I say “one more” like I know when this saga will end. If you are using the devcpu-data port to update your processors, you’ll need to add
microcode_update_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out.
Are you tired of hearing about Meltdown/Spectre yet? Doesn’t matter! The two sysctls for controlling mitigation in DragonFly have been renamed:
machdep.meltdown_mitigation machdep.spectre_mitigation
They go to hopefully sensible defaults, but Matthew Dillon has done some testing to show the effects of each in various combinations. (Update: more changes and tests.) Note that this is not the final mitigation work; compilers (i.e. gcc) are being updated to include workarounds for this, so new gcc -> new compiler in DragonFly -> new defenses. No silver bullet there, though.
More user group news: Helsinki, Finland, has a new BSD User Group: HelBUG. First meeting is February 7th. There’s no mailing list/site that I know of, yet.
I’m posting this waaaay ahead of time: next NYCBUG meeting is tomorrow. It’s a porting session, and here’s some of what to expect.
DragonFly has a donation page and a Paypal account. There’s no 501c3 benefit for U.S. residents to donate; DragonFly doesn’t exist as a non-profit. People have still been donating in smaller sums over time. It’s not enough to offset the colocation fees ($4k/year) plus the hardware there, but the money does get used for specific tasks. Matthew Dillon wrote a description of his upcoming plans: more storage, plus some interesting details on how much wear the existing SSD disks have sustained.
You could, if you are running DragonFly-current, create a vkernel using HAMMER2, and try out HAMMER2 even if your underlying disk is HAMMER1. Odd, but useful.
There’s a NYCBUG get-together tonight at Suspenders in Manhattan, New York City, 7 PM. There’s no technical presentation, but who cares? Start the end-of-year-drinking!
DragonFly 5.0.2 is released. As you may guess from the version number, this is a bugfix release. The release tag has the full details. Update through the normal process of a buildworld/buildkernel, at your leisure.
KnoxBUG has a meeting tonight, and John Hixson will be presenting “Setting up Samba for a Mixed Network of Windows and Mac“. Go, if you are near Knoxville.
For your ease of use: a Vagrant box with shared folders enabled. (via)
If you are like me and have a long weekend, dig into /usr/share/examples. Not all of it is necessarily up to date, but there’s examples there on running rconfig, diskless, different pf and ipfw examples, and so on. Actual documentation is in corresponding man pages – and there’s examples on how to write them, too.
A writeup that may help someone in the future: if you decide you want to encrypt your /home directory, on DragonFly, this is how you do it.
Because of the major version number change, there’s no packages built for DragonFly 4.9. Your options are to either update to 5.1 (which you probably meant to do anyway if you are running current) or manually point to the newest packages. Or just build from dports.
For clarity, this does not affect you at all if you are running 5.0 release. It only affects you if you are running DragonFly-current and have not updated in a while.
Michael W. Lucas is talking tonight at SemiBUG’s monthly meeting, and will be presenting on Tarsnap. Go, if you are near Michigan.
DragonFly 5.0.0 has been released. HAMMER2 is available in the installer. Multi-volume/clustering support isn’t in there yet, but support for deduplication/snapshots/booting and so on all are. My post to users@ has upgrade instructions.
Here’s your heads-up: NYCBUG is having an TOR installation party tomorrow. Go, if you are near.
I tagged DragonFly 5.0 (commit message list in that link) over the weekend, and there’s a 5.0 release candidate for download. It’s RC2 because the recent Radeon changes had to be taken out.
BSDNow 213 talks about the just-finished EuroBSDCon, and vBSDCon and other things. The episode 213 web page links to Youtube videos of all the talks, so there’s your evening schedule, filled.
If you are starting KDE on DragonFly, you’ll want to be sure dbus is started too. Mentioning it juuuuuust in case…
HAMMER2 is now available by default in DragonFly, and can be used in the installation process. (It was possible, but manual, before.) The next DragonFly release should be soon.