As a fix for wpa_supplicant, the upper limit on socket datagrams has been increased. What else does this affect? We’ll find out the hard way, which is why I mention it here.
I tried Hyper-V, and of course, I had to install a virtual DragonFly system. Sascha Wildner very helpfully pointed out that DragonFly on Hyper-V requires a legacy network adapter and a gen-1 image type; both changes you can make during initial setup. I’m noting it here for the benefit of future people walking down the same path.
Note: pick ‘legacy BIOS’ during the actual DragonFly install, too.
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
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.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
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.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
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.
tuning(7) had some updates from Matthew Dillon. It’s minor, as he says, but it’s such a useful man page I want to make sure people are reading it.
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.
Matthew Dillon (re?)added a sysctl: vfs.hammer2.cluster_write. It defaults to off, since HAMMER2 already writes a large buffer size and this should, in theory, not be needed. It may improve performance in some situations where there’s a lot of file creation and deletion, but that’s my theoretical guess rather than anything I’ve bennchmarked.
If you haven’t done it before, you can use ‘make rescue’ to build a tiny base system on DragonFly, for use when /usr goes missing, for when your disk is encrypted, and other rather catastrophic problems. It should be in sync with the rest of the system, which is why ‘make rescue’ can be part of a buildworld process. I’m mentioning this because currently, ‘make upgrade’ should be done first.
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.
Intel’s ACPICA 20180810 is now in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner. Nothing really user-affecting, but it does fix some memory leaks. You can tell it’s very new just by the version number.
Aaron LI has added interface group support in DragonFly, which is mostly to replace having to name individual interfaces in your pf config. There’s more work done than just that commit, incidentally, and he has a better explanation and writeup than my measly post.
If you have a mangled HAMMER2 disk, and you have inodes that are clearly mangled (the built-in CRCs don’t match), you can now remove them manually. This seems like Hole Hawg territory…
The TRIM operation has been in DragonFly for some time, and it looks like most SSDs support it reliably, now – so it’s on by default.
I have been meaning to post this for a while: gridgenerator.com, a painting web app, is running on DragonFly. I was told this on IRC and of course lost all details since then, but that’s fine – go draw something!