Welcome new DragonFly committer, Peeter Must!
Do you have a terabyte or more of RAM? You can boot DragonFly. In theory over 32 terabytes will require changes – but oh, to have such problems…
Noted from this commit: if you are routing over IPv6 directly to another address, the sysctl net.inet6.icmp6.nd6_onlink_ns_rfc4861 must be set to 1.
rdist has been removed. Does anyone mind? I don’t think so.
sys_pipe has been modified to avoid contention on DragonFly, which means better performance as tasks get handed between processors. See the commit message for details.
Matthew Dillon has added KVABIO, an API for avoiding the need to sync the TLB across all CPUs before continuing. What’s this mean? The more CPUs you are dealing with, the longer it takes to make sure all of them have the same cached view of the virtual memory. There’s a tradeoff – caching that view speeds up memory access, but the time cost of the synchronization can erase those benefits.
This API is now supported for NVMe and swap, HAMMER2, and tmpfs. Note that those last two links show a huge drop in IPI messaging. In the real world, this showed about a 5% improvement in performance for CPU-intensive work like complete synth builds. (Based on IRC conversations.)
The ppp kernel module has been removed. It’s still possible to run ppp(8) in userland, with tun(4), so it’s only a change in strategy, not result.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an update for the Realtek re(4) network driver. Try it if you have the hardware, whether older or newer.
This is a bugfix release, adding HAMMER2 support in initrd, among other cleanup commits. The tag message lists the changes. There’s no huge changes, but it’s only a bugfix release.
A writeup that may help someone in the future: if you decide you want to encrypt your /home directory, on DragonFly, this is how you do it.
I’ve got a long backlog of things to link to, so here’s the start: ifconfig now has an ‘lscan’ option, to show long SSIDs. “Long” means 14+ characters, in this case.
(Can you use emoji to create a SSID? That breaks character count and it’s just plain hard to read. Hmm.)
You can make them, but you can’t mount them. Tomohiro Kusumi’s note that mkfs_hammer2 works on Linux is of little wide practical use, but it’s a sign of progress to a larger goal.
I should have linked this with yesterday’s post: Sepherosa Ziehau put together some extended benchmarks on his changes between DragonFly 4.8 and 5.0, and their effects on latency using nginx to serve a lot of requests.
An optimization that applies to you only if you are on DragonFly, running nginx, and dealing with many requests: there’s a sysctl that specifically increases available sockets, which will decrease latency; Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message gives stats.
Cobbled together Friday night because my new job oddly has less hours of work but less time to screw around. That’s for the best.
- OpenBSD Jumpstart. (via)
- dtrace and ZFS update (for NetBSD, via)
- syspatch(8) Binary Updates Now for the Latest Release Only.
- Monitoring OpenBSD router.
- Sneaking in two threads (wait, more) about the DragonFly 5 release.
- FreeBSD 11.0 EOL.
- Why did OpenBSD silently release a patch before the embargo? Scroll to the end of the link for this item. Here’s the explanation. (via)
- FreeBSD: Building software from ports (2/2).
- Syspatch for one release only. (via)
SSH in DragonFly 5, by default, does not make a password authentication request on outgoing ssh sessions. You can manually add the option or change the config. Or use public keys, which is really the best idea if at all possible.
Because of the major version number change, there’s no packages built for DragonFly 4.9. Your options are to either update to 5.1 (which you probably meant to do anyway if you are running current) or manually point to the newest packages. Or just build from dports.
For clarity, this does not affect you at all if you are running 5.0 release. It only affects you if you are running DragonFly-current and have not updated in a while.
DragonFly 5.0.0 has been released. HAMMER2 is available in the installer. Multi-volume/clustering support isn’t in there yet, but support for deduplication/snapshots/booting and so on all are. My post to users@ has upgrade instructions.
Tomohiro Kusumi has made the userspace tools for HAMMER1 compilable on Linux, so you could create a HAMMER1 volume on a Linux system. No, it’s not the ability to read/write HAMMER1 in Linux, unfortunately – just some manipulation of volumes. I don’t know what his future plans are for HAMMER1|2 on Linux, if any.
DragonFly has also gained the vmx(4) virtual network driver. This is in DragonFly-current now and will be in the 5.0 release.