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.
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
DragonFly has had binutils 2.24 and 2.25 both available for some time. 2.24 has been taken out and replaced by binutils 2.27, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas.
The 2.25 version was and still is installed by default. If you want to try out 2.27 instead, WORLD_BINUTILSVER=binutils227 is what you need. I didn’t test that, of course. The binutils changelog will tell you what’s different in 2.27.
UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.
Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.
Imre Vadasz is working on full-offload scan support for wlan, imported from FreeBSD. That doesn’t change much from a user point of view, other that (I assume) reducing load and power usage a tiny amount. I’m reinforcing something most people don’t think about: there’s tiny computers inside your computer with their own firmware and processors, that you don’t directly control.
If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.
Because of libressl, nc(1) is now available in the base DragonFly system. It was already available through dports, but it’s such a flexible tool that this is worth mentioning.
If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.
One of my favorite things: when someone just appears out of nowhere and says, “I needed a change to my software so I did it and here it is to share”. Harald Brinkhof wandered into DragonFly and the first thing he did was update support for trackpads.
It’s now possible to put the /boot of your DragonFly system in the ‘a’ partition of a disklabel. It’s perhaps not major, but it’s another step in EFI support. EFI installs are possible now – if you do it manually.
Two things recently learned by Sascha Wildner’s timezone update in DragonFly: Everything (“GNU/Linux, Android, the BSDs, Chromium OS, Cygwin, AIX, iOS, BlackBerry 10, MacOS, Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, and Solaris”) uses the same time zone data, and there once was a “day of two noons“.