Peter Avalos has updated DragonF’y’s OpenSSL to version 1.0.1, in part to make future upgrades easier. See the changelog for what’s new. Look for the part specifically about 1.0.1, since the notes include unreleased material too.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever. Here’s parts one, two, and three. There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.
I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days. My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw. I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.
Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio. You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap. I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already. This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.
I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg. You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later. I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2. It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached. That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.
Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy. I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist. Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.
I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.
I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me, and slid the upside-down speakers onto them. There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.
You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner. How’s the sound? Okayish. You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar. I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.
This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home. (This laptop usually travels with me.) I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.
(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background. It was a wedding present. I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer. I don’t know why.)
Sascha Wildner has updated mfi(4), the LSI MegaRAID SAS driver , via FreeBSD and LSI. SAS2208-based controllers are now supported.
I just removed old pkgsrc binary packages for DragonFly 2.6/2.7 from avalon, so if somehow you are running a version of DragonFly that old, and still using binary packages, you’ll want to upgrade. I’m pretty confident that describes nobody.
Also, I have plans for coordinating the next pkgsrc release of 2012Q1, due April 6th, with the probably next minor upgrade of DragonFly, 3.0.3. I wrote out my plans already, so go read. (plus followup)
John Marino has changed the default search path for ldconfig; it no longer looks along /usr/lib/gcc* since that’s already included via rpath. The end result: you will need to do ‘make upgrade’ after your next buildworld build/installworld.
I’ve seen a few people complain about poor video performance in DragonFly, in Xorg. If you see a bunch of “contigmalloc_map: failed …” errors in your dmesg, your video card needs more contiguous memory allocated. Set vm.dma_reserved to 32M in /boot/loader.conf and you should be set. If that doesn’t work, try 64M.
A torrent for DragonFly 3.0.2, found via Google search. Which ISO or img files does it include? I don’t know. Which architectures? I don’t know. Is it legit? I don’t know. Click at your own risk, just like any other link.
DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one. This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.
Student applications for Google Summer of Code (and DragonFly) can now be submitted, until April 6th. Now’s your chance!
Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found. Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.
Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate. Why draw such a heavy line under that? The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem. Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!
This report from yours truly is using pkgsrc-current, so it reflects some of what will show up in pkgsrc-2012Q1. John Marino has already fixed some of the “top breakage” items, so the numbers should be even better for the next one…
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly (meaning version 3.1), you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. ‘make quickworld’ will appear to succeed but the kernel won’t work.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.0.x, this does not affect you.
Konrad Neuwirth is running Apache inside a jail, and getting some weird errors. Obviously I don’t know the fix, but Chris Turner knows what the settings need to be.
We have pkgsrc binaries still around for DragonFly 2.6/2.7. As I posted, I’d like to get rid of them. Would that inconvenience anyone?
We don’t have a set expiration policy. We probably should.
Carsten Mattner wrote out his notes on EFI booting on a Mac. This gets you closer to booting DragonFly on there, but I don’t think it is completely working yet.
Update: Carsten Mattner has a better summation than what I wrote.
If you do, acpi_hp could use some testing. Sascha Wildner just brought some improvements in for that module. I’ve seen discounted HP laptops show up in various places, recently.
Here’s the page, with a convenient mentor application note at the bottom. That’s the next step, so if you were thinking of mentoring, now is the time.