Category: Committed Code

John Marino updated wpa_supplicant (in dports).  He then suggested moving it out of base into dports, so that it could be updated independently of the base system.  (this update, for instance, took years.)   Since wpa_supplicant is necessary to get some systems online – and it can’t be installed if missing if you don’t have a network link – it may be too risky.  I think other packages could be moved out, myself.

Robin Hahling volunteered to update OpenSSH in DragonFly, which is good news.  It’s a jump from version 6.1 to 6.7, so there’s some feature changes.  tcpwrappers support is gone, for instance.  If you have a reason to object to this change, speak up now.

John Marino has upgraded gcc, libedit, xz, and grep in DragonFly.  Also, tzdata has jumped from version 2014e to 2014h, thanks to Sascha Wildner.

Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent changes to UDP in DragonFly mention some performance gains to sheer packet count.

You can now see the packets, bytes, and drops in altq by using the -altq arg to systat, thanks to this recent commit from Matthew Dillon.

This very long commit message from Sepherosa Ziehau details the UDP changes he’s made.  It’s mostly technical details, but at the end he mentions this little tidbit:

“For ‘kq_connect_client -u’ test, this commit gives 400% performance improvement (31Kconns/s -> 160Kconns/s).”

You can now start moused with an argument, so it will look at the right device.  In most cases, I imagine “/etc/rc.d/moused start ums0” will be what anyone wants.  Credit to Michael Neumann for the update.  Perhaps moused_flags="ums0" will do it too?  I haven’t tried yet.

This will overwrite your /etc/devd.conf.

DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully.  This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link.  Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.

Thanks to Zachary Crownover, rcreload is available in DragonFly.  (It’s always good to see a new contributor name.)

Nuno Antunes brought in a significant number of fixes for libradius.  He’s been doing other work recently on netgraph7 support, so I’m linking to this as a ‘signpost’ commit.

DRM (Direct Rendering, not Digital Rights) on DragonFly will normally eat all the memory it thinks it needs.  However, vm.dma_reserved can now be set to a fixed limit in /boot/loader.conf.   By default, vm.dma_reserved on DragonFly is set to 16M, and can be set higher.  I think this is necessary when running higher-resolution screens… Don’t quote me on that, though.

Alex Hornung has added a ChaCha algorithms and Fortuna-based CSPRNG to DragonFly’s random device.  You can pick what runs with the sysctl kern.rand_mode, and some other changes.

Predrag Punosevac noticed that turning on pf was slowing his machine down.  Rearranging the rules fixed a lot of it for him.  However, Matthew Dillon decided it was time to make pf work concurrently instead of in a single thread, and 24 hours later, it does.  Quick, someone benchmark this!

Sepherosa Ziehau implemented a UDP echo response tool, which not surprisingly meant he also had some UDP performance improvements.  As he points out in the commit, it makes lockless firewall state tables possible.

The obvious joke should be “how can you tell?”  Anyway, the csprng in DragonFly has been updated and IBAA is being used more often, and there’s more updates on the way.