This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
Matthew Dillon’s already using a 4K monitor on DragonFly, and he’s written notes on the various performance tweaks that went with it.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
Even sysctl accesses can be made to handle multiprocessor environments. This can actually make a difference when you’ve got a lot of processors building a lot of software, as in all of dports.
From IRC today:
“19:43 <@dillon> I’m bored at the moment. lemme try to speed up module builds“
Buildkernel, depending on your processor count, now may have tripled in speed.
Those changes I mentioned yesterday for text console support? They’re in DragonFly-master now, along with a loader tunable to turn it on and off.
If you are using a DragonFly system with accelerated video, and you have noticed that you can’t return to a text console after exiting xorg – Sascha Wildner/Imre Vadasz have a branch for you to try. Please do so if you have time and are on master; this is the last big item to fix before the next release.
You can now get temperature readings from your Radeon card under DragonFly.
If you’re using nginx on DragonFly, version 1.9.1 has specific DragonFly speedup options built in.
A short but more interesting list this week, I think.
- ZFS Mastery is out in print and electronic versions.
- BSD management with Puppet.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/05/25.
- Dell Networking OS 9 powered by NetBSD.
- Lumina Desktop Status Update/FAQ.
- PC-BSD 10.1.2: an Interview with Kris Moore.
- A FreeBSD Foundation visit to the (a?) NYI datacenter.
- “Patrol Read” support in OpenBSD.
- syslog-ng and ELK on OpenBSD.
- Yay for compatibility!
- The Linuxulator on FreeBSD now does 1:1 threads and x86_64.
- See this “Low Cost 10G Router” post on NANOG? Follow the very long thread, and you’ll notice a reoccurring theme: set up a BSD machine.
- Bitrig at NYCBUG on 2015/05/06, video.
Your Not BSD link of the week: Never fix anything.
Hammer 2 now uses LZ4 compression by default. It also uses a new CRC algorithm that performs much better, and there’s numbers to prove it. It helps iSCSI too. When I say new, it appears to be from the 1980s? I may be looking at the wrong place.
There’s a new ‘ifconsole’ option for /etc/ttys on DragonFly that may help you if your serial output device is a bit strange.
Matthew Dillon has been doing a lot of Hammer 2 work lately. Well, he’s been doing it for quite some time, but the recent commits contain the sort of things that are easier to link to, like deletion speedups, freemap changes, and stats tracking/compression results.
If you were running a version of DragonFly 4.1 (i.e. the master version, not release) built between the 20th and 25th, rebuild. There’s a UFS bug introduced in that short timeframe.
If you are running 4.0.x release or built your version of DragonFly-master outside of that date range – you are unaffected.
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon means users of Intel Haswell or later CPUs will see reduced power usage, if I’m reading this commit correctly.
Hammer will perform daily housekeeping tasks each night. If you’re up late enough, it may kick off while you are working. If you want to stop the process after it’s already started (since it’s disk-intensive), John Marino has added the ‘abort-cleanup‘ command.
Experimental automatic crypting of swap is now available in DragonFly-master. Recently added, though it may have been possible another way.