Some time back, Ján Su?an fixed up some firmware issues on DragonFly. He’s published a first stab at attaching firmware information to files; it’s up for review now and he’d like feedback. Please tell him what you think, if you’re interested in this topic.
If you were having trouble booting a DragonFly installer – or rather, you could boot but never find a disk to install on, this commit adding support for Sunrise Point, Lewisburg, Union Point, and Cavium ThunderX chipsets may fix your issue.
Two links I yoinked from conversation in EFNet #dragonflybsd: there’s a “powersave” power management page on dragonflybsd.org that for some reason wasn’t linked in the main documentation page. I fixed that, and you may want to look at it and change your mwait settings, or look at the corepower(4) module. (From ivadasz’s comments; thanks!)
There’s also an older page on DragonFly and grub2 that may be interesting to anyone looking to boot. (From aly’s comments; thanks!)
An oddly uplifting batch of BSD stories this week.
- Tor on OpenBSD, part 5 and part 6.
- Slides and transcript and code from the November NYCBUG meeting. (I wish all BUG meetings had this.)
- MeatBSD, the December SEMIBUG meeting, is a meetup at a local meat-heavy restaurant, December 18th. Plan for it now, cause you need to reserve a seat.
- Steam Autumn Sale Highlights for OpenBSD.
- OPNsense 18.7.8 released.
- GhostBSD 18.10 Now Available. (via)
- Abandon Linux – Move to FreeBSD or Illumos. A pro-ZFS item, which means plenty of filesystem comments at the source link. (via)
- Debugging rcctl in OpenBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD for Thanksgiving. This is a nice story to hear. (via)
- Stardew Valley on FreeBSD. (via)
- Cheap BSD-friendly notebook? Thinkpads thinkpads stinkpads thinkpads. (via)
If you happen to have a Intel Centrino advanced 6035 wireless card, it now works on DragonFly, thanks to Tobias Heilig.
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
There’s a section of the DragonFly website (a wiki) that records success with various laptops and DragonFly. The latest addition: Lenovo IdeaPad Y500.
arp(8) can now be limited to a particular interface on DragonFly; a minor change but I mention it because otherwise you may not realize it.
I should have mentioned this before, but: here’s how to use the virtio balloon memory driver in DragonFly, which is timely because it’s now in base.
I like to repeat this from time to time: loading the appropriate sound driver on DragonFly consists of loading all the sound kernel modules and seeing which one sticks, in dmesg . Chances are good it’s snd_hda anyway.
Did you use the digi(4), rp(4) and si(4) serial device drivers in DragonFly? I don’t think so, but you definitely can’t now.
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, ‘ddegroot’ has put together a virtio_balloon driver for handling memory usage. (An explanation of the term) Try it if you can; he wants testers.
In case it’s useful to you, here’s several laptop recommendations for DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon recently fixed a TRIM bug, where a TRIM command was being issued unconditionally, regardless of the mount flag, and duplicating the action if it was set normally. It’s fixed now. This would only have any significant slowdown on UFS, which means it would only affect installworld – the rest of your mounted volumes are HAMMER, right?
BSDNow 264 is available now and has the usual roundup of news, including discussion of Threadripper performance that I’ve avoided.
For anyone considering the purchase of a Ryzen system given the good benchmarks/power usage, here’s some discussion on users@ about which model is which.
I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
It turns out Threadripper (well, a Ryzen CPU) delivers good performance at relatively low power usage. As I sit in a room made too warm by a single desktop machine running, this lower wattage sounds pretty good to me.
Following up on the DragonFly/Threadripper benchmarks, DragonFly now has some NUMA work to accommodate the non-uniform CPU and RAM layout on those boards.
DragonFly will now run on a Threadripper 2990wx. What’s more, Matthew Dillon has published some testing results showing how power, CPU use, and memory speed all interact with these things. There’s a followup, too. I imagine these are interesting CPUs to most people, since they perform well and don’t have recent Intel-specific security problems.