I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two things recently learned by Sascha Wildner’s timezone update in DragonFly: Everything (“GNU/Linux, Android, the BSDs, Chromium OS, Cygwin, AIX, iOS, BlackBerry 10, MacOS, Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, and Solaris”) uses the same time zone data, and there once was a “day of two noons“.
The switch to from OpenSSL to LibreSSL in DragonFly’s base and in dports has led to more cleanup, including the removal of an old, strange munitions/crypto import restriction. Be careful upgrading if you’re on master, though!
If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setrou
Remember I posted that LibreSSL is in base DragonFly, but not default? Well, it’s default now. You can have a system without OpenSSL at all, by rebuilding DragonFly-current and using up-to-date dports.
Update: see John’s comments for clarification: LibreSSL is default; the change is that OpenSSL isn’t even built any more. The result is still the same good news: you can have an OpenSSL-free DragonFly system now.
I don’t have it uploaded yet, but DragonFly 4.6.1 is tagged. Anyone with an existing 4.6.0 or earlier system can upgrade now. Use the 4.6 release instructions if you are unsure on how to upgrade. The 4.6.1 tag commit message has all the changes.
OpenSSL in DragonFly 4.6 has been updated to 1.0.1u. It’s time for a DragonFly 4.6.1, to catch up on this and other updates since the 4.6.0 release. I plan to work on it this weekend.
It’s now possible to start up a vkernel(7) using a COW disk, meaning copy-on-write. One image can be used and reused for multiple vkernels without changing, and all disk activity goes to memory instead.
If you had trouble getting your laptop’s touchpad to work under DragonFly, try again. (If you are running DragonFly-current)
It’s now possible to build dports using LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL. Set SSL_DEFAULT in make.conf to the appropriate port name, and start building. Use synth for fastest results, of course.
LibreSSL will eventually become the default library. This is in addition to the previously-mentioned, already-completed in DragonFly 4.7, base system switch to LibreSSL.