Francois Tigeot has updated i915 support to match what’s functionally in Linux 3.16. Accelerated video on Broadwell chipsets is now fully supported, plus a bunch of other changes mentioned in his commit message.
If you are running DragonFly-master, there have been fixes for a wrong uname (my fault) and initrd image booting with encrypted drives. Update if you are running on the bleeding edge, if you haven’t already.
If you are sure you don’t need to look at your boot menu for very long in DragonFly, you can make it zip by quickly.
It’s an unexpectedly diverse list this week.
- The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t. The best explanation for the much-linked OpenSSH story last week: PAM is the problem.
- pfSense 2.2.4 is released.
- OPNsense 15.7.4 Released.
- A week of pkgsrc #11.
- The 2015Q2 FreeBSD status report is out.
- FreeBSD 10.2-RC1 Now Available.
- Introducing BSDHistory, and how it is set up.
- BSD Graphics.
- What BSD do you use, and for how long have you been using it and how?
- NetBSD on the Nvidia Jetson TK1 (via)
- A new fancy FreeBSD boot screen.
- Switching a static blog to OpenBSD’s new httpd server. (via)
- Three new c2k15 reports on Undeadly: one, two, three.
- HardenedBSD Completes Strong ASLR Implementation.
- FreeBSD on the c720. (via)
- Yay cross–pollination.
- Fixing the GPT booting bug with FreeBSD and some Thinkpads. Also, asking Lenovo for a BIOS fix. (thanks, Warren Block)
- pkgsrc-2015Q2 binary packages for illumos now available.
- Anyone here use DragonFly? Not an ‘other’ BSD, but this was a good place to put the link.
If your DragonFly machine can do it, it will now run an accelerated console by default.
A DragonFly machine with a lot of network traffic will have a significant amount of memory consumed by all the running network connections. (as with any system) It’s now possible to adjust the amount of memory set aside for those operations, live. This sort of fine-tuning will only matter if you run an extremely busy machine, but it’s worth it if you do.
Francois Tigeot has a new i915 video branch for testing, if you are running DragonFly-current. It will be especially useful for people on a Broadwell chipset.
I’m globbing these DragonFly updates together in a single post because I’m running behind:
ACPICA was updated to Intel’s newest version: 20150717.
GCC in DragonFly was updated to the 5.2 release.
DragonFly DRM (that’s Direct Rendering) now supports ValleyView chipsets.
hostapd, for creating a wireless access point, has been included in DragonFly along with wpa_supplicant, for a long time. Like wpa_supplicant, there’s a version in dports that is the latest version and is easier to update (e.g. no system update required to get a newer version.) Unlike wpa_supplicant, there’s no chicken-and-egg installation problem if it’s not in the base system – so out it goes.
If you’ve previously tried to install DragonFly using a USB thumb drive, and it would somehow not be found to boot from, there’s a potential fix.
DragonFly ships with wpa_supplicant, for setting up WiFi. However, there’s no guarantee it’s the latest version. A solution exists: security/wpa_supplicant in dports. However, this has a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need wpa_supplicant to get online and download the dports version of wpa_supplicant. So, DragonFly still includes wpa_supplicant in the base system, but you should upgrade to the dports version when possible.
DragonFly now has the same math library (libm) as OpenBSD, replacing an earlier combined version of I think what NetBSD and FreeBSD ran. This doesn’t necessarily directly affect you, but it’s work worth doing; matching the underlying frameworks between BSDs helps everyone.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been doing a lot of work with various processors states to save power on DragonFly. He’s published a summary of how well the various P-state/C-state/mwait settings work. He found that setting a lower C-state can perversely improve performance.
For those saying “but how do I set these lower power states?”:
sysctl machdep.mwait.CX.idle: AUTODEEP
sysctl machdep.cpu_idle_hlt: 1 (or higher)
Do you have a ValleyView GPU? It now works much better in DragonFly, and there’s a new accelerated rendering branch to try out, too, if you follow that link.
Hey, my stickers arrived! You can order your own.
There was a newer release of OpenSSL (1.0.1p) last week, so there’s a new revision of the DragonFly release – 4.2.3. There’s little major change other than the security fix for OpenSSL.
Those readers who can count past 2 may notice that there wasn’t a 4.2.2. We went straight from 4.2.1 to 4.2.3. That’s my fault. I screwed up tagging and Git doesn’t like repeated, deleted tags.
I don’t know enough about Erlang and LFE to say much other than “Hey, look at this article about installing LFE on DragonFly!” (via)
Here’s how you test the console frame buffer on DragonFly, even though X is the way to go.