‘evdev‘, a driver for input device events, is now built by default in the DragonFly kernel. Update your custom config to match, if you have one.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s scheduling system His further tests show an improvement in basic forking.
In a larger users@ thread about multiple BSD development systems and how to set them up, I spied this tip on making multiple local virtual machines all reachable via SSH.
There’s several bug fixes that have gone into DragonFly over the past few days, in an attempt to track down an odd bug. They’ve been committed to 5.6, too, so you can pick them up if you update.
I imagine this will turn into a 5.6.2 release, but not until we find the cause of the error mentioned in that link.
You’ll all be happy to know ACPI errors are less noisy now. (And it was updated to 20190509, before the 5.6 release.)
Matthew Dillon’s made a change to the DragonFly kernel that could be disruptive, but will help make sure chromium runs. If you update after this point, make sure to update your dports, too, just to be sure everything is in sync. This applies to 5.6 and 5.7.
Because of some changes Matthew Dillon made to maxvnodes calculation in DragonFly, you may find yourself using 5%-10% less RAM. If you’ve upgraded to 5.6, you already have this benefit.
DragonFly now has retpoline turned on (stats included in that link) as a side effect of having gcc-8 as default, and SMAP/SMEP are also supported. I enjoy just saying these words out loud. SMEP SMEP SMEP SMEPSMEPSMEPSMEP.
I’m still backlogged, so here’s a May 14th mitigation in DragonFly for MDS attacks possible with Intel CPUs from 2011 onward. It’s in the current release.
Shamelessly copied from my own users@ post: I tagged 5.6.1 and built it earlier today. This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm. The ISO should be showing up on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org in the next 20 minutes or so, or you can rebuild using the normal process on an existing 5.6 system:
cd /usr/src git pull make buildworld make buildkernel make installkernel make installworld make upgrade
If you are still on 5.4 or earlier, you need to bring in 5.6 sources, which is noted in the 5.6.0 announcement.
A last-minute drm change in DragonFly 5.6 turned out to cause a reproducible lockup, so there’s changes in place for it. This means 5.6.1 will need to be rolled, which I will do in a day or two. If you want to update now, the normal buildworld/buildkernel process will get you this change.
OPIE was disabled recently in DragonFly. Now that the 5.6 release is out, it has been removed. This may require manual intervention if you are on DragonFly-master (i.e. 5.5. or 5.7) and update in the next day or two. This need to fiddle with it will go away soon with changes to ‘make upgrade’; I will mention it when I see it.
This won’t affect anyone running 5.4 or 5.6. It’s only in development.
DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released. This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2. Matthew Dillon did some informal testing of the VM improvements, and posted results to the users@ list.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading (pay no attention to my 5.4 typo), as do the release notes.
Francois Tigeot updated ttm and radeon DRM in DragonFly to match what’s in I assume the Linux 3.18 kernel. Please try if you have the appropriate hardware. This was at the start of May, so you may have already done so without realizing if you run -current. It’ll be in the 5.6 release, too.
ISO and IMG files of DragonFly 5.6rc1 should start showing up at mirrors over the next few hours. This is the release candidate, not the release, so don’t install unless you want to test.
This will turn into a real 5.6 release probably by weekend if no problems are found. See the tag commit message for a list of the commits since 5.4.
‘daftaupe‘ has updated the installation page for DragonFly to note what different steps you use when doing a manual install over encrypted HAMMER2.
Thanks to a suggestion from Lassi Kortela, man.dragonflybsd.org now exists and takes you directly to the online man page interface, similar to man.(free/net/open)bsd.org.
A question on starting up a virtual kernel on DragonFly and sticking it in the background led to some suggestions – follow the thread.