Your local mirror should have a copy of the release candidate for DragonFly 4.0.0 by now. Please try it out and report problems. Note that this is a x86_64 only version; there’s no i386 version though you may be able to manually build on i386.
It’s been possible to install and run clang on DragonFly for a long time, of course, and at least build world with it. However, John Marino is putting in significant work to make clang one of the system compilers, replacing the older gcc44 that’s in DragonFly now. (The newer gcc47 stays.) This won’t be part of the next release, but it should be available soon after.
I noted the last few things that should be committed before the DragonFly release. People have spoken up for most of them, but it wouldn’t hurt to try recent -master with the upmap/kpmap work that recently went in. Benchmarks wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
Sascha Wildner brought in led(4) from FreeBSD. It’s a driver for flashing LEDs, as you might have guessed. I’d like to see someone make Blinkenlights, whether BeBox-style or just generally mysterious.
Francois Tigeot gave talks at EuroBSDCon and XDC 2014, and he’s posted slide and video links. He covers DragonFly and Postgres and video drivers, or at least I assume so cause I haven’t watched them yet. There’s other BSD-specific material available too, according to his post.
John Marino updated wpa_supplicant (in dports). He then suggested moving it out of base into dports, so that it could be updated independently of the base system. (this update, for instance, took years.) Since wpa_supplicant is necessary to get some systems online – and it can’t be installed if missing if you don’t have a network link – it may be too risky. I think other packages could be moved out, myself.
Robin Hahling volunteered to update OpenSSH in DragonFly, which is good news. It’s a jump from version 6.1 to 6.7, so there’s some feature changes. tcpwrappers support is gone, for instance. If you have a reason to object to this change, speak up now.
John Marino has upgraded gcc, libedit, xz, and grep in DragonFly. Also, tzdata has jumped from version 2014e to 2014h, thanks to Sascha Wildner.
This week’s BSDNow has an interview about mentoring with Steve Wills of FreeBSD, the usual array of news. This week has more small device news than normal – NetBSD on Raspberry Pi and pfSense on a mini-ITX system. And a mention of my desktop article! I’m relevant!
The powersaving page on dragonflybsd.org has seen a bunch of updates; this should be handy even if you aren’t on battery power that often.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent changes to UDP in DragonFly mention some performance gains to sheer packet count.
Markus Pfeiffer has imported FreeBSD’s if_lagg to DragonFly. It’s for talking LACP over multiple network ports, so that the traffic from those multiple ports can be aggregated – if what’s on the other end generally understands LACP. (Failover mode may not count.) Please test if you have that sort of surfeit of network ports.
Matthew Dillon hasn’t committed anything to DragonFly in several days… cause he just got married! Congratulations to the newly married couple.
There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.
The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600 CPU in it. It works, however.
Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward. Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages. I went for XFCE4 because I could. Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.
Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:
moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0"
The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:
Option "NoAccel"
Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.
I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:
git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)
It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time. (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)
I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.
And… that’s about it. It’s a working desktop. Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive. I wish I had done this a long time ago.
Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.
In a bit of perfect timing, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, Lumina, has been ported to DragonFly, thanks to mneumann! It’s not in dports yet, but it should be buildable from source…
You can now see the packets, bytes, and drops in altq by using the -altq arg to systat, thanks to this recent commit from Matthew Dillon.
Why is it so warm out? I want autumn to start.
- BSD compared to Linux, an explanation.
- A description of what rcctl does. (via several places)
- NetBSD runs on the OpenRISK 1000.
- tmux-resurrect, making tmux survive machine restarts.
- OpenBSD version numbering explained.
- PC-BSD has its own subreddit.
- Lumina is now available as a port – will it work on DragonFly? Someone try!
- DiscoverBSD news for 2014/09/01.
- NetBSD 5 systems now use modular xorg.
- The 2014Q3 pkgsrc freeze is coming up.
- PXE installs of OpenBSD with Serva.
- Are you a “connoisseur of old time stamps“?
- FreeBSD has some support for the Altera SOCFPGA.
- Your cross-pollination moment of the week.
- Yes, it runs (Retro)BSD.
This very long commit message from Sepherosa Ziehau details the UDP changes he’s made. It’s mostly technical details, but at the end he mentions this little tidbit:
“For ‘kq_connect_client -u’ test, this commit gives 400% performance improvement (31Kconns/s -> 160Kconns/s).”