Category: Goings-on

Are you tired of hearing about Meltdown/Spectre yet?  Doesn’t matter!  The two sysctls for controlling mitigation in DragonFly have been renamed:

machdep.meltdown_mitigation
machdep.spectre_mitigation

They go to hopefully sensible defaults, but Matthew Dillon has done some testing to show the effects of each in various combinations.   (Update: more changes and tests.)  Note that this is not the final mitigation work; compilers (i.e. gcc) are being updated to include workarounds for this, so new gcc -> new compiler in DragonFly -> new defenses.  No silver bullet there, though.

DragonFly has a donation page and a Paypal account.  There’s no 501c3 benefit for U.S. residents to donate; DragonFly doesn’t exist as a non-profit.  People have still been donating in smaller sums over time.  It’s not enough to offset the colocation fees ($4k/year) plus the hardware there, but the money does get used for specific tasks.  Matthew Dillon wrote a description of his upcoming plans: more storage, plus some interesting details on how much wear the existing SSD disks have sustained.

DragonFly 5.0.2 is released.  As you may guess from the version number, this is a bugfix release.  The release tag has the full details.  Update through the normal process of a buildworld/buildkernel, at your leisure.

If you are like me and have a long weekend, dig into /usr/share/examples.  Not all of it is necessarily up to date, but there’s examples there on running rconfig, diskless, different pf and ipfw examples, and so on.  Actual documentation is in corresponding man pages – and there’s examples on how to write them, too.

DragonFly 5.0.0 has been released.  HAMMER2 is available in the installer.  Multi-volume/clustering support isn’t in there yet, but support for  deduplication/snapshots/booting and so on all are.   My post to users@ has upgrade instructions.

 

I tagged DragonFly 5.0 (commit message list in that link) over the weekend, and there’s a 5.0 release candidate for download.  It’s RC2 because the recent Radeon changes had to be taken out.