A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau has made some networking changes that both reduce CPU usage in high-traffic situations and change some underlying network structures. This means a full buildworld is needed on your next update.
If you’re using DragonFly 4.4.x or older, you are unaffected.
If you find yourself using gpt and disklabel64 for a new disk, and aren’t quite sure what order to type everything in to create a disk slice, why not crib from Tim Darby’s notes? (note that the archive has added some line breaks to it.)
The ‘hammer show’ command can be used to dump the B-Tree structure of a Hammer volume, and CRC errors can be spotted. It’s rare that anyone would need it, but if you do, this dumped information will include file hierarchy information.
If that makes you a bit nervous to repost any of that information when talking about it in public, Tomohiro Kusumi has added an ‘obfuscate’ option to ‘hammer show’ that does just that – it hides path information from the debug output.
Sepherosa Ziehau has continued his quest of making large-scale data transmission on DragonFly effortless; his latest change has cut the kqueue contention rate by two-thirds when dealing with a connection rate of nearly 400,000 connections per second. Note that’s number of connections, without even tracking the bandwidth used by each.
John Marino rearranged how GCC5 handles CPUTYPE settings. If you are specifically setting the target CPU when compiling, his commit will give you an exact list of what to target.
Note that I am not saying another architecture – this is all x86_64. I also don’t recommend doing this unless you have a specific use for it – compiler overoptimizations often create more problems than they fix.
Daniel Bilik has found there’s an issue with i915 acceleration, Baytrail CPUs, and some AUTODEEP low-power states. This will only affect you if you are using that specific hardware combo and setting certain low power modes. Interestingly, it affects other platforms, too, as it appears to be a symptom of how the video is addressed, not a DragonFly-specific bug.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
Francois Tigeot has again updated Intel i915 video support in DragonFly, bringing it even with what’s in Linux 4.2. This will be very useful for Broadwell and Skylake users, and even Broxton, apparently the newest Atom platform.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
BSDNow 129 is available. Along with the normal news summary, it has an interview with John Marino, the fellow behind DragonFly’s dports system, and author of recently-noted-here synth, which has reached version 1.0.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.
I have DragonFly shirts, helpfully printed up by Sepherosa Ziehau in China. I have a list of people that are interested in shirts, most of whom remembered to give a shirt size. I don’t have anyone’s email address or mailing address on that list.
If you are on that list, send me your mailing address.
The shirts are marked L/XL/XXL/XXXL, but they run smaller than U.S. versions of those sizes. I usually find a U.S. XL shirt baggy, but “XXXL” is the one that fit me, for instance. I’ll do my best to place the appropriate one. This is just an advance apology, since it’s too late to change anything if it turns out tight.
I’ll mail these out as I have the spare cash and time on hand. (I hope most of you live in the continental U.S.)
If you have a Broadwell system, the drm.i915.enable_execlists tunable added by Imre Vadász may keep your system stable. (thanks, zach on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Rimvydas Jasinskas has consolidated/restored/updated a large number of papers into share/doc on DragonFly. I’m not going to link to his large number of commits, but instead point you at the directory where they all went. There’s a number of design documents in there that date back to 4.4BSD and beyond (and some much newer), which may interest or educate you. Of special note: The Guide to the Dungeons of Doom, for rogue, or the KAME IPv6 implementation notes.
If you’re building from dports, and you want to include debugging information, you’ll want to put ‘WITH_DEBUG=yes’ in /etc/make.conf. Note that this affects anything you build at that point, including world, which you’d want to rebuild anyway.
These probably apply cross-BSD, but in this case, it’s DragonFly tips for printing with CUPS.
If you have a Core2 processor in a DragonFly system, it may not work with accelerated video. If that happens to you with this (admittedly old) processor, switch to VESA for now.
For those of you running DragonFly-current, the already-mentioned library privatization going on means that ports have to be rebuilt. You will want to do it yourself, or wait a little bit before upgrading if you want to install binaries.