A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Something I’ve wanted for a long time: DragonFly stickers. Or ‘decals’, if you want to sound fancier. Markus Pfeiffer has them set up on Stickermule.
I just created an account there, and apparently I can supply a referral link which gets you and me both a $10 credit, if you use that. It’ll make you sign up, then you’ll probably have to go back in with the direct link for the DragonFly sticker.
BSDNow 096 has the usual new links, even more BSDCan 2015 video links, and an interview with Jun Ebihara about some of NetBSD’s lesser-known architectures.
(I like trying to guess the interview subject from each week’s obscure title; I was going to guess RetroBSD… which would make a good topic to explore.)
There’s a minor update for DragonFly 4.2 – this covers a problem with i915 support, so it’s worth upgrading if you have an Intel video chipset.
DragonFly 4.2 is officially released! You can go to the 4.2 release page for details, go to the mirrors page to download, or read my users@ post for upgrade steps.
Update: news stories and commentary seen on lobste.rs, Hacker News, and linux.fr.
If you wanted to try IPFW3 and NAT, nans_nans1 has done the experimentation for you, and wrote down the steps.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 4.0.6 ISO and .img files. (Does that capitalization make sense?) They should be available at your nearest mirror, or will be shortly. I am still working on the 4.2 release candidate images.
This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
If you are using a DragonFly system with accelerated video, and you have noticed that you can’t return to a text console after exiting xorg – Sascha Wildner/Imre Vadasz have a branch for you to try. Please do so if you have time and are on master; this is the last big item to fix before the next release.
That’s Non Uniform Memory Architecture, and John Baldwin is talking about how it works on FreeBSD, tonight/now, in New York City for NYCBUG. There’s several more events this month with NYCBUG, so look at the announcement for tonight’s location and more dates.
If you were running a version of DragonFly 4.1 (i.e. the master version, not release) built between the 20th and 25th, rebuild. There’s a UFS bug introduced in that short timeframe.
If you are running 4.0.x release or built your version of DragonFly-master outside of that date range – you are unaffected.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where the DragonFly website is hosted, is temporarily down while a disk is replaced. Images and binary packages are still available.
Jesse Wattenbarger wrote in with his success story of switching to DragonFly, both for server and desktop. Of note is his noticeable speedup with swapcache.
If you’re running DragonFly-master and you have an Intel video chipset, Francois Tigeot has an update for you. It brings accelerated Intel video up to match the Linux 3.14 version, adds Broadwell chipset support, and should generally improve performance. He lists how to test right in the message.
DragonFly now has GCC 5.1 release. If you are running DragonFly master (i.e. 4.1), you’ll probably want to both rebuild world and kernel, and update your packages so they all match. There’s already packages built with GCC 5.1, so binary package upgrades can happen quickly. There’s GCC 4.7 packages still available if you aren’t making the jump yet.
If you’re on DragonFly 4.0.x – nothing’s changed.
Here’s some comments from Matthew Dillon on page coloring in DragonFly; a topic that comes up every year for some reason.
The release candidate for GCC5 (5.1.0) is out, and it’s in DragonFly too. It’s not yet switched over to run as the default – that’ll require the release.
The default compiler in DragonFly is going to change over from GCC 4.7 to GCC 5.x very soon, to match the GCC 5.1 release. This means that packages built for DragonFly-master won’t be compatible with the old ones. You will need to reinstall packages when you next ‘pkg install’. John Marino has an extensive writeup detailing what’s needed, and the actual change is some days off.
If you are using DragonFly 4.0.x (the release), this doesn’t affect you at all.
I have had trouble with my daily/weekly periodic reports never making it to my GMail account. Sascha Wildner pointed out to me that periodic.conf has its own answer already:
daily_output=”/var/log/daily.log”
daily_status_security_output=”/var/log/security.log”
weekly_output=”/var/log/weekly.log”
monthly_output=”/var/log/monthly.log”
… and newsyslog is already set to take care of them. There’s more in the periodic.conf man page.
There’s been some linking to the updated HAMMER2 design document. The Reddit link doesn’t have anything specific, but the Hacker News one has some details (including a credit code!) for installing DragonFly on a Vultr VPS.