Sepherosa Ziehau has an IPv6 patch for you to try. What’s it do? I think it improves performance under multiple streams of traffic, but that’s from looking at the code and totally guessing.
Matthew Dillon committed the start of a Hammer 2 cluster API. I noticed, while looking at the commit, that there’s a design document, a freemap design document, a changes list, and – most important for anyone interested – a TODO list.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
In part because I asked him, Sepherosa Ziehau benchmarked 10G ix(4) with 2 ports on DragonFly. The results? Good, both for bandwidth and for CPU usage.
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.
DragonFly has moved from the old USB stack to USB4BSD by default. That means:
- If you are already using USB4BSD, you will want to remove WANT_USB4BSD from your kernel config.
- If you have trouble, switch back to the old USB.
- There’s some drivers that are not yet converted; help with them would be appreciated.
- A full kernel/world build and ‘make upgrade’ will be needed in either case.
Sascha Wildner’s announcement email has all the gory details, including the kernel config changes to move back to the old USB setup. This is of course in master; 3.6 users are unaffected.
Hammer’s ability to stream to remote disks is great, but what if you have storage that uses some other file system? Antonio Huete Jimenez put together a shell script that will dump out the contents of a Hammer PFS, for upload to whatever. Read the README for the details.
If you are upgrading packages on your DragonFly 3.6 system, and you have docbook installed, there’s an extra step needed because of the moving around of several docbook packages. If you don’t have docbook installed – nothing to see here.
I followed up with Google on why DragonFly isn’t in Summer of Code this year. It is exactly as I suspected: they want to get new organizations in. DragonFly’s been doing it for 6 years, so they are picking new orgs over returning ones. This is apparently the same reason NetBSD isn’t in this year, either.
(Honestly, I can use the break.)
Sascha Wildner has updated arcmsr(4), which brings in support for the Areca ARC1214, ARC1224, ARC1264, ARC1284, and ARC1883 models, from FreeBSD. Please test if you have the appropriate hardware.
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
Coretemp is now in the default kernel configs for DragonFly, so you can use coretemp to see your Intel CPU temperature.
If you’re using the i915 driver for xorg, and xorg dies with a “No monitor specified for screen” error, there’s a config change to fix that, or you can just update.
Another week where I barely need to look up source code commits.
- PC-BSD Weekly Digest 18 and Digest 19.
- OpenBSD’s signify tool has been backported to OpenBSD versions < 5.5.
- Video of an OpenBSD install.
- xorg, unprivileged on OpenBSD. (via)
- This is a good idea: FreeBSD 10’s release.sh mapped out.
- bcrypt() updates in OpenBSD and what it means for you. (also)
- iXSystem’s NYCBSDCon 2014 recap. (via nycbug-talk)
- A description of those expensive/busy WhatsApp FreeBSD servers. (via)
- FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis. (via #nycbug)
- NetBSD is bringing in BIND 9.10.0b1. (a beta?)
- NetBSD is also in the process of moving from gcc 4.5 to 4.8.
- Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord. I still haven’t set up the Netflow system that I want to set up, dangit.
- pkg will require libucl. This affects FreeBSD and will affect DragonFly too.
- OpenBSD has an experimental USB installer. This may be new to the upcoming release – I don’t know.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
Sascha Wildner brought in ACPICA 20140214, and his commit message has a list of the updates.
The DragonFly Mail Agent is being suggested as a possible sendmail replacement for FreeBSD.