Imre Vadász fixed top so that hitting ‘c’ filters displayed processes by command name. I am mentioning this not because it’s a huge change, but because I forget about all the interactive elements that are possible with top.
Does that count as alliteration? Anyway, Matthew Dillon has increased the size of the starting window in TCP. If you are on a higher-latency link and/or fetching lots of small files, you should notice better performance.
If you are on bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3), you will need to rebuild both kernel and world to keep them in sync, after Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit. This won’t affect you at all if you are on 4.2.x.
I don’t think I linked to this anywhere else: Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System? By Siju George, at BSD Magazine.
The disk scheduler apparatus in DragonFly has been removed. This may not affect you much, since alternate scheduling setups were never utilized much with it. It may fix some rare Hammer cleanup issues, though, and you may need to adjust your custom kernel config, if you have one.
John Marino sent a helpful link to show the cross-platform work he’s been involved in: He brought the locale work from Illumos into DragonFly over the summer (look for his name on commits), and now it has been brought from DragonFly into FreeBSD, with Baptiste Daroussin reporting on the process. If there’s any OpenBSD/NetBSD developers reading, with an interest in locales, this may be useful..
(someone correct me if that’s not the right Illumos link)
If you are using bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3) on a machine with Intel video, the i915 module has been renamed. This means you will probably need to rebuild xf86-video-intel from source to have it match. There should be a matching binary package soon.
If you are on DragonFly 4.2, this does not affect you.
Sascha Wildner has brought over support for the Realtek 8168H. This may be useful because at least one low-cost server provider – Kimsufi, I think? – uses them by default in their product line.
If you are using clang with DragonFly, and you want to always run the newest version, you can set options in compilers.conf, and use ‘clangnext‘.
If for some reason you are seeing messages about your CPU overheating – and you know it is not, there’s a solution. Disable coretemp messages.
Note that if your CPU is actually overheating, turning these messages off won’t help. Don’t want anyone to be surprised when their computer melts…
Via EFNet #dragonflybsd, “Booting DragonFlyBSD with Hammer on a GPT drive“.
For those of you with DragonFly and an Intel i915 chipset, Francois Tigeot has moved support up another notch, to match Linux 3.18. This will help Cherryview and Broadwell chipset users the most.
I think at this point, Sepherosa Ziehau is able to improve the DragonFly network stack by just standing near his computer and concentrating for a few minutes. For example, he’s unearthed another improvement to connect rate/reduction of CPU usage.
Imre Vadász has put together an initial port of Wayland / Weston for DragonFly. You can look at his pull request for dports to see how to install, though I’d imagine this is only for people who like to experiment at this point. It’s still work in progress, as is Wayland itself.
Tomohiro Kusumi has added a dm-delay target, which means you can simulate poor disk performance, without having to have poor disks. His commit message includes some benchmarks that shows it doing a good job creating a bad job.
The Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative is using DragonFly (and FreeBSD) as part of their library setup, and Michael Wilson, the project coordinator sent a note to users@ describing this. They are looking to spread through the continent, so get in contact if you want to be part of the project.
There’s a new version of the Intel video driver in dports – xf86-video-intel-2.99.2015.09.09. If you update to this and you experience an xorg-server crash, Matthew Dillon found that changing the acceleration method from SNA to XAA fixes the problem. Don’t change it unless you actually see the problem, of course.
The package x11-themes/dragonfly-wallpapers exists, thanks to John Marino, and gives you DragonFly-themed backgrounds in KDE. Or probably any other window manager, if you install it and point your wm at the directory.
Update: John Marino helpfully posted a link to the images. It’s not yet built as a binary, but it’s not exactly time-consuming to build from source.
