DragonFly – Page 42 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2017/02/14

Near-term dports work

Rimvydas Jasinskas posted an extended description of what’s happening with dports. There’s a significant xorg reformatting coming in ports, which is going to be absorbed into dports, but it may take some time. There’s also an odd loss of commit rights for John Marino, who commits (frequently!) to both DragonFly and FreeBSD. (His followup) This all translates to some upcoming transition time for dports to accommodate these changes.

Note that if you are using dports binaries, especially on DragonFly 4.6 release, this won’t really affect you; the way dports is set up, binary sets always work. It is interesting to hear about future work, in any case.

2017/02/13

Skylake users, update

This recent CPU frequency change will make your Skylake-using laptop much easier to deal with. Apparently this is a common problem with Skylake? (links via EFNet #dragonflybsd)

2017/02/03

Many vkernel changes

The vkernel(7) code has been going through a lot of changes, and instead of linking to the many smaller commits, I’ll point at Matthew Dillon’s latest change since it’s detailed. What’s the performance difference? I don’t know yet if this is for performance or for stability.

2017/01/27

Ricoh cameras, memory cards, and DragonFly

Apparently there’s a quirk to the way Ricoh cameras format memory cards that made them unreadable on DragonFly. They’re readable now. I link this not because I think it affects many people, but because it’s such a strangely specific problem.

2017/01/24

Frequency tips

A note from Sepherosa Ziehau explains how you can check for Intel Turbo Boost effect on DragonFly, or at least see your current frequency if you’re using AMD.

2017/01/23

Vkernels: when to use them

The question of using vkernels(7) in a manner similar to jails pops up time and again, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, “it depends“. It looks like when you want to isolate greedy programs, vkernels are the way to go.

2017/01/17

UEFI booting in installer

The DragonFly installer now supports UEFI directly. There’s a uefi(8) man page now, and there’s even rconfig support, though not enough people realize how awesome rconfig(8) can be.

2017/01/13

Some removals that may not matter

The ncv(4), nsp(4), and stg(4) drivers are now removed from DragonFly. So is the portal file system. Also, though not a removal, vm.swapcache.use_chflags now defaults to 0. Does this affect you? Almost certainly not! I feel compelled to point it out, though, just in case there’s that one person who didn’t want a surprise.

2017/01/112017/01/10

Another i915 video update

The i915 driver has been updated to match Linux 4.6 – this is of most benefit to the owners of newest hardware, but the commit message lists what has changed, for owners of Haswell series GPUs and later.

2017/01/10

Significant memory handling changes in DragonFly

If you are on DragonFly -master, now is a good time to update. Matthew Dillon has been changing how DragonFly handles locking and memory use, with differences in the vmstat structure and page coloring, some memory settings, and many other locking changes. I am only linking to a few examples. If you don’t want to dig through those links for performance numbers, he summarized his changes and their effects in a post to users@.

2017/01/09

NUMA and DragonFly

That’s Non-Uniform Memory Access, to disambiguate. Matthew Dillon’s changing how memory is allocated in DragonFly. NUMA is been a long-discussed and complex topic for a long time, so I will point at the initial commits and call it “a developing situation”.

2017/01/05

UEFI booting on DragonFly

If you have a NVMe-capable EFI BIOS on your machine, you should be able to safely install DragonFly, using these instructions from Matthew Dillon. It’s not part of the installer, yet.

2017/01/03

32 terabytes of swap on DragonFly

Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s swap handling, and his explanation notes that the theoretical max swap space is now 32 terabytes. He even had to change field sizes to accommodate the new, bigger numbers.

2016/12/302016/12/26

Something for Hyper-V and DragonFly users

If you are using DragonFly under Hyper-V, Sepherosa Ziehau’s been making additional commits to improve compatibility. What’s it like? I don’t know; I haven’t tried Hyper-V yet.

2016/12/292016/12/26

Binutils 2.27 now default

The version of binutils used in DragonFly is now 2.27 by default. This will make the most difference to you if you want to work with Link Time Optimization.

2016/12/282019/08/01

More secure browsing

Matthew Dillion mentioned his changed tutorial on secure web browsing on DragonFly, though I imagine it applies to other systems too. The trick is to use an isolated user account for running a web browser, and he includes the various steps to do so smoothly in the tutorial web page.

2016/12/272016/12/26

Post-Haswell GPU fix

For anyone with a newer CPU – Broadwell, Skylake, etc. – there was a memory leak in the video driver. It would take several weeks of continuous operation to have an effect, but in any case, it’s fixed. This only affected DragonFly 4.7 users with the appropriate CPUS and the Intel video driver.

2016/12/26

Shutdown fix for -current

If you were running DragonFly 4.7, for a short period you may have had trouble with shutting down, because of an ACPI bug. It’s fixed now. It’s actually been fixed for two weeks, but I’m going back and clearing things I hadn’t had a chance to post, since we are in the Christmas-New Years lull time.

2016/12/242016/12/26

In Other BSDs for 2016/12/24

Merry almost Christmas!

OpenSSH 7.4 released. (via)
Configuring the FreeBSD automounter. I think this applies to DragonFly too. Thanks, Michael Wilson.
AsiaBSDCon 2017 paper proposals are I assume due by end of year, just like last year, though the 2017 AsiaBSDCon site does not appear to be up as I type this.
BSD Magazine has lessons 4 and 5 of FreeBSD and Chef up now.
Security and BSD tools (via)
Version SAT. Talks about package management in general – and what do you know, pkg seems to be the most advanced tool in this case. (via)
Bringing the scheduler saga to the finishing line
openbsd changes of note 4
OpenBSD laptops
Replacing Cisco ASA with PFSense. I did it, I ain’t sad.
Using ZFS to Fight Data Rot by Kevin McAleer

2016/12/21

Importing clang to base

Don’t get too excited yet – clang import hasn’t happened. However, I want to draw attention to Rimvydas Jasinskas’ changes to alternate compiler handling, which would be for importing clang. His commit message goes into some of the rather thorny problems of transitioning between compilers and releases.