DragonFly – Page 43 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2016/11/222016/11/22

EFI run-time ABI support in DragonFly

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.

2016/11/152016/11/14

re(4) users, please test

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.

2016/11/112016/11/11

Full-offload scan and what it means

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.

2016/11/092016/11/08

nvme(4) added to the kernel

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.

2016/11/082016/11/04

nc(1) in DragonFly base

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.

2016/11/072016/11/01

Braswell and DragonFly

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.

2016/11/042016/11/01

Trackpad and Elantech support in DragonFly

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.

2016/11/022016/11/01

More EFI work

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.

2016/11/012016/10/31

MMC/SDCard use now possible

If you have a memory card slot of some sort on your laptop, DragonFly can now reliably access it. Probably even boot from it, though I haven’t seen it happen.

2016/10/312016/10/28

Time tidbits

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“.

2016/10/292016/10/28

In Other BSDs for 2016/10/29

I get all the BSDs this week.

Infrastructure in a Post-Cloud Era. .ike presenting at NYCBUG on November 2nd. Go if you are near, vote if you can.
FreeNAS/ESXi – Link aggregation without a switch.
Dropping Linux and KVM in Favor of FreeBSD and Jails (2015). (via)
chromebook printing troubles
I used Virtualbox to install both FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD… it said login incorrect upon reboot.
Internet Connection Problems
Continuous OpenBSD regress tests. (via)
*BSD on laptops
In this how-to we’ll set up an email server from scratch using NetBSD.
Allow reading of files but no copying on FreeNAS.
NetBSD 7.0.2 released.
OPNsense 16.7.7 released.
pkgsrcCon 2016 videos.

2016/10/282016/10/28

More security rewiring

The switch to from OpenSSL to LibreSSL in DragonFly’s base and in dports has led to more cleanup, including the removal of an old, strange munitions/crypto import restriction. Be careful upgrading if you’re on master, though!

2016/10/27

net.inet.carp.setroute and what it does

If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setroute can keep them from being changed.

2016/10/262016/10/26

Better Fortran

Rimvydas Jasinskas has been improving LTO – Link Time Optimization – support. It’s led to a lot of commits, and those are just a few examples.

2016/10/25

Goodbye, COMPAT_43

COMPAT_43 is gone, but it hasn’t worked in a long time anyway. Note that this is 4.3BSD, pre-everything.

2016/10/20

em(4), re(4), and network issues

If you are using em(4) or re(4) devices for networking, you may want to turn on polling. MSI may or may not help for re(4), along with switching to the emx(4) driver.

2016/10/192016/10/20

LibreSSL not just available but default

Remember I posted that LibreSSL is in base DragonFly, but not default? Well, it’s default now. You can have a system without OpenSSL at all, by rebuilding DragonFly-current and using up-to-date dports.

Update: see John’s comments for clarification: LibreSSL is default; the change is that OpenSSL isn’t even built any more. The result is still the same good news: you can have an OpenSSL-free DragonFly system now.

2016/10/182016/10/17

DragonFly 4.6.1 images up

I’ve uploaded ISO and IMG files for DragonFly 4.6.1, so they should be available for download at your local mirror. Note that there’s an uncompressed 4.6.1 ISO for those installing to a virtual server.

2016/10/172016/10/17

DragonFly 4.6.1 tagged

I don’t have it uploaded yet, but DragonFly 4.6.1 is tagged. Anyone with an existing 4.6.0 or earlier system can upgrade now. Use the 4.6 release instructions if you are unsure on how to upgrade. The 4.6.1 tag commit message has all the changes.

2016/10/14

OpenSSL update, DragonFly update

OpenSSL in DragonFly 4.6 has been updated to 1.0.1u. It’s time for a DragonFly 4.6.1, to catch up on this and other updates since the 4.6.0 release. I plan to work on it this weekend.