I noted commits about this before, but here’s the instructions: how to use DragonFly on a Macbook Pro with dual GPUs.
There’s an update for Radeon DRM that matches it up (mostly) to what’s in Linux kernel 4.7.10. If it gives you problems, there’s some workarounds. Remember, this is in DragonFly-current, so anyone running 4.8 is unaffected.
I am late in mentioning this, because it was added just before the DragonFly 4.8 branch: there’s a new ‘efisetup(8)‘ script added to DragonFly. Use to to perform a complete a UEFI-bootable installation to a given disk.
Now that we’re past the DragonFly 4.8 release, Francois Tigeot has added an update to the i915 driver, bringing it to match what’s in the Linux 4.7.10 kernel. He also committed Peeter Must’s port of the vga_switcheroo module.
Matthew Dillon picked up a number of different NVMe SSD drives, and tested them. He wrote up the entire test, but the immediate summary is: buy Samsung.
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.