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.
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@.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There’s been some updates to the AHCI driver. Matthew Dillon outlined the changes, with the biggest one being support for FIS Based Switching. FBS is the ability to send simultaneous streams of data to and from multiple drives on a port multiplier. Support for it is rare and quirky, but it should significantly improve throughput on a compatible port multipler. Read his writeup for details, including on how to back up your kernel.
You know about swapcache(8), the DragonFly-specific trick of caching disk data on an small SSD, meaning you get mostly the speed benefits of an SSD while still using a cheaper, slower drive? Whether you did or didn’t, Matthew Dillon’s updated the documentation for it to account for recent hardware changes.
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
I know the title’s not that helpful, but I like rhyming. The i915 driver in DragonFly now matches what’s in the Linux 4.5 kernel, for a more complete description. (Here’s the Linux changelog to match.) This is good news for anyone with Skylake, Broxton, or Kabylake processors.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.
If you are moving to the newest 1.8 version of Go, the language, you need to be on at least the last release of DragonFly 4.4, or 4.6. You’ve probably upgraded by now anyway, or at least I hope you have.