There seems to be a lot of ACPI-related updates lately: Sascha Wildner has updated ACPICA in DragonFly to what I think is the very latest version. See his commit for the differences.
John Marino updated daemon(8) on DragonFly. For some reason, I didn’t know it was a standalone program. I knew about the idea of daemons as helpers based inside the computer, which is why so many server programs end with a ‘d’ – sshd, ftpd, and so on. Inexplicably, I never actually saw the program itself.
As you read this, I’m at NYCBSDCon – or at least should be.
- FOSDEM 2014 videos are up. The second item listed is about the new version of ports, which includes dports. (via)
- Crochet-FreeBSD, a system for building bootable FreeBSD images for a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, and VM. (via Markus Pfieffer on IRC, indirectly)
- Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures. Seen previously at BSDCan. ‘Greytrapping’, mentioned in the article, is new to me.
- Email delivery headaches. Mailing many people is somehow almost always a low-level irritation.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/03 roundup.
- Another n2k14 hackathon report. DragonFly uses that DHCP client he’s talking about.
- PC-BSD on eWeek.
- bsd-cloudinit – FreeBSD on OpenStack. (via)
- OpenBSD gained some VAX hardware. The only VAX hardware I ever saw was 6 feet tall; I can’t imagine these are easy to ship.
- OpenBSD updated to ldns 1.6.17.
- Seen via a pkgsrc list: Berlios.de is closing down its hosting, so this may affect you if you usually grab your pkgsrc packages from there.
- The proper way to break the FreeBSD ABI.
- Robert Watson’s privilege ideas.
- How to switch between mfi(4) and mrsas(4) on FreeBSD. mrsas(4) sounds like MRSA to me, which is a bit more worrisome
- FreeBSD supports MegaRAID Fury cards.
- The plan for ATF removal in NetBSD.
- DragonFly takes the FreeBSD patch(1) updates, and that’s fine, because FreeBSD made those changes to an import of DragonFly’s patch(1). Hooray for cross-pollination!
Probably because of the C-state changes, Sepherosa Ziehau wants people to use a new set of sysctls instead of the hw.cpu_mwait* ones – at least on x86_64. This won’t affect you if you aren’t already familiar with them, probably.
It’s now possible to reach deeper power-saving C-states with DragonFly, thanks to work from Sepherosa Ziehau. It’s possible to have it auto-adjusted by setting two sysctls.
I put in the application for Google Summer of Code 2014, for DragonFly. Will we get in for a 7th year? I hope so!
(I still want more mentors; contact me if you’re interested.)
I already asked this question on kernel@, but I’ll repeat it here. Who is interested in mentoring for DragonFly, for Google Summer of Code 2014? The org application period is starting today, and it would be neat to do this for a seventh year in a row.
If you have an Intel-based system, and are running DragonFly master, there’s new c-states (power-saving modes) for you to try. Sepherosa Ziehau posted a note about testing and feedback.
There’s been periodic commits updating the USB4BSD support in DragonFly; I haven’t been linking to them because they are generally incremental. However, it’s good to (re?)mention just how you can build DragonFly with that new USB support.
xf86-video-intel-2.21.15 should now work on your DragonFly system. I don’t see it in dports, yet, though.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
There’s a new ACPI version in DragonFly, and Sascha Wildner wants you to update your BIOS, just to be sure.
Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.
Brad Fitzpatrick showed up on the users@ list and mentioned that for DragonFly to be supported in Go, it needed to show up in the Go Dashboard with building reports. I now have the Go builder running on pkgbox32/pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org. Check the builder page to see status.
Note: Installing the port of Go from Dports works just fine; this is the mechanism for testing Go on a per-commit basis for the people who work on Go – so a ‘fail’ notice on the builder page doesn’t necessarily mean anything, unless you are developing Go itself. This may already be clear to you.
Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)
With everyone buying tablets lately, the low end of computers is getting pretty low-cost indeed. Creating single-purpose computers is possible, and I was thinking of doing that to create a Go-testing system. (Though probably not necessary for me.) It got me to thinking, though…
How low-cost a system could run DragonFly? The master-slave and low system requirements of Hammer lead to some interesting possibilities. There’s no Arduino equivalent for DragonFly because there’s no DragonFly on ARM, despite all my wishing. DragonFly has been run on Soekris systems before, and might work on a PCEngines ALIX board. Ebay, my basement, or Craigslist are options too, but not as fun. Who has suggestions?
If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
ACPI has been updated in DragonFly by Sepherosa Ziehau, to potentially support the very low-power sleep states available with Haswell CPUs.
Note: Sepherosa clarified that the lower power states are not available – yet.
There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
Markus Pfeiffer has added more of his work on USB4BSD to DragonFly, and a reminder: if you want to try it out, there’s just a few options to set.