A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
DragonFly has had binutils 2.24 and 2.25 both available for some time. 2.24 has been taken out and replaced by binutils 2.27, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas.
The 2.25 version was and still is installed by default. If you want to try out 2.27 instead, WORLD_BINUTILSVER=binutils227 is what you need. I didn’t test that, of course. The binutils changelog will tell you what’s different in 2.27.
Even the U.S. holiday doesn’t stop the regular posting of BSDNow episodes. #169 is up now. I like the Let’s Encrypt vs. the FreeBSD cluster story, cause that’s an interesting and intricate problem.
UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.
Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.
It took me three edits of this post to spell “Salvador” correctly.
Your unrelated food link of the week: Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook. (It’s getting reprinted.)
A much more well-rounded crop of BSD links this week.
This week’s BSDNow episode is almost all FreeBSD, all the time. No interview subject this week. I’m going by the written summary because the video is showing as private… but maybe I’m catching it just before posting?
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.
SemiBUG is meeting tomorrow; Joe Gidi will present on managing Android devices with BSD. My assumption is that it will be at Altair Engineering, in Troy, MI, again.
The January meeting will be Michael W. Lucas talking about Ansible. (Dunno if there’s a December meeting planned.)
Some of this is overflow from last week.
Started out with a short list, but I managed to find some extra links by Friday.
Imre Vadasz is working on full-offload scan support for wlan, imported from FreeBSD. That doesn’t change much from a user point of view, other that (I assume) reducing load and power usage a tiny amount. I’m reinforcing something most people don’t think about: there’s tiny computers inside your computer with their own firmware and processors, that you don’t directly control.
I’ve been on the road all week, so it seems like I just posted about the last episode. BSDNow 167 is online, and it returns to the interview format. Scott Long of Netflix is interviewed. He’s part of the reason most of the Internet runs through BSD.
If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.
Because of libressl, nc(1) is now available in the base DragonFly system. It was already available through dports, but it’s such a flexible tool that this is worth mentioning.
If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.
There’s got to be something surprising and/or useful for you in this week’s links; they are gloriously eclectic.
Your unrelated browser game of the week: Epitaph. (via)
Several pfSense links this week, which by complete coincidence is the same week that I’ve been adding network cards to my older pfSense devices at work to create radio links.
One of my favorite things: when someone just appears out of nowhere and says, “I needed a change to my software so I did it and here it is to share”. Harald Brinkhof wandered into DragonFly and the first thing he did was update support for trackpads.
BSDNow 166: pot jokes! No interview, but lots of topics.
It’s now possible to put the /boot of your DragonFly system in the ‘a’ partition of a disklabel. It’s perhaps not major, but it’s another step in EFI support. EFI installs are possible now – if you do it manually.