The DragonFly installer has been modified to produce disk arrangements that will generally match between UFS and Hammer installs, plus directories where you usually don’t want Hammer history or backups (like /tmp or /usr/obj) are now under /build and null-mounted to where you’d expect, since null-mounting works transparently well on DragonFly. Matthew Dillon has a note explaining the whole thing.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new version of drivers for em/emx(4) and igb(4). The initial versions had trouble, but testing is ongoing. Try it if you have the correct hardware.
Update: never mind.
For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
If you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4), Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to try out his Intel NIC driver update. He’s already updated the ix(4) driver to support more hardware.
As mentioned previously, Sepherosa Ziehau is printing up some DragonFly T-shirts for WeChat users. He’s going to have a few left over, so he is sending them to me to hand to non-China people. If you want one, leave a note saying so in the comments. Here’s the front and back.
You need to provide some way for me to contact you – preferably email, and the size you’d want. (Use the Land’s End Men’s Shirts chart for sizing, because why not.) I’ll only have a few, so no guarantees.
Update: I have more responses than probable shirts at this point – sorry! I’ll get in contact with each of you once the shirts come in and arrange delivery.
Hammer now defaults to ‘noatime’, meaning the date and time of last access are not updated on every file action. Note that creation and modification date and time are still recorded. This will help with speed and disk activity.
This may cause a problem with any software expecting this to change – mutt, possibly? We will find out. This change was done after the 4.4 branch, so it’s not in the current release of DragonFly.
If you are a WeChat user and want a DragonFly BSD shirt, send your Chinese address and mobile number to seallyhs@dragonflybsd.org, or scan this image to join the WeChat DragonFly BSD group.
This is exclusive to China right now, as it’s being done by DragonFly developer Sepherosa Ziehau – who, as you might guess by now, is based in China.
John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
Matthew Dillon has added two Hammer2 directives – ‘info’ and ‘mountall’. See his commit message for a explanation of each. This predates the 4.4 branch, so it’s available in the current release. The usual caveat applies: Hammer2 is for development only; don’t use this to store data you want to use.
I am taking this moment away from my significant backlog of things to post to note that there have been a lot of games fixes in DPorts lately. Thanks to Rimvydas, many small bugs that kept games from compiling on DragonFly are now fixed. The easiest way to see is to look at the commits from December 8th and back, but the best way is to pick one and play.
DragonFly 4.4 is released! The release page has the information, and your nearest mirror should have the images by now. To update an existing 4.2 system, see my users@ post.
Sharp-eyed users will note that release is happening with version 4.4.1, rather than the 4.4.0 you’d expect. That’s because I tagged 4.4.0, built the images, and then OpenSSL 1.0.1q was released. Rather than make everyone who installs DragonFly need to immediately update, Sascha Wildner brought in the OpenSSL update to the 4.4 branch, and I built 4.4.1 instead.
I’m combining two items because news happens faster than I can post: Tomohiro Kusumi has added a ‘dm-flakey’ target to the disk mapper, so you can simulate an unreliable disk, reliably.
Also, the DRM support for radeon chipsets has been updated to match the Linux 3.18 kernel, same as i915. Remember, you can control backlight brightness with it now.
If you are running DragonFly-master (i.e. 4.5), and you have a system between these two updates (roughly between November 27th and now), please rebuild your kernel to avoid a TCP bug.
DragonFly has historically performed very well with NFS. I don’t have hard numbers to point at (an interesting exercise if someone wanted it), but in any case: DragonFly now can tune up to a much larger iosize, which means better NFS performance. DragonFly <-> DragonFly NFS performance can now max out a GigE link, or with anything else that can handle the larger iosize. That plus additional readahead, also in that commit, means easier netboots.
I have a huge backlog of things to post, so this is originating from the 17th: Matthew Dillon has been working for some time on hardlinks and Hammer 2. Hardlinks are the same file, presented in multiple places. This can be a problem when your filesystem keeps infinite, writable snapshots. The solution he just commited is called ‘xlink’ and the commit message has details.
Since DragonFly 4.4 has been branched, bleeding-edge DragonFly is now at version 4.5. As John Marino detailed in his post, that means pkg on 4.5 systems will look in a new place for downloads. (“dragonfly:4.6:x86:64”, since it always uses even numbers) To cover for this, set ABI to point at DragonFly 4.4 packages in pkg.conf for now. They’re freshly built and functionally the same, anyway. Once there’s a 4.6 download path, that ABI setting can be removed. Packages for DragonFly-current are available now and probably at the mirrors by the time this posts.
Update: as John Marino pointed out to me, anyone on DragonFly-master who upgrades now will be at version 4.5. This means pkg will get the new (4.5) packages on the next pkg upgrade. That means a mix of old and new packages unless you either reinstall anything (pkg update -f) or hardcode the 4.4 download path until you are ready to switch everything.
So: DragonFly-current users should either hardcode the 4.4 path for now or force an pkg upgrade for everything. DragonFly 4.2-release users are unaffected.
Did you need to use SLIP on DragonFly? Do you remember what SLIP is? Well, it’ll work with a USB modem on DragonFly, even if you are making a face right now and saying, “SLIP? Who uses that?”
The default linker in DragonFly has been switched to gold, the newer version of ld. (get it, go-ld?) It’s faster, cleaner, going by the commit message. It’s possible to switch back to the old one if needed. This predates the recent branch for 4.4, so it will be default in the release, too.
The next release of DragonFly is coming due, since it’s been 6 months. I just tagged 4.4RC, and I’ll have an image built soon. Current estimate is that we’ll have the 4.4-RELEASE at the end of the month.