libpcap has been updated in DragonFly by Matthew Dillon, and file has been updated by Peter Avalos.
ATM support is gone in DragonFly, and frankly, I’m surprised it was still there.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to version 20140424. Will that help you? Perhaps with newer motherboards; otherwise check the changelog.
Here’s the announcement from Francois Tigeot: DragonFly now uses dynamic binaries in the root filesystem. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if on 3.7 and upgrading.
DragonFly now has a ‘rescue’ system added in, which also functions as a way to mount encrypted filesystems. Does PAM work yet? I don’t know; I may be linking to this earlier than I need to.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Sascha Wildner brought in ACPICA 20140214, and his commit message has a list of the updates.
See the announcement, and the commit. I’m not totally sure what this affects.
There seems to be a lot of ACPI-related updates lately: Sascha Wildner has updated ACPICA in DragonFly to what I think is the very latest version. See his commit for the differences.
John Marino updated daemon(8) on DragonFly. For some reason, I didn’t know it was a standalone program. I knew about the idea of daemons as helpers based inside the computer, which is why so many server programs end with a ‘d’ – sshd, ftpd, and so on. Inexplicably, I never actually saw the program itself.
Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.
Franco Fitchner has updated mdocml in DragonFly to 1.12.3. The changelog is right on the front page of the vendor site.
Update: Undeadly has a nice summary of the changes.
Matthew Dillon wrote a roundup post summarizing all the changes he’s made to DragonFly to improve SMP performance in the last few weeks. He’s removed almost all contention from DragonFly. This means better performance, scaling upward depending on the number of processors.
‘monster’, the system that builds all 20,000 items in dports, can complete the run in 15 hours. Compare this to the 2 weeks it used to take me to build the 12,000 packages in pkgsrc. This is admittedly on different hardware and different packaging systems, but it gives a sense of the scale of the improvement.
The ‘poweroff’ command, the equivalent of ‘halt -p’, has been added based on a suggestion from Robin Hahling.
Matthew Dillon was using poudriere, the dports build tool, on a 48-core system. Poudriere was building all 20,000+ dports, so the machine was quite busy. He decided to get rid of as much contention as possible, and he’s listed all the ways DragonFly’s been streamlined by these efforts. We need to revisit some of our previous benchmarks…