If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.
There’s some DragonFly material in here, though I normally confine that to the rest of the week. It’s inextricable from the rest of the links.
- Setting up an OpenBSD mail server. (via)
- FreeBSD-current users, regenerate your keys. (fixed)
- Using OpenBSD and vxlan to overlay remote lans. (via)
- A Prediction: 2020 the year of (PC-)BSD on the desktop. (also)
- “Has Linux lost its way?” (via) (also)
- DiscoverBSD news for 2015/02/16.
- Curious if FreeBSD or any other BSD district would work better on a MacBook pro?
- Which
- Am I taking a realistic route to learning more about internals? (hey, it’s DragonFly!)
- Speaking of which: cross–pollination.
- More cross-pollination, and surprise from me; I didn’t know USB video link worked on any BSD.
- The m0n0wall project has ended.
- The end of ‘games’ as a separate object on FreeBSD.
- Tetris: still changing.
- autonet – simple automatic wifi chooser on OpenBSD.
- pkgsrc binaries as an exit strategy from systemd.
- IPFW now the default firewall (and on) in PC-BSD.
- The updated roadmap to 1.0.0 for Lumina, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, to go with the 0.8.2 release.
- PC-BSD at SCALE.
- s2k15 hackathon report.
I admit I never thought about it much, but I’ve also never had enough RAM to matter: there’s a memtemp(4) tool that monitors temperature sensors for your system’s memory. Sepherosa Ziehau has updated it on DragonFly to support some newer processor setups.
This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system. The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.
(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)
Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
Well, might rather than will , but I had to make a music reference. There’s a bug in versions of pkg from 1.4.6(ish) to 1.4.11 that can make it accidentally delete itself while updating packages. If this happens to you, there’s an easy fix, as posted to users@:
# cd /usr && make pkg-bootstrap
Once you’re on version 1.4.12+, you’re fine.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
John Marino has removed gcc 4.4 in DragonFly, and replaced it with gcc 5.0. Two things to note: gcc 5 does not yet successfully build world, and DragonFly is an officially supported platform for gcc with this release.
If you have a em(4)/emx(4) card, AKA ‘Intel(R) PRO/1000’, Michael Neumann has an update for you. It’s from Intel’s 7.2.4 release of the code. This is to support the new I218 cards. Initial reports are positive.
This week is relatively quiet.
- Raspberry Pi GPU acceleration in NetBSD 7. (via)
- OpenBSD networking on Macbook Pro?
- PC-BSD 10.1.1 is out.
- Is there any RNDIS support in any BSD?
- Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?
- Stuck between OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD (mostly Web and File Server)
- devctl, a new device control utility in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has gained a VCHI driver for the Broadcom “VideoCore IV GPU”.
- Things you can remove from FreeBSD.
- PC-BSD gains ‘personacrypt’, for encryption of home directories.
- OpenBSD gained iwm(4), for Intel 7260 wifi.
Matthew Dillon brought in some wireless networking updates – the ath(4), iwn(4), and wpi(4) drivers are updated. There’s porting notes if you need them, too. In related news, rum(4) is also improved. The updates apparently benefited DragonFly and FreeBSD at the same time.
Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 drivers in DragonFly (remember the call for testing) to match what’s in Linux 3.10, which means you should get excellent accelerated video performance on most any recent Intel video chipset, on DragonFly.
Here’s a number of DragonFly links to clear out my backlog:
- Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to version 6.7.
- He updated file, too.
- Bill Yuan’s ipfw branch has been updated.
- Matthew Dillon’s been making more Hammer2 commits; check the TODO for status.
- Michael Neumann has Rust working on DragonFly.
- Filesystem encryption on Hammer.
If you have very recent alc(4) hardware, it may be supported now. If you are booting over NFS, it may be faster now. These changes are unrelated other than both being recent – NFS is improved for any chipset.
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
- Running DragonFly-master
- Using a i915 chipset
- (optional) On a chipset that is not Haswell or Ivy Bridge
… He could use your testing and feedback.
I’m saving up for one of those Acer c720p Chromebooks that people seem to be enjoying. If you have enjoyed the Digest for a long time and want to help, please do. Of course it’s to run DragonFly.
Thanks to the generosity of a bunch of people, I’ll get a C720 and an SSD too. Thank you all very much, people I have never met but would like to shake the hands of.
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.