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.
If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted an extended description of his work with nginx on DragonFly, and the kind of performance he was able to wring out of it. Of special note: he posts all his sysctl changes, which might be useful to anyone else in high-traffic environments, and notes that he was able to saturate a 10Gb link with one DragonFly machine.
Also: a followup comparing interrupt vs. polling performance.
Tomohiro Kusumi has been working on a port of autofs to DragonFly. If you aren’t familiar with it, autofs is an automatic file system mounter, so when you access a network file system at its local mount point, autofs kicks in and makes sure the remote file system is automatically mounted. He has an initial report on his progress, and expects it to be in DragonFly master in the next month.
NYCBUG is meeting tonight, and Thomas Levine will be there to talk about Urchin, a shell-based test framework. The announcement also has future meeting/speaker dates noted.
If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.
Not older people that use DragonFly, but people of any age using an older release of DragonFly: Bezitopo is Pierre Abbat’s topographical program, and he needs testers on versions 4.4 of DragonFly or before. Please give his open-source program a run if you are on the appropriate versions. Trying other BSDs, even though not requested, can’t hurt.
Posting it now, because it’ll be too late by this weekend’s In Other BSDs: The inaugural meeting of KnoxBUG is tomorrow night. That’s Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The speaker is Kris Moore, of PC-BSD. The website has directions.