DragonFly – Page 45 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2016/08/202016/08/19

In Other BSDs for 2016/08/20

For once, I’m not working on Saturday, so even though this is last minute, at least I’m not in a race with the clock.

ZFS High-Availability NAS. (via)
Steam on FreeBSD. (via)
Reminder: Next SemiBUG meeting is on the 23rd.
Want to help move a cabinet of BSD User Group equipment, in NYC?
“results-oriented and non-ideological“.
BSD, guava. (via)
OpenSSH is/has been deprecating DSA keys. This affects FreeBSD, and probably DragonFly too.
The third “Hosting files using ZFS” class is available.
connect doesn’t restart. OpenBSD pkg_add.
OPNSense is at version 16.7.2 and gained a team member.
DiscoverBSD for 2016/08/15.
Linux kernel, the port. (via)
MidnightBSD 0.8 out. (via)
UEFI multibooting: FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.

2016/08/19

Pulseaudio removed from dports

There’s been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.

2016/08/17

Optimizing your kernel

There’s been a number of commits lately around higher optimization levels for your DragonFly kernel. It looks you can even set it systemwide. Boot code remains at -O; any higher level will make it explode. Is this safe? I have no idea!

2016/08/152016/08/14

Buildworld for -current users

If you are on DragonFly-current, AKA DragonFly 4.7, make sure to perform a full buildworld on your next upgrade. Tomohiro Kusumi changed a Hammer ioctl, and the buildworld is needed to keep everything in sync.

2016/08/11

You probably didn’t use this anyway

The last bits of Linux emulation have been removed from DragonFly. It’s 32-bit, so it’s been unsupported since DragonFly went to 64-bit only with the 4.0 release. Also, some other 32-bit only items are gone, including the cs, ep, ex, fe, and vx network drivers. It’s almost impossible that anyone was using it, but it’s notable because that’s some… 15-20k lines of code gone? Removal of unused code is also positive.

2016/08/10

IPI benchmarks in DragonFly

Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was “improved IPI signalling”. He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.

2016/08/09

OpenSSH, OpenSSL updates

Because this always happens just after I create a DragonFly release, there’s a new version of OpenSSL. However, this is for version 1.0.2. 1.0.1 is what’s in the release, and it’s supported through the end of the year.

OpenSSH has a major version bump in DragonFly, to 7.3p1. This means some features – specifically patches for High Performance Networking – are no longer there, and you’ll get an error if your config file requires them. Either remove the options from your config, or install OpenSSH from dports.

2016/08/08

ACPICA and a program inside

Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal ‘coding language’, called AML? I did not, but it’s in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.

2016/08/08

Changes for vmstats

If you’re one of the people who can easily read ‘systat -vm’ output, the data presented there has been modified. If you’re not one of those people, it’s a good way to monitor system health.

2016/08/05

DragonFly notes elsewhere

Here is some coverage of the DragonFly 4.6 release, which may be interesting to read because of the comments: Hacker News, Hacker News again, and lobste.rs.

A reaction to the initial creation of DragonFly I never saw before, and Matthew Dillon’s followup. (via)

I like the summary in the very first comment of this story on DragonFly removing page-zeroing.

2016/08/042016/08/03

For VPS users, an ISO

Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.

2016/08/04

No more page zeroing

After some testing of different ways to pre-zero out memory pages, Matthew Dillon came to the conclusion: page zeroing doesn’t matter any more. The idea dates all the way back to CSRG, and he’s removed it from DragonFly.

2016/08/02

DragonFlyBSD 4.6 released

DragonFly 4.6 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, or update your source files and build – my users@ email describes the steps.

2016/07/302016/07/29

In Other BSDs for 2016/07/30

I did all of this in a hour, because I had so many tabs saved from during the week. Don’t get overwhelmed!

EuroBSDCon 2016 schedule has been released.
OPNsense 16.7 released.
2016Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
SemiBUG has a Twitter. Here’s their last meeting, and the next is 8/23.
August 3rd: NYCBUG Installfest. Go just to see what weird hardware shows up.
Attacks against FreeBSD Update components. (via)
How do I dual boot FreeBSD 10.3 with Windows 10?
Steam on FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. (via)
ZFS and RAID.
OpenBSD 6.0 pre-orders up.
OpenBSD 6.0 to be released September 1, 2016. (via)
EuroBSDCon 2016 talks and tutorials. (via and via)
DiscoverBSD for 2016/07/25.
Why FreeBSD? by Hamza Sheikh.
pfSense 2.3.2 is out.
AWS VPN config supports pfSense 2.2.5+.
FreeBSD 11 Beta2 is available.
n2k16 hackathon report: Stefan Sperling on dhclient bugs, iwm(4) issues.
Will switching to FreeBSD give me an advantage over Linux when it comes to gaming?
Translation Status for 1.0.0. (Lumina)
one reason to hate openbsd.
Status of wireless support for MacBook Pro (late 2011)
Am I doing it wrong?
VirtualBox 5.x finally on FreeBSD.
Some notes on our new generation of ZFS-based file servers.
A Grand Experiment by Leo Laporte. Shifting to BSD. (via)
Announcing PacBSD (Formerly named ArchBSD). (via)
OpenBSD: Release Songs: 6.0: “Another Smash of the Stack”. (via)

Bonus DragonFly items, sent by Rolinh on IRC:

2016/07/29

HEADS UP: world needs rebuilding

I’m a bit late on this, but: If you are using DragonFly-current, you will need to rebuild world. If you are on 4.4, this won’t matter until you go to 4.6, and you’d be rebuilding world and kernel for that anyway.

(4.6 will probably be tagged this weekend.)

2016/07/252016/07/24

DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 available

DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 has been tagged. You can pull it directly from the master site in img or iso form (check your local mirror instead if possible), or shift to the new tag.

“Where is RC1?” you may ask? I tagged the first release candidate some days ago, and this bug was immediately found right after. It was easier to go right to RC2 once a fix was found.

This candidate will probably lead directly to a release version, so if you want to run the release version exactly, wait a few days.

2016/07/22

NVMe and IOPS

Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!

2016/07/21

i915 update to 4.4

the i915 support in DragonFly now matches the Linux 4.4 kernel, which is good news if you have a Broxton, Skylake, or Cherryview processor, plus it adds a variety of fixes.

2016/07/20

Looking at your battery

If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.

2016/07/19

UEFI install story

I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)