If you are on DragonFly, using pf, using altq, and using fairq to control usage, there’s a latency bug that Matthew Dillon recently fixed. He’s posted an announcement and committed fixes to master and 3.8, so it’s only an upgrade away.
Thanks to Francois Tigeot, the drm/i915 driver now supports Haswell processors, and the special FDI and DDI ports they use. I am late posting this.
You can now start moused with an argument, so it will look at the right device. In most cases, I imagine “/etc/rc.d/moused start ums0” will be what anyone wants. Credit to Michael Neumann for the update. Perhaps moused_flags="ums0" will do it too? I haven’t tried yet.
This will overwrite your /etc/devd.conf.
If you are using the ATI Mach64 drm driver on DragonFly, Francois Tigeot would like to know. He’s done something that breaks it, but he’s making the educated guess that this more-than-10-years-old card is no longer in use.
Because of some structure changes made by Matthew Dillon while chasing a pf bug, you will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel on your next update – if you are running DragonFly-master. 3.8 users are unaffected by the bug or the change.
The server that hosts shiningsilence.com is getting old, and it’s time for me to go to 64-bit DragonFly. It’s audience opinion time: what have you purchased lately, and liked? What would you suggest?
It seems pkg 1.3.6 was slightly scrambled. If you happen to have built and installed it, John Marino has special instructions on how to update to 1.3.7. If you are on DragonFly 3.8, you can follow those instructions now, and if you are on 3.9, that repo should be ready for an update in the next few days.
You should perform a full world and kernel install if on master.
Several people (including me) have been getting bit by a problem: when performing an installworld with a changed kernel, the vn kernel module is loaded, but it was built by the previous kernel and may cause problems when it doesn’t match up.
To fix that, vn is now built in, instead of being a separate module. The rescue initrd (which is what is being mounted when it has this problem) is now installed via a ‘make rescue‘ command that can wait until a successful installworld and reboot.
Another long list. These are making my Friday nights take some extra effort.
- Oolite, an open source game based on Elite. Yes, it runs on BSD. I’m surprised I haven’t posted about it before. (via)
- My Experience Switching from Slackware Linux to FreeBSD.
- A week of pkgsrc, #3.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/08/18.
- OpenBSD is gaining a rcctl(8) tool for automation.
- Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes.
- 20 years of FreeBSD ports.
- “Does BSD perform disk caching less aggressively?” I bet the person asking was using two different machines at different times with different loads, which means he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
- The FreeBSD Foundation’s August Update is out.
- Some people don’t like pkg.
- The EuroBSDCon 2014 travel grant has been extended, and Google has grants to bring more female computer scientists there.
- Spatializer support in NetBSD.
- NetBSD is keeping up with the gpl2 version of GNU Make.
- PC-BSD 10.0.3-RC1 has been tagged.
- FreeBSD has a new automounter.
- FreeBSD has a set of keymap conversion tools. Might be useful to someone?
- FreeBSD now goes up to 256 CPUs. (I thought this already happened?)
- Yay cross-pollination!
- Apparently people don’t pay attention to file contents.
- IPv6 tunneling on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD has replaced BIND with unbound in the base system.
If you remember the earlier work to support DragonFly on An Acer c720 Chromebook, it’s been repeated for the c720p. The “p” means it’s a touchscreen.
DragonFly’s using pkg 1.3, at least on master, and I’ve seen a few people report an error message when performing ‘pkg upgrade’. The error message usually includes something like:
pkg: need to re-create repo Avalon to upgrade schema vers
If you get this, do ‘pkg update -f’ and it will complete.
DragonFly’s dhclient will now retry failed interfaces and handle being re-run gracefully. This is a blessing for anyone who has had a flaky link. Matthew Dillon’s made two other improvements for booting that will also improve boot time when networks go missing.
Here’s a nice advantage for dports and DragonFly: since it’s an overlay on FreeBSD ports, it’s possible to move to newer or different versions of software without waiting for it to happen in FreeBSD. For example: there’s a newer version of the xorg intel driver now in dports – newer than what’s in ports.
If you are tracking DragonFly master, your next kernel build should be full, not quick.
If you have a DragonFly system with an iwn wireless chipset, and you are having trouble connecting and running in the 5Ghz part of the spectrum only, here’s a tip: the -ht switch may fix it.
It took me a little while, but DragonFly 3.8.2 images are uploaded now to the main site. Check the 3.8.2 changelog if you didn’t before. This is a recommended upgrade for the newer OpenSSL, and should otherwise have little impact on the programs you have installed.
There’s been good progress in Francois Tigeot’s work on Haswell graphics support in DragonFly. If you have one of those newer units, you should be able to use the i915 driver with it now – as long as you keep acceleration off. (You won’t notice any difference in 2D anyway.)
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.8.2, which exists mostly to accommodate the latest release of OpenSSL. (Security fixes, which should not be a surprise.) I will build images as soon as I get a chance.
If you have a i915 video chipset (which appears to be most every recent laptop), Francois Tigeot would like you to try his huge patch. It doesn’t support Haswell chips yet, though it lays some of the groundwork for it.
If you have a particular favorite thing in DragonFly, Damian Vincino would like to know about it.