I’ve seen a similar config other places, but it never hurts to note: scrolling in X requires just a few xorg config lines.
Following up on an earlier post, the new servers for DragonFly are in place. The old 40-core machine used for bulk build, monster, is being retired. The power efficiency of the new machines is startling. Incidentally, this is where donations go – infrastructure.
Taken from IRC: “DFBEADM(1) A Boot Environment Manager for HAMMER2“. This could be fun! Here’s the users@ post to match.
Matthew Dillon posted an extensive writeup about the hardware changes for dragonflybsd.org; price to performance ratio has been improving so much for multiprocessor machines that we can jump forward both for hosting hardware and for a testbed.
He also mentions his immediate thoughts on what to tackle next, since SMP has been so relentless improved in DragonFly. It resulted in a very long conversational chain as people weighed in with opinions, so I’ve held off posting it until the conversation finished. (I chimed in too.)
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one. It’s apparently similar to usched(8).
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
I’ve mentioned dbus and DragonFly a few times; here’s one of those “you will eventually do this” tidbits: if for some reason you are installing it for the first time, remember to start it with the rc script.
Who can recommend a dynamic DNS service? (I’d like to know from direct experience, not Googling.) I’ve been using Dyn for years, but they’ve been unintelligibly merged into the Oracle behemoth, and I need to change.
- Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar. (via)
- Trajectories for the future of software. (also via)
- Chain Letter Evolution. (via)
- The PDP-7 Where Unix Began. (via)
- Decoded: Rogue. This is strangely … readable? (via)
- fern: a curses-based mastodon client. (via)
- ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception, ARPANET, Part 2: The Packet, and ARPANET, Part 3: The Subnet. Another very readable article. (via)
- A generation of hip-hop was given away for free. Can it be archived? (via)
- Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer: 10.3 seconds per hash. More important, that’s the only AGC in the world.
- Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Eighteen – Drubbings In The Deep.
You’re probably used to the ‘make buildworld; make buildkernel; make installkernel; etc etc’ dance on each upgrade at this point. ‘Tse’ has created a script that rolls that all up into a single action.
In a larger users@ thread about multiple BSD development systems and how to set them up, I spied this tip on making multiple local virtual machines all reachable via SSH.
Shamelessly copied from my own users@ post: I tagged 5.6.1 and built it earlier today. This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm. The ISO should be showing up on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org in the next 20 minutes or so, or you can rebuild using the normal process on an existing 5.6 system:
cd /usr/src git pull make buildworld make buildkernel make installkernel make installworld make upgrade
If you are still on 5.4 or earlier, you need to bring in 5.6 sources, which is noted in the 5.6.0 announcement.
OPIE was disabled recently in DragonFly. Now that the 5.6 release is out, it has been removed. This may require manual intervention if you are on DragonFly-master (i.e. 5.5. or 5.7) and update in the next day or two. This need to fiddle with it will go away soon with changes to ‘make upgrade’; I will mention it when I see it.
This won’t affect anyone running 5.4 or 5.6. It’s only in development.
DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released. This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2. Matthew Dillon did some informal testing of the VM improvements, and posted results to the users@ list.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading (pay no attention to my 5.4 typo), as do the release notes.
ISO and IMG files of DragonFly 5.6rc1 should start showing up at mirrors over the next few hours. This is the release candidate, not the release, so don’t install unless you want to test.
Thanks to a suggestion from Lassi Kortela, man.dragonflybsd.org now exists and takes you directly to the online man page interface, similar to man.(free/net/open)bsd.org.
A question on starting up a virtual kernel on DragonFly and sticking it in the background led to some suggestions – follow the thread.
NYCBUG is meeting at Suspenders, tomorrow. The announcement has details. Go, if you are near.