Did you know there’s a rescue image, created with crunchgen, in DragonFly? If your system can boot to single-user mode, you can use it to at least manipulate data on disk – it includes mined as a simple small editor. (Since vi assumes /usr is mountable.) This rescue image now includes undo, so you can back out changes on a Hammer volume.
Matthew Dillon has been testing on more NVMe hardware, or at least what is supposed to be NVMe hardware, and he has a writeup of the results that may be useful for anyone planning a shopping trip soon.
Remember Sepherosa Ziehau’s nginx tests on DragonFly? He’s using the same configuration to test performance of the accept(2) and close(2) calls. The result? Over 8000 concurrent connections, for 580,000 connections per second. That’s on one DragonFly machine.
Matthew Dillon has written a new, from scratch, driver for NMVe in DragonFly. If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s SSD access over PCIe, which gives better throughput than ATA. He’s posted a summary of his work, and it’s possible to load it now as a module. It supports MSI-X, and there’s test results from using dd on supported NVMe hardware.
Tomohiro Kusumi has finished his port of autofs to DragonFly; you can now have a filesystem automatically mount when accessed, rather than requiring it at boot.
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, there’s been some improvements to virtio(4). Update and try if you’ve had problems in the past.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been working on network performance, including making more network calls asynchronous. His test case using nginx shows that a single DragonFly machine can now take enough traffic to max out 2 10Gb links. That’s with 16Kb requests, and 30,000 of them at the same time.
If you have a ral(4) wireless card that didn’t function as expected, it may suddenly work for you now on DragonFly 4.5 due to the large wifi update. The ral(4) driver covers a lot of hardware, so check the man page for all the commercial names.
Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd have updated the wifi setup in DragonFly, incorporating Adrian’s FreeBSD changes (and merging back some of Matt’s from DragonFly). This affects the ath, rum, iwm, iwn, run, bwn, urtwn, wi, ral, iwi, ndis, and wpi drivers. The ‘an’ driver has been removed, too. I’m not going to even try to link to all the commits.
If you’re on DragonFly master and are using one of these devices, now is the time to update and try. Note that this removes the separate network interface that’s specific to the device and creates only a wlanX device.
Update: Matt reminded me that at least half the work came from Imre Vadasz; I missed it because I was only looking at the commit email names – mea culpa.
karu.pruun managed to get xwayland working on DragonFly, and also took notes while doing it. That means you can try it out, too.
If you get “libGL error: failed to open drm device: Permission denied” when using direct rendering, make sure to add your user id to the ‘video’ group.
DragonFly versions of TeX have been available for some time now. However, Nelson Beebe, who is part of the TeX project, is having trouble building some related binaries – asymptote and clisp. He could use help from anyone interested, to match up with this summer’s release of TeX 2016.
Some DragonFly links are sneaking in here just to get them cleared out.
- May 17th: Ike Levy speaks at SemiBUG. Go if you are anywhere near; Ike’s a good speaker and passionate about BSD.
- Speaking of scheduling: BSDCan 2016 is less than a month away.
- Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me. (via)
- BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code. (via)
- FreeBSD PowerPC 32bit pkg repository (unofficial). ~19,500 packages, more to come. (via)
- As a Linux user, where should I start with experimenting with BSD?
- DragonFly i915 driver updated to Linux 4.3. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/05/09.
- Cons of staying on an old -RELEASE version ?
- More p2k16: ajacoutot@ on Gnome, rc and rcctl improvements, krw@ on pdisk, softraid and more.
- SROP mitigation committed. (OpenBSD)
- The 50th Quarterly pkgsrc Release, pkgsrc-2016Q1. Also, stats.
- Thomas Levine’s notes from the recent NYCBUG presentation on Urchin.
- NetBSD on the Sega Dreamcast, presented on a Dreamcast.
- How BSD was built, and how it lost the lead to Linux.
- Running Tor in a NetBSD rump unikernel. (via)
- Running FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD as a virtualised guest on Online.net.
- Meet Joe Maloney – Lead System Architect for PC-BSD. I like the transition from volunteer to employee.
- LinuxFest Northwest 2016: The Devil in the Details: Switching to BSD from Linux. Apparently one of the most popular videos.
If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.
Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.
The drm/i915 driver has been updated by Francois Tigeot to match what’s in Linux kernel 4.3. His commit post has the general detail; you will especially want this if on DragonFly-current and running on Skylake architecture.