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“.
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.
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!
If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setrou
COMPAT_43 is gone, but it hasn’t worked in a long time anyway. Note that this is 4.3BSD, pre-everything.
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.
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.