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.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
If you’ve ever wondered how having multiple swap devices can work, here’s your DragonFly-specific answer.
If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.
(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
If you’re using qemu and DragonFly, the latest update of ACPICA to version 20160422 may fix some issues introduced in a previous update. (I don’t have a specific bug report to point you at; sorry!)
The DragonFly 4.4.3 point release is out. There’s a commit page listing the changes between 4.4.2 and 4.4.3. Nobody will be surprised that there’s an OpenSSL update in there.
If you want a complete image, it’s available for download at your nearest mirror. If you want to upgrade an existing install:
cd /usr; make src-update
(or src-create-shallow if you don't already have source)
make buildworld && make buildkernel
make installkernel && make installworld
make upgrade
reboot
This is one of those weeks where a bunch of release all tumble together by chance.
- UbuntuBSD Is Looking To Become An Official Ubuntu Flavor. (still confusing)
- PC-BSD 10.3 out; PC-BSD 11 out next. 10.3 was out last week; I missed this link before.
- pfSense 2.3-RELEASE Now Available! (also seen here and here)
- PostgreSQL – Add BSD authentication method. (via)
- BSD and Toshiba Chromebook 2.
- FreeBSD 10.3-Release on AWS. As Colin Percival points out, the last half-dozen releases have been on AWS too.
- Undeadly and HTTPS. (via)
- Penguicon 2016 Lucas Track Schedule. For being called “Penguicon”, there’s a lot of BSD events there.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/04/11.
- OPNsense 16.1.9 released.
- OPNsense 16.1.10 released.
- Unix’s file durability problem, which leads in comment to disks from the perspective of a file system (McKusick), which I thought I had linked before but maybe not. (via)
- FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and BadLock.
- UbuntuBSD Should Heed Kubuntu’s Cautionary Tale.
Tomohiro Kusumi would like to port Hammer (1) to FreeBSD, as noted in this bug discussion. It’s not even begun to happen, but if you can contribute, please do.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been creating a near-constant stream of bugfixes and cleanups to Hammer for quite some time. I don’t often link to it, because they are incremental improvements and hard to linkblog, so to speak. In an effort to make up for this deficit, I do want to draw attention to his two recent commits: “Make hammer commands print root volume path“, and “Print volume list after volume-add|del“. Small changes, but this is what makes complex systems usable.
If you remember this Baytrail problem, Daniel Bilik has gone and found a fix, as this appears to be a cross-platform bug, and he has patches for DragonFly. If it’s affecting you, you don’t have to wait for the patches to be added in; he’s made them available directly.
Update: it’s committed to DragonFly now.
I keep posting about Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on sustaining extremely high traffic loads in DragonFly. Now I’m posting about a tool to create that load: kq_sendrecv. It creates tens of thousands of TCP connections, without creating a process for each, and uses kqueue, as you might guess from the name. This may be useful if you really want to tax another system.