BSDTalk 239 is 55 minutes of talk with Baptiste Daroussin at vBSDCon 2013 about ‘pkgng’ on FreeBSD. The BSDTalk post doesn’t mention it, but it is the same pkg tool that DragonFly uses, so Baptiste’s plans are relevant to DragonFly too. (I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet so I don’t know how much he talks about DragonFly, specifically.)
Timezones are a human invention to describe the natural world, so they are changed according to human whims. That’s a grand way to note this change in timezones that is global but I noted in a DragonFly commit of tzdata2014b – look at the last entry.
One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run. Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in. DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.
Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD. If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead. Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS. Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.
(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.) As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?
If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an IPv6 patch for you to try. What’s it do? I think it improves performance under multiple streams of traffic, but that’s from looking at the code and totally guessing.
Matthew Dillon committed the start of a Hammer 2 cluster API. I noticed, while looking at the commit, that there’s a design document, a freemap design document, a changes list, and – most important for anyone interested – a TODO list.
Alex Hornung has updated tcplay in DragonFly to 2.0, and cryptdisks is updated to match. If you have a short memory, tcplay(8) is the tool on DragonFly to manage TrueCrypt volumes. Is DragonFly the only BSD to have this? I think so, based on very few seconds of googling.
In part because I asked him, Sepherosa Ziehau benchmarked 10G ix(4) with 2 ports on DragonFly. The results? Good, both for bandwidth and for CPU usage.
A recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau has a 5% improvement in the number of network connections per second a x86_64 machine can accept. He’s also reducing the number of IPIs during network activity. If this seems somewhat esoteric, it’s because network speeds are getting so fast that the benefits come from reducing the accompanying CPU load.
Sascha Wildner updated the time zone database on DragonFly to tzdata2014a. The odd thing isn’t that update – Sascha updates like clockwork, haha! – but the release notes. Apparently Even Microsoft is starting to support time zone names, sorta, finally.
If you’re on DragonFly 3.7, you will need to build world before building the kernel again if you are updating to some point in the last 24 hours. Sascha Wildner points out the related commit.
Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.
DragonFly has moved from the old USB stack to USB4BSD by default. That means:
- If you are already using USB4BSD, you will want to remove WANT_USB4BSD from your kernel config.
- If you have trouble, switch back to the old USB.
- There’s some drivers that are not yet converted; help with them would be appreciated.
- A full kernel/world build and ‘make upgrade’ will be needed in either case.
Sascha Wildner’s announcement email has all the gory details, including the kernel config changes to move back to the old USB setup. This is of course in master; 3.6 users are unaffected.
Hammer’s ability to stream to remote disks is great, but what if you have storage that uses some other file system? Antonio Huete Jimenez put together a shell script that will dump out the contents of a Hammer PFS, for upload to whatever. Read the README for the details.
If you are upgrading packages on your DragonFly 3.6 system, and you have docbook installed, there’s an extra step needed because of the moving around of several docbook packages. If you don’t have docbook installed – nothing to see here.
I followed up with Google on why DragonFly isn’t in Summer of Code this year. It is exactly as I suspected: they want to get new organizations in. DragonFly’s been doing it for 6 years, so they are picking new orgs over returning ones. This is apparently the same reason NetBSD isn’t in this year, either.
(Honestly, I can use the break.)
Sascha Wildner has updated arcmsr(4), which brings in support for the Areca ARC1214, ARC1224, ARC1264, ARC1284, and ARC1883 models, from FreeBSD. Please test if you have the appropriate hardware.
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
Coretemp is now in the default kernel configs for DragonFly, so you can use coretemp to see your Intel CPU temperature.