Jim Keenan is speaking tomorrow at the NYC Perlmongers meeting about testing on non-Linux platforms. i.e. BSD. Go, if you are near.
Welcome the newest committer to DragonFly: Aaron LI!
If no surprises happen, the release candidate for DragonFly 5.2 will be built this weekend.
Aaron LI wrote a tool to update a running DragonFly system from an existing image – release or snapshot. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s very promising. It’s up on Github so if this gets you excited, you know what to do.
A new DragonFly user found setting keybell=”visual” in rc.conf caused a crash on the next terminal beep. In this case, the user is Deaf and so prefers something other than an auditory bell. The issue is fixed in development and release, but I always like seeing variations on “many eyes make bugs shallow“.
Oh, hey, that’s a nice thing to say. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Another BSD User Group event tomorrow, the 7th: HELBUG, a brand new BUG starting in Helsinki, Finland. The announcement has details on where to find it and what they’ll be doing. Go, if you are near.
This Wednesday, NYCBUG has Christos Zoulas speaking on “Reproducible Builds on NetBSD“. See the announcement for details. Go, if you are near New York City.
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.