I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
Aaron LI has brought dhcpcd into DragonFly-current, as a replacement to dhclient(8) and rtsold(8). dhclient does support IPv6 but it’s bundled with server and BIND applications, so it’s harder to support.
Aaron LI’s added ip6addrctl(8) to DragonFly; on by default. There should be a man page entry for it within a couple hours, online.
arp(8) can now be limited to a particular interface on DragonFly; a minor change but I mention it because otherwise you may not realize it.
There’s a fix for memory contention in NUMA (meaning Threadripper in this case) configurations on DragonFly; the commit has before-and-after numbers. They are somewhat context-free, so I can’t easily translate to what this means for performance.
Matthew Dillon’s moved tty_token from a global to per-CPU token in most cases in DragonFly. This is good for performance as with any global->local shift, but I can’t tell you what aspect it improves.
Something I didn’t know existed but makes sense now that I do: a virtualized randomness device, added to DragonFly. Entropy is usually provided through hardware, so of course you’d need something for it in a VM.
If your kernel panics, the current state of memory can show why. That memory dump needs to be saved somewhere. ‘dumpon’ is the command to specify the device that will keep it. If you want to turn it off, you end up using the odd syntax ‘dumpon off’. Thanks to Aaron Li, there’s now a linguistically-sane command: ‘dumpoff’.
As a fix for wpa_supplicant, the upper limit on socket datagrams has been increased. What else does this affect? We’ll find out the hard way, which is why I mention it here.
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.
If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems. It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process. I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.
Intel’s ACPICA 20180810 is now in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner. Nothing really user-affecting, but it does fix some memory leaks. You can tell it’s very new just by the version number.
If you have a mangled HAMMER2 disk, and you have inodes that are clearly mangled (the built-in CRCs don’t match), you can now remove them manually. This seems like Hole Hawg territory…
As part of a recent update to OpenPAM, you can now use ed25519 in pam_ssh. My perception is that ed25519 is one of the better options to pick.
Sascha Wildner has brought in the NetBSD version of mtree(8), as groundwork for some other changes. There’s little user effect at this point, but it’s worth being familiar with mtree as a tool. Take a look at the man page, especially the section on trojan horse detection under EXAMPLES.