There’s the DragonFly syntax for loader hints, and there’s the FreeBSD syntax. If you happen to use the FreeBSD syntax on DragonFly, it’ll still work.
Thanks to Imre Vadasz, the virtio driver in DragonFly now has PCI MSI-X support. This should help with virtual performance, though I say that on principle, not with any actual numbers to back it up.
Are you on DragonFly-master? Are you using a Realtek network device? Sepherosa Ziehau has an update he would like you to test.
This recent CPU frequency change will make your Skylake-using laptop much easier to deal with. Apparently this is a common problem with Skylake? (links via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
There will be pizza pie, and Raspberry Pi, for installing BSD, at the next KnoxBUG meeting, tomorrow, for those near Tennessee.
Note that it was originally scheduled for Tuesday and had to be moved up a night because of a conflict – so your schedule has changed even if you were already planning to go.
Apparently there’s a quirk to the way Ricoh cameras format memory cards that made them unreadable on DragonFly. They’re readable now. I link this not because I think it affects many people, but because it’s such a strangely specific problem.
A note from Sepherosa Ziehau explains how you can check for Intel Turbo Boost effect on DragonFly, or at least see your current frequency if you’re using AMD.
BSDNow’s episode of the week has a number of Raspberry Pi-specific items, plus a discussion of iocage which I was not familiar with.
The DragonFly installer now supports UEFI directly. There’s a uefi(8) man page now, and there’s even rconfig support, though not enough people realize how awesome rconfig(8) can be.
The i915 driver has been updated to match Linux 4.6 – this is of most benefit to the owners of newest hardware, but the commit message lists what has changed, for owners of Haswell series GPUs and later.
That’s Non-Uniform Memory Access, to disambiguate. Matthew Dillon’s changing how memory is allocated in DragonFly. NUMA is been a long-discussed and complex topic for a long time, so I will point at the initial commits and call it “a developing situation”.
If you have a NVMe-capable EFI BIOS on your machine, you should be able to safely install DragonFly, using these instructions from Matthew Dillon. It’s not part of the installer, yet.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s swap handling, and his explanation notes that the theoretical max swap space is now 32 terabytes. He even had to change field sizes to accommodate the new, bigger numbers.
For anyone with a newer CPU – Broadwell, Skylake, etc. – there was a memory leak in the video driver. It would take several weeks of continuous operation to have an effect, but in any case, it’s fixed. This only affected DragonFly 4.7 users with the appropriate CPUS and the Intel video driver.
There’s been some updates to the AHCI driver. Matthew Dillon outlined the changes, with the biggest one being support for FIS Based Switching. FBS is the ability to send simultaneous streams of data to and from multiple drives on a port multiplier. Support for it is rare and quirky, but it should significantly improve throughput on a compatible port multipler. Read his writeup for details, including on how to back up your kernel.
You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn’t, Matthew Dillon’s updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.
I know the title’s not that helpful, but I like rhyming. The i915 driver in DragonFly now matches what’s in the Linux 4.5 kernel, for a more complete description. (Here’s the Linux changelog to match.) This is good news for anyone with Skylake, Broxton, or Kabylake processors.
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.
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.
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.