There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.
The 4.0 release of DragonFly is out! Quoting from the release page:
Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.
The more eagle-eyed downloader will notice it’s version 4.0.1, not 4.0.0. That’s because nobody trusts .0 releases I tagged 4.0.0 just before a few useful commits went in, and it’s better to retag to make sure everyone got them. See also my message to kernel@/users@
I’m working on the 4.0 release, but in the meantime, I wanted to point at a slew of updates from Sascha Wildner: ACPICA 20141107, pciconf(8), axge(4), and the kernel part of the netgraph7 Bluetooth stack.
I hadn’t caught this yet cause I am working extra hours, but Matthias did: Matthew Dillon talks about DragonFly and the 4.0 release for a good 43 minutes on BSDTalk.
A fellow whom I’ve only seen named as Bill is working on what he calls ipfw2, though technically what’s already in DragonFly is ipfw2, since it’s the second version of ipfw. Either way, he has a project page up describing what he’s done so far, and what he plans.
Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.
Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.
If you look at your local DragonFly mirror, you’ll see ISO and IMG versions of DragonFly 4.0.0RC3. Please run, break, and report.
(Check the iso-images directory.)
Imre Vadaz’s recent change to dev/drm, adding kqueue support, has (from anecdotal reports in IRC) made video performance much better. It’s committed to DragonFly 4.0, so it’ll be in the next release.
Matthew Dillon had some followup commits that went in just after I tagged RC2 of DragonFly 4.0 last night, so I’ve tagged RC3. Tagging’s cheap, anyway.
I just tagged a second release candidate of DragonFly 4. Matthew Dillon’s recent reapctl() addtions – now called procctl() – just went in.
I said “USB ethernet drivers should work now” yesterday, but didn’t specify what works with the new USB structure in DragonFly. Sascha has fixed that by explicitly porting aue(4), cue(4), ipheth(4) and kue(4) from FreeBSD. As his commit notes, there’s still a few more devices to go.
If you’ve got a USB Ethernet device on DragonFly, it should work. Also, some cell phones tether correctly now, when they may have had trouble before.
The release candidate for DragonFly 4.0 came out last week, and normally the release would happen after a week. There’s still a few people reporting an odd freeze, so until we can find a cause, we’ll continue to wait.
Chrome runs on DragonFly now, apparently possible now because of this ported fix from Joris Giovannangeli.
If you can read French, or can translate, here’s an article covering the use of DragonFly as a desktop system.
Despite my complete lack of good planning, John Marino and Francois Tigeot have packages available for the DragonFly 4.0 release candidate that I assembled. Point at this directory to use them.
As Francois Tigeot has pointed out, recent Mesa upgrades have made very old graphics drivers using DRM1 no longer work. They’ve been removed. This won’t affect you unless your graphics card is 10+ years old.
If you are running DragonFly, and also using nginx, the so_reuseport option will give you a significant speed boost. I’ve mentioned it before, but not this directly.