If you’re running DragonFly 2.4 on amd64, you may have noticed trouble with USB drives or separate issues with ACPI. Both seem to be fixed by the same commit. It’s been merged to the 2.4 branch, so updating on that branch will get the fixes without moving to 2.5.
Some months ago, Nikita Glukhov started working on a port of tmpfs to DragonFly. It’s incomplete, but Alex Hornung has put together a nice summary and is looking for someone to take it up again. I’d sure like to see it active again; it’s much better than mfs.
DragonFly’s newest committer is Jordan Gordeev, whose name may already be familiar. He’s the student behind the 2008/2009 Summer of Code projects for AMD64 support in DragonFly. You’ll notice the 2.4 release has a 64-bit version, in no small part due to his effort. Welcome Jordan!
There’s now a Git repo of pkgsrc. This is just a copy from cvs every 15 minutes, so it won’t allow changes back to pkgsrc, but it’s much faster to download via git than it is via cvs.
If you had any trouble with the dramatic changes in the 2.4 page, there’s a page on the DragonFly BSD site that lists possible workarounds.
The 2.4 release of DragonFly is out. This is a major release, with a lot of new features packed in, so read the release notes carefully. There’s a 64-bit experimental version, too
By the way, please use a mirror. Avalon is a good one, as is chlamydia.
Updating steps I used after the cut.
Well, technically, they are 2.3.1+ packages, but they will work fine on 2.4 and can be installed via pkg_radd.
The 2.4 release has been branched, and the release ISO should be available Wednesday.
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
If you’re running 10G Ethernet, Matthew Dillon’s turned on the inflight limiter by default, which should help keep your system from being overwhelmed if it’s not handling the greater volume of packets. If you’re not running 10G Ethernet, this shouldn’t affect you. If only we all could be so lucky.
The packages directory on avalon.dragonflybsd.org now has a i386 directory and an amd64 directory. I’ve changed pkg_search and pkg_radd to base their search/retrieval on processor arch; this means that once we have pkgsrc packages built on a 64-bit platform, they will be accessible.
If you back up the pseudo-file-systems (PFS) on your Hammer volume to a non-Hammer disk, and then need to restore them to a new Hammer volume, and then realize you forgot to write down the shared-uuid, well, then, YONETANI Tomokazu has a patch for you. I haven’t seen this committed yet, but it appears valuable.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert added a tool, chkmoddeps, which checks for missing modules that are required by other modules. Useful if you are working with the kernel.
Alex Hornung has added support for ATA command passthrough. As a pleasant side effect, smartmontools works with AHCI again.
Matthew Dillon’s changed the scheduler to fix a problem with small writes taking longer than they should. This should have a noticable, though not necessarily perfect effect on interactivity, especially for those using DragonFly as a desktop.
Alexander Polakov has made it possible to use UTF8 as the default system encoding, which makes non-ASCII characters viewable everywhere. It makes a full buildworld/buildkernel process necessary. He also did it without making /bin and /sbin dynamic, which is good news for anyone who might happen to lose /usr.
Mahdi Montazeri sent in the URL to another new BSD site: irbsd.com. It’s a generic web framework reposting RSS feeds from other people, without linking back to the originals, so nothing new.
Matthew Dillon posted the results of a full bulk build of pkgsrc on a 64-bit DragonFly system; the success rate was relatively high for a new platform and pkgsrc-current. The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities will need some changes.