DragonFly has a donation page and a Paypal account. There’s no 501c3 benefit for U.S. residents to donate; DragonFly doesn’t exist as a non-profit. People have still been donating in smaller sums over time. It’s not enough to offset the colocation fees ($4k/year) plus the hardware there, but the money does get used for specific tasks. Matthew Dillon wrote a description of his upcoming plans: more storage, plus some interesting details on how much wear the existing SSD disks have sustained.
the md5(1) utility on DragonFly now does SHA512 checksums, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas. You can see it as a separate ‘sha512’ binary in /sbin, but it’s a hard link back to the original md5, if I’m reading the commit right.
There’s been a number of commits lately from Sascha Wildner with mentions of “Tianocore EDK II” a term that’s new to me. Googling for it tells me it’s a development environment for UEFI programs, useful for anyone booting on modern hardware.
Peeter Must has added evdev support in DragonFly. It’s a ‘generic input event interface’, meaning at least at first it’s for keyboards and mice. It requires a kernel rebuild with ‘device evdev’ and ‘options EVDEV_SUPPORT’ included.
I’m far enough backlogged that Sepherosa Ziehau’s igb(4) update is already in, but as a side effect, a PC Engines apu2b4 is a good DragonFly machine.
However, if you have em(4), here’s your chance to help test.
If you run ‘top -M‘, CPU states are reported on a per-CPU basis. It turns out that having over 110 CPUs will cause a segmentation fault – but not any longer! I wish I had a screenshot for this.
If your DragonFly-current system was built between December 6th and 10th, you should upgrade. There’s a memory corruption bug that may bite you otherwise – but it only existed for those 4 days.
You could, if you are running DragonFly-current, create a vkernel using HAMMER2, and try out HAMMER2 even if your underlying disk is HAMMER1. Odd, but useful.
Syscons now holds 10 screens back, not 4. Every few years, I really, really need that.
If you are running DragonFly-current, you can get your floppy drive running again. This is actually hard to test; floppy drives are becoming an endangered species.
Last minute, as always!
- The anatomy of tee program on OpenBSD. (via)
- Leaving Amazon AWS. (via, I think)
- FreeBSD Port-Knocking.
- s2k17 Hackathon Report: Stefan Sperling (stsp@) on wireless (iwm(4), athn(4) and more) progress.
- DiscoverBSD for 2017/12/03.
- Cross-BSD pollination. (DragonFly->OpenBSD, via)
- FreeBSD 11.0 is end-of-lifed.
- OPNsense 17.7.9 released.
- BSDCan 2018 Call for Papers is out. (via)
- DTrace & ZFS Being Updated On NetBSD. (via)
- NetBSD desktop for newbies. (via)
- What sort of fun projects are you guys working on using Dragonfly?
- pledge() work in progress.
- arm64 platform now officially supported [and has syspatch(8)].
- “SSH Mastery” 2nd ed tech reviewers wanted.
The ix(4) driver in DragonFly has been updated to match a new vendor release, and the faith(4)/faithd(4) driver is gone.
DragonFly 5.0.2 is released. As you may guess from the version number, this is a bugfix release. The release tag has the full details. Update through the normal process of a buildworld/buildkernel, at your leisure.
This is not as catastrophic as it may seem. I did not know this, but there’s a utility called dm(8), for Dungeon Master, used to control game access on a BSD system. It’s now gone on DragonFly, since its controls aren’t needed, and its setuid ability definitely isn’t needed.
Thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas, it’s possible to ‘make NOSHARED=yes buildworld‘ and build a complete DragonFly world without shared libraries.
If you’re booting DragonFly in UEFI mode, and you have unsupported video (i.e. NVIDIA), there’s the scfb driver for xorg. It doesn’t support NVIDIA chipsets either, but it gives more options than the generic vesa driver. It appears to be present in all the BSDs to some extent.
For your ease of use: a Vagrant box with shared folders enabled. (via)
If you are like me and have a long weekend, dig into /usr/share/examples. Not all of it is necessarily up to date, but there’s examples there on running rconfig, diskless, different pf and ipfw examples, and so on. Actual documentation is in corresponding man pages – and there’s examples on how to write them, too.
I just wasted an hour trying to figure out why xorg had strange output but no errors on this laptop, and it’s because I had i915_load=”YES” in /boot/loader.conf instead of i915_load=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf. I’m almost nearly sure I’ve mentioned that before, but if not: here you go.
(though if you never plan to run X, you can put it in loader.conf and everything will just work.)
(Title updated for a more correct sentence)