Roy Marples has brought in version 8.0.4 of dhcpcd(8); it’s definitely up to date since he’s the author. It does DHCP, DHCPv6, and IPv4LL/ZeroConf, the last of which I’ve only seen on Apple machines before. Someone want to try Network Configurator with it?
Jails on DragonFly now have their own sysctl tree, inherited from defaults. And are no longer MPLOCKed.
First, history: DragonFly has had binaries of dports available for download for quite some time. These were originally built using poudriere, and then using the synth tool put together by John Marino. Synth worked both to build all software in dports, and as a way to test DragonFly’s SMP capability under extreme load.
Matthew Dillon is working on a new version, called dsynth. It is available now but not yet part of the build. He’s been working quickly on it and there’s plenty more commits than what I have linked here. It’s already led to finding more high-load fixes.
Here’s something I haven’t see before: at the time of me typing this, there are commits in DragonFly, FreeBSD, and I assume NetBSD (haven’t found the commit), but the 2019-5612 CVE entry is still shown as reserved and not public. This may change by the time you read this article, of course.
Update: the original source, found by an intrepid reader.
Roy Marples, the ‘upstream‘ for dhcpcd(8), noticed that DragonFly was working with it as a dhclient/rtsold replacement, but the process wasn’t complete. So … welcome new committer!
DragonFly has a utility called kcollect(8), for gathering about the last day’s worth of kernel statistics. It recently gained some extra flags and details, and should work well if you want to collect stats in a low-impact way.
This slipped in just before the 5.6 release, and I thought I had already noted it: DragonFly now defaults to HAMMER2 for disks during install, instead of HAMMER1.
There’s now a read-only sysctl ‘jail.jailed’ that can be checked to see if the current environment is running within a jail; useful for scripts that should not run in that environment, etc. I link to it mostly because it’s an odd sort of meta-signifier of reality, like being awake or in a waking dream, and that entertains me.
Aaron LI’s fixed a bug in rconfig tag names. This is minor, but I think rconfig(8) is a very powerful and underappreciated utility, so I point it out whenever possible.
Thanks to Aaron LI, st (“suckless terminal” I assume) is supported in termcap in DragonFly.
DragonFly’s tcp keepalive was changed from milliseconds to seconds. This happened in both DragonFly-current and in the 5.6 release, and it changes the networking API, which means a dports rebuild is needed… or a pkg upgrade, for which happily all packages have been rebuilt. So, on your next update of the system, be sure to update packages too.
The module formerly known as ‘radeonkms’ is now just plain ‘radeon’. There have been changes in other commits, but this is the only usage change.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s scheduling system His further tests show an improvement in basic forking.
There’s several bug fixes that have gone into DragonFly over the past few days, in an attempt to track down an odd bug. They’ve been committed to 5.6, too, so you can pick them up if you update.
I imagine this will turn into a 5.6.2 release, but not until we find the cause of the error mentioned in that link.
You’ll all be happy to know ACPI errors are less noisy now. (And it was updated to 20190509, before the 5.6 release.)
Matthew Dillon’s made a change to the DragonFly kernel that could be disruptive, but will help make sure chromium runs. If you update after this point, make sure to update your dports, too, just to be sure everything is in sync. This applies to 5.6 and 5.7.
Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.
DragonFly now has retpoline turned on (stats included in that link) as a side effect of having gcc-8 as default, and SMAP/SMEP are also supported. I enjoy just saying these words out loud. SMEP SMEP SMEP SMEPSMEPSMEPSMEP.
I’m still backlogged, so here’s a May 14th mitigation in DragonFly for MDS attacks possible with Intel CPUs from 2011 onward. It’s in the current release.