Posts

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In Other BSDs for 2017/09/23

Thank goodness for overflow from last week, because I haven’t had time to read.

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Lazy Reading for 2017/09/17

I start a new job tomorrow!

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In Other BSDs for 2017/09/16

Not sure why, but there’s been a lot of BSD news the past few weeks.  I am OK with that.

Late addition: NetBSD’s New York build cluster will be offline beginning Monday for about two weeks, which means no daily NetBSD or pkgsrc builds.

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Booting, UEFI, and text consoles

I installed a DragonFly snapshot on a Lenovo x220 last night.  I went for a EFI install, even though the x220 has a “Legacy” option.  When I booted, it looked like this:

It successfully booted, but once it hit the kernel load, it started printing to the top of the screen in that lovely repeating pattern you see.

Matthew Dillon helpfully pointed out that the DRM and i915 modules needed to be loaded.  Hitting ‘9’ during the bootloader countdown got me to a prompt where I could type:

drm_load="YES"

i915_load="YES"'

kern.kms_console=1

menu

Which brought me back to the boot menu, but this time it loaded those additional modules to support the Intel video chipset – and it worked!

These lines can go in /boot/loader.conf for permanent use.

Update: accelerated X will need a different setup – see my later post.

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Lazy Reading for 2017/09/10

Whee!

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In Other BSDs for 2017/09/09

Already overflowed to next week.

 

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Kabylake NUC and DragonFly

Matthew Dillon’s been using a Kabylake NUC for a DragonFly workstation and it’s generally working out well.  It’s tiny enough to lose on a desk, in my opinion.  He added performance details and a screenshot.  The Specific Configs page has his notes, recorded, too.

Related laptop tip: If you have a Lenovo Yoga and can’t mount the drive after install, various sdhci modules may be the answer.  Update: definitely the answer.

 

 

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New system: Ravenports

John Marino has assembled a new packaging and building system.  It’s called Ravenports, and he wrote a short intro, and has a filled-out site to go look at.

This is big news, in part because he knows what he’s doing (John worked on dports and created synth) and because it’s cross-platform.  The prior work on synth is part of the reason DragonFly works so well under pressure – the “build everything as fast as possible as complete as possible” strategy makes a great stress test.

There’s no need to change software management strategies yet.  It can be used at the same time as dports, so it doesn’t necessarily change anything for the next DragonFly release.

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Lazy Reading for 2017/09/03

Seventies/Eighties computing, this week.

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In Other BSDs for 2017/09/02

Lots of links this week – so many I’ve already started next week’s post.