I already asked this question on kernel@, but I’ll repeat it here. Who is interested in mentoring for DragonFly, for Google Summer of Code 2014? The org application period is starting today, and it would be neat to do this for a seventh year in a row.
If you have an Intel-based system, and are running DragonFly master, there’s new c-states (power-saving modes) for you to try. Sepherosa Ziehau posted a note about testing and feedback.
There’s been periodic commits updating the USB4BSD support in DragonFly; I haven’t been linking to them because they are generally incremental. However, it’s good to (re?)mention just how you can build DragonFly with that new USB support.
xf86-video-intel-2.21.15 should now work on your DragonFly system. I don’t see it in dports, yet, though.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
There’s a new ACPI version in DragonFly, and Sascha Wildner wants you to update your BIOS, just to be sure.
Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.
Brad Fitzpatrick showed up on the users@ list and mentioned that for DragonFly to be supported in Go, it needed to show up in the Go Dashboard with building reports. I now have the Go builder running on pkgbox32/pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org. Check the builder page to see status.
Note: Installing the port of Go from Dports works just fine; this is the mechanism for testing Go on a per-commit basis for the people who work on Go – so a ‘fail’ notice on the builder page doesn’t necessarily mean anything, unless you are developing Go itself. This may already be clear to you.
Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)
With everyone buying tablets lately, the low end of computers is getting pretty low-cost indeed. Creating single-purpose computers is possible, and I was thinking of doing that to create a Go-testing system. (Though probably not necessary for me.) It got me to thinking, though…
How low-cost a system could run DragonFly? The master-slave and low system requirements of Hammer lead to some interesting possibilities. There’s no Arduino equivalent for DragonFly because there’s no DragonFly on ARM, despite all my wishing. DragonFly has been run on Soekris systems before, and might work on a PCEngines ALIX board. Ebay, my basement, or Craigslist are options too, but not as fun. Who has suggestions?
If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
ACPI has been updated in DragonFly by Sepherosa Ziehau, to potentially support the very low-power sleep states available with Haswell CPUs.
Note: Sepherosa clarified that the lower power states are not available – yet.
There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
Markus Pfeiffer has added more of his work on USB4BSD to DragonFly, and a reminder: if you want to try it out, there’s just a few options to set.
I didn’t post this before, and should have: Matthew Dillon posted a summary of all the trackpad improvements he added, and how to make use of the various features.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.