DragonFly 3.6 to 3.8 upgrade note

If you are upgrading a DragonFly 3.6 system to 3.8, make sure you have the absolute latest version of 3.6 first.  A few people have had a crash during install of the new initrd, which leaves the system in an unbootable state.

There’s a fix now in 3.6 from Joris Giovannangeli, so updating 3.6 and then moving to 3.8 will ensure this doesn’t happen.  He posted a heads-up notice too.

(Why, yes, that is why shiningsilence.com was down for some hours today…  With Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner’s help, I was able to copy bits of /boot and /usr from a live CD back on disk and get online again.)

Try installing DragonFly again

Did you try to install DragonFly relatively recently and it never made it past the bootloader?  Apparently there’s a bug in some BIOS when using a smaller USB drive to install.  The loader checks multiple places for information, and if it checks somewhere that’s ‘farther’ than the end of the disk (i.e. 6G on a 4G USB key), the machine locks up.

Matthew Dillon and Kyle Davis spent a good number of hours figuring this out today, and Matt committed a fix.   So, if you were bit by this problem, try a -LATEST image about 24 hours from now and see if it works.

In Other BSDs for 2014/06/21

I have a backlog from stuff I missed last week while traveling, so we all benefit!

DragonFly 3.8.1 by this Monday

Matthew Dillon posted a note about the next point release of DragonFly, coming within a few days.  Chunks of it like the recent OpenSSL and Sendmail fixes are already on the 3.8 branch. 

I assume I’ll be the one rolling it, and I plan to put together a 3.6.3 tag too, just so there’s a final version of 3.6 that has all changes rolled up.

OpenSSL update

There were more problems found in OpenSSL… right after release of DragonFly 3.8.  OpenSSL 1.0.1h has been committed, thanks to Robin Hahling and Sascha Wildner.  I’ll be rolling a 3.8.1 release soon.

If you are saying “Hey, what about LibreSSL?  And do I write it LibReSSL?”, it’s not set up as a portable release yet.  Also, I don’t know the correct capitalization, either.  There is some debate about the lack of notification from OpenSSL to LibreSSL, though other vendors were notified days before.

DragonFly 3.8 released

The 3.8 release of DragonFly is out!  See the release page for a changelog and check your local mirror for download first.

Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download.  (link goes to release versions of the packages.  Future updates will be in ../LATEST)

For upgrades from 3.6: You can pull the 3.8 source normally with git:

cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_8 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_8
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_8

Assuming you are using an unmodified kernel, here’s the steps I usually do for an upgrade:

# make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade

After upgrading from 3.6, pkg (as designed) will download the appropriate 3.8 packages with pkg upgrade.