for several platforms.
- FreeBSD has a new core team.
- More cross-pollination – also from Android?
- OpenBSD-current users will need to update their kernel.
Some dports packages can’t be installed in combination with others. The easy way to find the conflict without doing the install? Look for CONFLICTS= in the Makefile. If you don’t have the dports tree on disk, you can always look online.
If you’re looking to use LDAP on DragonFly, follow this thread (read the first, keep going) as people talk about implementing it, what they installed, etc. I haven’t tried it myself, yet.
The mfi(4) driver has had some data corruption problems on “Thunderbird” series RAID controllers. There’s a newer driver, mrsas(4), that replaces mfi(4) for these controllers and does not have these issues, but switching may mean new drive locations and therefore some work to get booting correctly again. Sascha Wildner has an extensive writeup about what this entails, and how to switch now if you have that hardware (recommended).
ACPICA has been updated by Sascha Wildner to version 20140627, which as you can guess from the version, is the most recent. See the included changelog for what’s different.
Another ‘quiet’ week – lots of commit activity in the other BSDs, but not a lot to point at directly.
- PostgreSQL/FreeBSD performance and scalability on a 40-core machine. (PDF link, via) There’s comparison to DragonFly’s results, mentioned here before. DragonFly’s solution of shared page tables is dismissed because it would require work to do, though I think that’s a symptom of FreeBSD’s more complex locking model rather than complexity of what’s in DragonFly.
- pkgsrc-2014Q2 is out.
- Here’s some notes on the systemd compatibility GSoC/OpenBSD project.
- The FreeBSD ixgbe(4) driver understands RSS, and so does igb(4).
- FreeBSD GENERIC kernels can now use vt(4), the replacements for syscons.
- FreeBSD images can now boot UEFI.
- FreeBSD 9/10 users using the WITH_NEW_XORG option have a temporary binary ports repository to use, to handle the change in the drivers.
Matthew Dillon changed the default keep-policy in DragonFly to:
set keep-policy keep state (pickups, sloppy)
This is to match other BSDs (which? I don’t know) and reduce overhead, according to the commit.
A note for everyone: use Hammer default on a very busy filesystem, and you will eat a lot of disk space since all file changes are recorded. (I’ve done this to myself a few times.) Francois Tigeot has a list of tips on how to keep that from happening.
The max number of CPUs on DragonFly just went from 63 to 64. This is really just a side effect of preparation to move up that limit, but I am entertained by the single-digit bump.