If for some reason smartmontools seems to think your disks aren’t SMART-capable, force smartd to use SCSI ioctls. has a snippet to use in your smartd.conf for just that.
Assembled all on Thursday!
- No Plan Survives Contact with the Internet. pfSense 2.4.0 delay, related to recent dnsmasq discoveries.
- pfsense rant.
- Exploring BSD for my CDN.
- Ohio LinuxFest 2017 Recap.
- First draft of “Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition” finished! Related: Michael W. Lucas has a Patreon.
- OPNsense 17.7.5 released.
- autoconf/clang (No) Fun and Games.
- FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE out.
- Upgrading from FreeBSD 10.3 to 11.1 via freebsd-update and beadm.
- ClonOS offers web-based container/VM management on FreeBSD base. (via)
- LibertyBSD 6.1 released. (via)
- Anybody interested in taking over my Emacs front-end to (Free)BSD pkg?
- How to blank laptop screen?
- Any way to control the battery charge levels (thinkpad)
- Serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance. (via multiple places)
- pkgsrc-2017Q3 is out.
Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented direct input support for polling, which will affect you most directly if you have an 10G ix(4) card. His commit message lists the performance improvements.
I tagged DragonFly 5.0 (commit message list in that link) over the weekend, and there’s a 5.0 release candidate for download. It’s RC2 because the recent Radeon changes had to be taken out.
If you are starting KDE on DragonFly, you’ll want to be sure dbus is started too. Mentioning it juuuuuust in case…
kcollect(8) (see previous mention) now supports saving data to dbm files, thanks to Harald Brinkhof.
I installed a DragonFly snapshot on a Lenovo x220 last night. I went for a EFI install, even though the x220 has a “Legacy” option. When I booted, it looked like this:
It successfully booted, but once it hit the kernel load, it started printing to the top of the screen in that lovely repeating pattern you see.
Matthew Dillon helpfully pointed out that the DRM and i915 modules needed to be loaded. Hitting ‘9’ during the bootloader countdown got me to a prompt where I could type:
drm_load="YES" i915_load="YES"' kern.kms_console=1 menu
Which brought me back to the boot menu, but this time it loaded those additional modules to support the Intel video chipset – and it worked!
These lines can go in /boot/loader.conf for permanent use.
Update: accelerated X will need a different setup – see my later post.
In addition to the already-mentioned ipfw per-CPU state tracking, Sepherosa Ziehau has added per-CPU state tables to ipfw, and his commit documents the improvement in performance/latency. He’s also added ipfw support to sshlockout(8).
HAMMER2 is now available by default in DragonFly, and can be used in the installation process. (It was possible, but manual, before.) The next DragonFly release should be soon.
Already overflowed to next week.
- New story: Savaged by Systemd. Lucas, what hast thou wrought?
- A few questions about BSD
- FreeBSD package management with Pkg (1/2). Applies to DragonFly, too.
- OpenBSD Community goes platinum.
- OPNsense 17.7.1 released.
- FreeBSD 10.4-BETA3 Available.
- A Brief History of Solaris (SunOS) Ports. Technically a BSD. (via)
- My first patch to OpenBSD. (via)
- Getting acme.sh to renew certs via cronjob on FreeBSD
- GSoC 2017 Reports: Add SUBPACKAGES support to pkgsrc, part 1. (via)
- Best BSD for Kaby Lake w/ Integrated Graphics.
- FreeBSD – what processes in what jails are using swap?
- LLVM libFuzzer and SafeStack ported to NetBSD. (via)
- OpenBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5th Gen). There’s a cost-saving tip in there for anyone planning a purchase.
- Solaris reported dead again. Illumos is working fine, though.
Matthew Dillon’s been using a Kabylake NUC for a DragonFly workstation and it’s generally working out well. It’s tiny enough to lose on a desk, in my opinion. He added performance details and a screenshot. The Specific Configs page has his notes, recorded, too.
Related laptop tip: If you have a Lenovo Yoga and can’t mount the drive after install, various sdhci modules may be the answer. Update: definitely the answer.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some improvements to ipfw in DragonFly, moving it to per-CPU state tracking among other things. (I haven’t mentioned just ipfw in foreeeever.)
His commit message describes the improvements. Of most interest: it reduces the performance impact of running ipfw in his tests to almost nothing. Does this translate to ipfw on other BSDs? I don’t know.
Francois Tigeot is going to be giving a talk about the DragonFly graphics stack at EuroBSDCon 2017. (14:00 September 21st in Paris) Registration is already closed because I didn’t realize how soon it was happening – sorry!
Here’s a detailed writeup from Aaron LI on how to get a DragonFly system onto an IPv6 network.
Update: He also supplied an example pf ruleset that solved some IPv6 throughput problems for his VPS.
Pulled from a longer thread: x.x.1 update instructions for DragonFly.
Probably old hat to most readers, but I like to see this documented, and the hw.ncpu ‘trick’ is nice.
There will be a bootable, single-image version of HAMMER2 in the next DragonFly release. Matthew Dillon has a note about what will be in place at that point, and you can always look at the recent commits.
This happened a while ago, and I’m just catching up to it: the virtio_scsi(4) driver has been added to DragonFly; ported from FreeBSD and worked on by a number of people. ‘man virtio‘ if you want background.
“gee, we have a 6-digit PID, might as well make it work to a million!”
Here’s the first of several commits to support this, and here’s the highest load averages I’ve ever seen.
If you are running DragonFly on a Ryzen CPU, this commit will fix (work around?) a hardware bug. I have not looked at how other operating systems may be addressing it, but it may be interesting to contrast.