A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas, GCC 8.0 has been imported into DragonFly. It’s not built by default, so you’ll need to set WORLD_ALTCOMPILER to get it. Rimvydas mentions this is part of a 3-year upgrade cycle.
Note that he went the extra mile and made sure dports could handle it too.
A recent and new CPU bug, CVE-2018-8897, is fixed in DragonFly. THis applies to both Intel and AMD processors. I’m happy to see that the CERT page lists equal notification timing for a whole lot of operating systems, rather than the few that heard about Spectre/Meltdown early.
Following that topic, Matthew Dillon has “fleshed out” Spectre mitigations, and his commit message details the current state. The sysctl ‘machdep.spectre_mitigation’ will tell you what’s set at any given point.
Update: update.
You can now use Wake On LAN functionality with igb(4) cards in DragonFly.
(I like acronymic titles a little too much, I know.)
systat in DragonFly has gained some new fields when using -pv. Read up on the tool if you have not used it before.
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to the scheduler, with the result that nice(1) is really vigorous now about enforcing priority.
Here’s something that doesn’t have an immediate impact now, but will be useful down the road: Francois Tigeot has been working on DRM support in DragonFly, and has been quite successful with Intel video support. His strategy has been to adopt Linux methods where possible, to reduce the amount of support work. The payoff has been excellent, and prompt, accelerated video support in DragonFly. The most recent work is “git: drm: Implement parts of the Linux irq subsystem“, which is going to come in handy for someone, I’m sure.
Sascha Wildner has ported FreeBSD’s driver, for LSI Fusion-MPT 3/3.5 SAS controllers. It includes mpr(4), mps(4), and the mpsutil(8)/mprutil(8) management program. It’s in the kernel by default, in fact.
The short answer: if you have an Areca card (in this case, a model 1222) and multi-terabyte drives, they will work on DragonFly.
IPSEC hasn’t been maintained in basically forever in DragonFly, so it’s been removed. It was only still mentioned in the VKERNEL configs, so if you have a custom VKERNEL config file, remove any mention of IPSEC, IPSEC_ESP, or IPSEC_DEBUG. Otherwise, nothing to worry about.
Reduce, the “second oldest computer algebra system”, has been ported to DragonFly (and there’s work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you’re a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.
I like code that travels through multiple BSDs.
There’s a plugin for pkg, called pkg-provides, which will tell you what package(s) contain the filename you provide – installed or not. I didn’t even know pkg had a plugin system. Anyway, it works on DragonFly, as the author notes.
I haven’t been able to say this in a while, but: I like cross-pollination.
For anyone wanting to try out ipfw3, there’s now a rc script. Make sure to set up a rules file, or you’ll kill all incoming traffic.
DragonFly 5.2.0 has been released. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are in there, along with improvements for HAMMER2, accelerated video, and ipfw. My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as does the release notes.
Losing power at home this week put a dent in my reading throughput, so to speak, but this will do.
Shutdowns are a bit faster in DragonFly, thanks to the addition of a QUICKHALT shortcut. How much faster? It depends on what devices you have mounted, I suspect. I haven’t yet updated and tried.
Happy Almost Fool’s Easter Day! I have to be at work in a few hours, at 3 AM, so this is all I was able to find in the time I have.
