MIDI support has been (re) added in DragonFly, if I read this recent commit correctly. You may have supported hardware and not even realize it.
There’s been a lot of improvements to DragonFly and graphics support recently, and Francois Tigeot gave a talk at the 2015 X.Org Developer’s Conference outlining just how much has changed. He’s posted the slides.
If you happen to still be running DragonFly 4.0 – that’s two releases ago and not supported – you may be noticing less ports are building. There’s been enough significant changes in DragonFly since that release that it’s reducing the number of buildable ports.
DragonFly 4.0 to 4.2 is not a difficult jump, so jump when you can. The converse of this, of course, is that there’s even more building on 4.2 and DragonFly-current.
Matthew Dillon brought over the FreeBSD iwm(4) driver to DragonFly, with some changes. This is useful to anyone with Intel “Dual Band Wireless AC” 3160, 7260, or 7265 units.
I mentioned Endless Sky in the last Lazy Reading post as a game that might run on DragonFly. ‘Romick’ took that as a challenge and got it working; he’s posted the steps he took so that anyone else can do so.
Noticed both in a commit message and in tonight’s BSDNow, Imre Vadasz has added Panel Self Refresh (power saving) capabilities, set with a sysctl.
John Marino’s committed libc versioning. He has a post describing it, along with a note that anyone DragonFly-current should do a full buildworld/kernel and also update all installed packages. (Update: those new packages are on the way.)
John Marino is working on versioning libc, and as part of that process, libc is no longer loaded into executable memory. Here is I think an explanation of lib versioning that may apply, and of course moving things that aren’t supposed to execute, out of executable memory areas, is good for security. There’s more on that topic, too – W^X may be a similar example.
This is a complicated topic that I’m not part of, so suggest better descriptions in the comments, please.
HAMMER2 recently gained the ability to be used as the root mount for your DragonFly system. Live deduplication of data is also now possible, which means fast copy operations, less space used, and no need to wait for an overnight batch process to do it. If you want to try it, you need a bleeding edge DragonFly system and the WANT_HAMMER2 option. It’s still not ready for production use, so don’t try it with any data you want to keep.
Francois Tigeot has stepped i915 support in DragonFly even farther, this time bringing it to match Linux 3.17. This may be most useful for those with Broadwell and Cherryview chipsets.
I don’t note it enough, but Tomohiro Kusumi has been making constant updates to HAMMER, the version we have now. Often they are the sort of update that makes the code more readable, or fixes possible problems, and so on. Very essential, but hard to post about it. In any case, I’m using his recent improvements to hammer volume-del to note his contributions, of which there are much more than the day’s worth I link here.
Francois Tigeot has pushed in some significant updates from Rimvydas Jasinskas, updating the radeon driver to match Linux 3.17. Try it if you have the corresponding hardware.
Matthew Dillon posted an extended description of how to run Firefox in a way that completely locks it away from your user account. As a side effect of this, the current crop of dports binaries has been updated.
Did you know that AT&T maintains a regex library and test suite? I did not, but now DragonFly has both, in part for better multibyte character support.
(corrected to note that the regex library is not from AT&T – thanks, anonymous commenter)
Most of the news is about Intel video support, but Radeon direct rending improvements are coming too. ‘zrj’ have brought up drm/radeon support to match what is in Linux 3.12. Worth trying if you’ve had problems with your Radeon and audio, going by what I’ve seen people report in IRC.
The vi in any BSD is not the original Berkeley vi – instead it’s usually nvi. However, thanks to John Marino, DragonFly has the up-to-date, multibyte-supporting nvi2. (I know I’ve made reference to the nv/nvi difference before.)
If your DragonFly-running c720p (the touchscreen model) occasionally decides to go perma-bonkers, Matthew Dillon has added a method to reset it, either on reboot or by setting debug.atmel_mxt_reset=1.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted some information on a project for anyone interested: ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control. It’s an extension of p-state power management, and he’s already done a lot of groundwork to support that in DragonFly.
There’s been a bugfix-release to the release version of DragonFly, bringing it to 4.2.4. This is to fix a rare crash on issuing ‘shutdown -h now’. If you haven’t had this problem, there’s no rush to upgrade.