Matthew Dillon solved a performance problem that was most noticeable when doing intensive I/O while performing other tasks; downloading a large collection of files while opening another application that read a lot of initial data, for example, would have a noticeable startup delay. His recent VM change seems to have solved it, and the commit message has an in-depth explanation of how.
Sdävtaker has reported success booting DragonFly on a Clevo TN120R, which is almost more of a tablet/nettop than a laptop.
Alex Hornung has added support for a bunch of hardware to enable a Soekris 5501 to run DragonFly. We now have a watchdog and gpio framework as a side effect.
Sdävtaker has created a new blog, similar in design to this one, at http://dfbsd.trackbsd.org.ar/. It’s in Spanish!
It’s been mentioned before, but it’s moved: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA graphics driver that works on DragonFly.
Mentioned here for completeness: tcsh has been updated, along with libarchive and opencrypto.
DragonFly 2.4.1 has been released; this is recommended for any users of 2.4.0, as there’s a lot of little bugfixes. (Check the tag list to see all the fixes.) Next time, we may make a release candidate first.
A build of pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.4 and DragonFly 2.5 has been completed. The 2.5 packages are on avalon.dragonflybsd.org, and the 2.4 packages are about halfway there.
DragonFly 2.4 1 should be out Thursday. There’s a few bugfixes to add, still.
Installation of pkgsrc packages that were built on a different version of DragonFly than the one running during that installation will cause a warning. This can cause some confusion, since the tool appears to be warning that something may not work, but there’s no further output. I’ve seen users think it means the install failed, for instance.
There’s potential ways around this, but the best would be this pkg_install modification suggested by Jeremy C. Reed. Anyone who implements this gets my eternal gratitude.
DragonFly 2.4.1 is slated for release this Wednesday, 2009-09-30. This will have fixes for the installer and 64-bit DragonFly, among other things.
Do you have a recent ASUS system? Constantine Murenin has a patch for you, for hardware monitoring.
If you’ve got a really, really old DragonFly installation that been upgraded from… 1.8? Perhaps earlier? The system will be using libc_r instead of lib_xu. If you want to change to lib_xu, which is the long-term goal, Hasso Tepper has the simple steps listed.
If you’re setting up a DragonFly workstation, and you want to use two monitors, here are some suggestions on what video card to use.
The general plan for binary pkgsrc packages are to keep them around for the current release and the previous release. Some people say “delete now!“, some say “No, wait!“. What’s your opinion?
This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.
The freeze period for the 2009Q3 release of pkgsrc has started, and should result in a release around the end of September.
Binary packages built from 2009Q3, for DragonFly, should be available approximately a week after that.
Edit: See? Definitely started now.
A script I was running on avalon.dragonflybsd.org yesterday afternoon removed the packages, iso images, and snapshots stored there. (Sorry!) Hammer saved my bacon, with a snapshot of the 182G of missing files immediately available.
If you were bit by the bug where the 64-bit version of DragonFly wouldn’t boot from CD/DVD on your system, Matthew Dillon has some test images of DragonFly 2.4 for testing. Please use and report if it was successful.
Stathis Kamperis, as part of his Summer of Code work, ported NetBSD’s POSIX message queues to DragonFly. He has a writeup of all the details, and even has test cases! It should be showing up in 2.5 soon.