I always thought of cross-pollination – sharing of code between BSDs – as a good thing. This seems like the most basic way to do that: same base sh.
If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.
A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade. Update to 5.8.3 if you haven’t yet, while you are at it.
Roy Marples helped out with the news drought (for me) by committing dhcpcd 9.3.0 to DragonFly. There’s a few user-affecting changes in there.
I tagged and built 5.8.2 today, and it should be appearing on a mirror near you, momentarily. The tag commit has a list of the changes, and of course there’s a users@ post to match. It’s a bugfix release, so no major changes – but there’s plenty of little updates.
If you buy a Lenovo Yoga 500, or any laptop with an iwm(4) chipset, here’s how to get it going with DragonFly.
Here’s a recommendation (and a usage lesson) on pkg-provides, a tool for matching a file to the installed pkg that brought it. It goes with the pkglocate article some weeks ago; it seems like this should be standard functionality. Thanks to Nelson H. F. Beebe.
Recently updated in DragonFly: dhcpcd to 9.2.0, nvi2 2.1.3 to 2.2, tpm, libressl 3.1.3 to 3.1.4, TianoCore EDK II, and of course the pciconf database.
There’s a security update for ftpd(8) in DragonFly, both current and release. As the note about it says, you shouldn’t use it anyway.
Screen switching, where an xterm’s contents return to what it was before starting a full screen program, was turned on and then back off for DragonFly. It would have only affected DragonFly-current users, and even then only for a short window of time. If you encounter it anywhere else, though, here’s how to turn it off using Xresources.
You can now add something to run on first boot after install, only, on DragonFly. This is probably of most use to you if you are building a custom image.
If you want to bring in the DragonFly projects repo, the option has been added to /usr/Makefile. (cd /usr; make projects-create)
Aaron LI has rewritten calendar(1) to support Chinese (lunisolar) and Julian calendars, and along the way added support for other calendars, more options, and generally improved the program. His original source archive is available, as is his reference book.
HAMMER2 now has a ‘growfs’ directive, so if there’s room in the partition, you can expand your HAMMER2 volume to fit. Related: gpt(8) and disklabel(8) now have similar options. fdisk(8) does also.
Apparently DragonFly used to disable IOAPIC when booting in a virtual machine. This helped with some old virtual machines, but broke newer ones. It’s now enabled, which helps boot DragonFly on Google Cloud.
There’s a new option in efibootmgr(8) on DragonFly to boot into firmware, on next boot. You may find this useful.
If you’ve got a newer i219 ethernet chipset – it’s now supported in DragonFly.
ncurses has been upgraded from 6.0 to 6.2 in DragonFly; a 4 year jump. Perhaps not a huge effect on you, but I want to link to it cause there’s such nice changelogs!
There’s work being done on a DragonFly hypervisor, based on NVMM. The theoretical next milestone is tomorrow.
Vincent DEFERT put the DragonFly handbook and other notes into epub format, and you can download them now.