DragonFly has historically performed very well with NFS. I don’t have hard numbers to point at (an interesting exercise if someone wanted it), but in any case: DragonFly now can tune up to a much larger iosize, which means better NFS performance. DragonFly <-> DragonFly NFS performance can now max out a GigE link, or with anything else that can handle the larger iosize. That plus additional readahead, also in that commit, means easier netboots.
Since DragonFly 4.4 has been branched, bleeding-edge DragonFly is now at version 4.5. As John Marino detailed in his post, that means pkg on 4.5 systems will look in a new place for downloads. (“dragonfly:4.6:x86:64”, since it always uses even numbers) To cover for this, set ABI to point at DragonFly 4.4 packages in pkg.conf for now. They’re freshly built and functionally the same, anyway. Once there’s a 4.6 download path, that ABI setting can be removed. Packages for DragonFly-current are available now and probably at the mirrors by the time this posts.
Update: as John Marino pointed out to me, anyone on DragonFly-master who upgrades now will be at version 4.5. This means pkg will get the new (4.5) packages on the next pkg upgrade. That means a mix of old and new packages unless you either reinstall anything (pkg update -f) or hardcode the 4.4 download path until you are ready to switch everything.
So: DragonFly-current users should either hardcode the 4.4 path for now or force an pkg upgrade for everything. DragonFly 4.2-release users are unaffected.
Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. isn’t slowing down BSDNow, cause there’s a new episode up with Bryan Cantrill talking about the awfulness that is Linux interfaces, along with a bunch of summary news items written out on the page.
The next release of DragonFly is coming due, since it’s been 6 months. I just tagged 4.4RC, and I’ll have an image built soon. Current estimate is that we’ll have the 4.4-RELEASE at the end of the month.
If you are on bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3), you will need to rebuild both kernel and world to keep them in sync, after Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit. This won’t affect you at all if you are on 4.2.x.
I don’t think I linked to this anywhere else: Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System? By Siju George, at BSD Magazine.
It’s Thursday and there’s a new BSDNow: Controlling the Transmissions. The interview this week is with Hiren Panchasara, about “improving TCP”, though I haven’t yet listened to it for details. There’s also the normal news roundup.
If you are using clang with DragonFly, and you want to always run the newest version, you can set options in compilers.conf, and use ‘clangnext‘.
If for some reason you are seeing messages about your CPU overheating – and you know it is not, there’s a solution. Disable coretemp messages.
Note that if your CPU is actually overheating, turning these messages off won’t help. Don’t want anyone to be surprised when their computer melts…
The Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative is using DragonFly (and FreeBSD) as part of their library setup, and Michael Wilson, the project coordinator sent a note to users@ describing this. They are looking to spread through the continent, so get in contact if you want to be part of the project.
BSDNow 110 is now available. It’s back to the text summary format, so I can tell you easily that it includes an interview with Benno Rice, about Isilon and their interactions with FreeBSD.
NYCBUG is having “true(1) and false(1), The Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm, NYC*BUG Mix Tape Edition” happen this Wednesday the 7th. You may remember a similar event at the end of August. This will be led by George Brocklehurst from the original event, with NYCBUG members present. If you missed the previous one, try this out – by all accounts, these code readings are inordinately fun.
The package x11-themes/dragonfly-wallpapers exists, thanks to John Marino, and gives you DragonFly-themed backgrounds in KDE. Or probably any other window manager, if you install it and point your wm at the directory.
Update: John Marino helpfully posted a link to the images. It’s not yet built as a binary, but it’s not exactly time-consuming to build from source.
It has finally happened: There’s no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate, at least for ARIN – and that’s going to affect most people reading this. Ask your ISP for IPv6 access. The next step is being forced to implement either wonky 6to4 mappings, or just plain IPv6 networks.
If you happen to still be running DragonFly 4.0 – that’s two releases ago and not supported – you may be noticing less ports are building. There’s been enough significant changes in DragonFly since that release that it’s reducing the number of buildable ports.
DragonFly 4.0 to 4.2 is not a difficult jump, so jump when you can. The converse of this, of course, is that there’s even more building on 4.2 and DragonFly-current.
I mentioned Endless Sky in the last Lazy Reading post as a game that might run on DragonFly. ‘Romick’ took that as a challenge and got it working; he’s posted the steps he took so that anyone else can do so.
John Marino’s committed libc versioning. He has a post describing it, along with a note that anyone DragonFly-current should do a full buildworld/kernel and also update all installed packages. (Update: those new packages are on the way.)
BSDNow 106 is up. The interview is with Nigel Williams about, you guessed it, multipath TCP. There’s the normal roundup and not a pun to be seen anywhere. I feel so confused!
If you missed last night’s DNSSEC presentation at CDBUG, here’s the slides.