If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.
If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.
One of my favorite things: when someone just appears out of nowhere and says, “I needed a change to my software so I did it and here it is to share”. Harald Brinkhof wandered into DragonFly and the first thing he did was update support for trackpads.
It looks like I summarized iwm(4) updates too early, cause Imre Vadasz added an actual powersave option. I’d like to see someone with a power meter do some before-and-after testing.
It’s been a quiet week, but there’s some activity: Imre Vadasz has been committing many improvements to iwm(4). They haven’t been standalone enough for me to build a post around, but the most recent enables a low-power scan mode.
If you had trouble getting your laptop’s touchpad to work under DragonFly, try again. (If you are running DragonFly-current)
For those running DragonFly 4.7, there’s new firmware for all iwm(4) devices. Also, you can get temperature readings off the iwm wireless device now, if I’m reading this correctly.
3D printing on DragonFly with a Fabrikator? Yep, it works. (from jh32 on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Matthew Dillon has added powerd, a utility that will automatically step down processor speed based on reported temperature. The range is configurable, and there’s some other nice-to-have features. This will save your CPU from melting, and probably also your thighs from being burned.
karu.pruun has been trying to get a Macbook’s hybrid graphics card to work in DragonFly. He’s been working on a gmux driver, but it needs a framework like Linux’s switcheroo. If this topic interests you, help him out.
Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal ‘coding language’, called AML? I did not, but it’s in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.
Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!
If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.
I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)
karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?
That’s one tip per subject, really. If you need to set up a ‘video’ group for xorg, here’s the one-liner to do so. If PulseAudio annoys you, which is not uncommon, ‘chmod -x /usr/local/bin/pulseaudio’ and it’ll go away.
If you have a NVMe chipset under DragonFly, you now can use a special utility to retrieve status information: nvmectl. Right now, only ‘info’ is implemented.
This is limited to some users of specific Intel video chipsets, but: if you get odd screen artifacts in X, the ‘vesa’ driver may work just fine for you. Or turn acceleration off. Or set ‘drm.i915.enable_execlists=0’ according to zrj on #dragonflybsd.
(Updated to reflect all the answers in the thread and elsewhere.)