This makes sense once you think about it: copy-on-write filesystems (like Hammer2 and ZFS and probably others) actually do nothing when “zeroing” out filespace.
There’s been multiple reports of pulseaudio causing problems for DragonFly users. It would get pulled in as a dependency, and audio would suddenly stop working. Uninstall, and audio is fine. John Marino has removed it from dports, to prevent that exact problem.
It’s a good week to learn: BSDNow 154 has no interview, but a lot of tutorials, including ones on GhostBSD, Enlightenment, Steam on FreeBSD, and so on.
Alex Merritt noticed that one of the new characteristics of DragonFly 4.6 was “improved IPI signalling”. He asked about benchmarks, Sepherosa Ziehau pointed at tools, and Matthew Dillon provided some results.
Here is some coverage of the DragonFly 4.6 release, which may be interesting to read because of the comments: Hacker News, Hacker News again, and lobste.rs.
A reaction to the initial creation of DragonFly I never saw before, and Matthew Dillon’s followup. (via)
I like the summary in the very first comment of this story on DragonFly removing page-zeroing.
It’s Thursday, so that means BSDNow 153, with a title inspired by the lead news item, “my int is too big”. (No, not spoon, int.) No interview this week, but lots of links.
Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.
DragonFly 4.6 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, or update your source files and build – my users@ email describes the steps.
DragonFly 4.6 release candidate 2 has been tagged. You can pull it directly from the master site in img or iso form (check your local mirror instead if possible), or shift to the new tag.
“Where is RC1?” you may ask? I tagged the first release candidate some days ago, and this bug was immediately found right after. It was easier to go right to RC2 once a fix was found.
This candidate will probably lead directly to a release version, so if you want to run the release version exactly, wait a few days.
The NYCBUG meeting happening tomorrow night, June 6th, is on the two different BSDs (RetroBSD and LiteBSD) that can run on the super-tiny PIC32 microcontroller. Go if you are near.
The system I had for running a go builder died. I am running out of extra hardware. Is there someone who is using Go and DragonFly and is willing to commit to running a semi-dedicated builder?
There’s a new digital library in Kisumu, Kenya – and it’s running DragonFly for file storage.
If you didn’t already know about it, you will find this useful: DragonFly has a tuning(7) man page, about getting the best performance from your system. Matthew Dillon recently updated the man page with some tips about SSD setup.
Tomohiro Kasumi wrote a lengthy explanation of what “@@” means, in the context of the Hammer file system. It acts as a sort of signifier for each actual Hammer pseudo-file-system, since it’s possible to null-mount these anywhere in DragonFly, under all sorts of names. Don’t trust my summary, though – read his.
BSDNow 143 has the usual roundup of news, plus a conversation with Matthew Macy about graphics improvements in FreeBSD.
We need DragonFly people interviewed, since DragonFly graphics improvements have been leading the pack, so to speak. I’m linking to the Jupiter Broadcasting site again since I don’t see this episode up on the BSDNow site yet.
karu.pruun managed to get xwayland working on DragonFly, and also took notes while doing it. That means you can try it out, too.
BSDNow 142 is out. You might think the title is about Perl, the language, on BSD, but it’s because there’s an interview with FreeBSD developer Alfred Perlstein. I’m sure he gets that a lot. Among the other news on the episode is a note about ordering BSDNow shirts: do it today because it’s the last day they will be available! Also, you can order now and pick it up at BSDCan if you’re going to be there.
(I’m linking to the jupiterbroadcasting site because the bsdnow.tv site isn’t updated as of this writing.)
The May issue of BSD Magazine is available now. There’s articles on ZFS, OpenBSD’s arc4random, an interview of Fernando Rodríguez of KeepCoding, and more. It’s a free PDF download if you didn’t know.
DragonFly versions of TeX have been available for some time now. However, Nelson Beebe, who is part of the TeX project, is having trouble building some related binaries – asymptote and clisp. He could use help from anyone interested, to match up with this summer’s release of TeX 2016.