A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
The binary package repository for DragonFly-current has been updated with the latest build of all packages, thanks to tuxillo and others on EFNet #dragonflybsd doing a lot of work.
Tuxillo noted: there’s new rust, thunderbird, firefox, nginx, several llvm versions, and a new chrome (version 72). freerdp is temporarily broken; use remmina with the rdp plugin instead. openvpn isn’t upgraded yet cause the build was with libressl, which is a broken combination – it’ll all be built with openssl in a future run.
A little thing: Matthew Dillon has made changes to vm_page_list_find2() which should improve performance in low-memory situations, though how much I don’t know. Mentioning it, cause every little bit helps – for knowledge and speed.
As mentioned last week, there’s a new build of dports for 5.4, now available. No surprise, but a reminder to keep third-party software up to date is never wasted.
Because someone decided years and years ago that the CAM structures should be passed through to userland, smartctl, camcontrol, cdrecord, and some other tools will be broken in DragonFly-master for a few days. If you are on -stable (5.4) this won’t affect you.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s improvements to re(4), bringing it to Realtek’s 1.95 release, have been committed.
(Does Realtek have a public repo for this? A few minutes of Googling did not turn one up for me.)
Thanks to tuxillo and others, there’s a new build of dports on the way for DragonFly 5.4 that includes packages that weren’t building before – mongodb, kodi, mysql80, and I imagine more that I don’t know about. If the synth build is still running when you read this, you can look at its status page. If it isn’t running, the packages are of course in the normal place and you can use ‘pkg upgrade’ to get them.
Tobias Florek had a soft model made of Fred, the DragonFly mascot, years ago. He is moving and found a few unsold units. If you are in Europe (for shipping), and are interested in them, contact Tobias at dragonfly@ibotty.net.
If you don’t remember them: here’s the pictures.
Do you have Realtek hardware for your network link? Specifically, re(4)? Then Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch for you to try.
Two minor things that were keeping me from mounting Windows shares on boot of my DragonFly system: the right location for nsmb.conf and using proper capitalization. I’m writing it here to save someone else 10 minutes of search.
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.
‘mazocomp’ has updated the DragonFly mirrors list to include HTTPS links where appropriate, which would be most everywhere. An excellent idea.
While I’m talking about mirrors, there’s some new DPorts pkg mirrors too.
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.
If you have a lot of RAM on your DragonFly system, there’s a patch that you may find useful. If you weren’t able to install that system, well, there’s another potential fix out there.
If you’d like to set a particular sysctl(8), you enter it into /etc/sysctl.conf. A common mistake is to copy the command line and put “sysctl foo=bar” in sysctl.conf instead of “foo=bar”. This used to cause a warning, but it still bit people, as it would cause a long stream of error messages during boot – with no clear reason, as the kernel tried to understand the command. Now, that typo is handled automatically.
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!)
I usually get all happy when I see sharing happen across BSDs, and note it here. Here’s an unexpected one: between DragonFly and Haiku.