It’s tonight at 7 PM, with the details found on the NYCBUG mailing list. RSVP as soon as you can if you are near enough to go – and you should go.
If you are a WeChat user and want a DragonFly BSD shirt, send your Chinese address and mobile number to seallyhs@dragonflybsd.org, or scan this image to join the WeChat DragonFly BSD group.
This is exclusive to China right now, as it’s being done by DragonFly developer Sepherosa Ziehau – who, as you might guess by now, is based in China.
BSDNow 119 is up, with even lengthier news summaries than usual, and an interview of Paul Goyette about his testing work with NetBSD.
John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
Matthew Dillon has added two Hammer2 directives – ‘info’ and ‘mountall’. See his commit message for a explanation of each. This predates the 4.4 branch, so it’s available in the current release. The usual caveat applies: Hammer2 is for development only; don’t use this to store data you want to use.
DragonFly 4.4 is released! The release page has the information, and your nearest mirror should have the images by now. To update an existing 4.2 system, see my users@ post.
Sharp-eyed users will note that release is happening with version 4.4.1, rather than the 4.4.0 you’d expect. That’s because I tagged 4.4.0, built the images, and then OpenSSL 1.0.1q was released. Rather than make everyone who installs DragonFly need to immediately update, Sascha Wildner brought in the OpenSSL update to the 4.4 branch, and I built 4.4.1 instead.
BSDNow 118 is up, and it has an interview with Mark Heily about relaunchd, along with a number of other BSD news things that I haven’t even read yet because I didn’t expect the episode before today.
DragonFly has historically performed very well with NFS. I don’t have hard numbers to point at (an interesting exercise if someone wanted it), but in any case: DragonFly now can tune up to a much larger iosize, which means better NFS performance. DragonFly <-> DragonFly NFS performance can now max out a GigE link, or with anything else that can handle the larger iosize. That plus additional readahead, also in that commit, means easier netboots.
Since DragonFly 4.4 has been branched, bleeding-edge DragonFly is now at version 4.5. As John Marino detailed in his post, that means pkg on 4.5 systems will look in a new place for downloads. (“dragonfly:4.6:x86:64”, since it always uses even numbers) To cover for this, set ABI to point at DragonFly 4.4 packages in pkg.conf for now. They’re freshly built and functionally the same, anyway. Once there’s a 4.6 download path, that ABI setting can be removed. Packages for DragonFly-current are available now and probably at the mirrors by the time this posts.
Update: as John Marino pointed out to me, anyone on DragonFly-master who upgrades now will be at version 4.5. This means pkg will get the new (4.5) packages on the next pkg upgrade. That means a mix of old and new packages unless you either reinstall anything (pkg update -f) or hardcode the 4.4 download path until you are ready to switch everything.
So: DragonFly-current users should either hardcode the 4.4 path for now or force an pkg upgrade for everything. DragonFly 4.2-release users are unaffected.
Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. isn’t slowing down BSDNow, cause there’s a new episode up with Bryan Cantrill talking about the awfulness that is Linux interfaces, along with a bunch of summary news items written out on the page.
The next release of DragonFly is coming due, since it’s been 6 months. I just tagged 4.4RC, and I’ll have an image built soon. Current estimate is that we’ll have the 4.4-RELEASE at the end of the month.
If you are on bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3), you will need to rebuild both kernel and world to keep them in sync, after Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit. This won’t affect you at all if you are on 4.2.x.
I don’t think I linked to this anywhere else: Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System? By Siju George, at BSD Magazine.
It’s Thursday and there’s a new BSDNow: Controlling the Transmissions. The interview this week is with Hiren Panchasara, about “improving TCP”, though I haven’t yet listened to it for details. There’s also the normal news roundup.
If you are using clang with DragonFly, and you want to always run the newest version, you can set options in compilers.conf, and use ‘clangnext‘.
If for some reason you are seeing messages about your CPU overheating – and you know it is not, there’s a solution. Disable coretemp messages.
Note that if your CPU is actually overheating, turning these messages off won’t help. Don’t want anyone to be surprised when their computer melts…
The Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative is using DragonFly (and FreeBSD) as part of their library setup, and Michael Wilson, the project coordinator sent a note to users@ describing this. They are looking to spread through the continent, so get in contact if you want to be part of the project.
BSDNow 110 is now available. It’s back to the text summary format, so I can tell you easily that it includes an interview with Benno Rice, about Isilon and their interactions with FreeBSD.
NYCBUG is having “true(1) and false(1), The Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm, NYC*BUG Mix Tape Edition” happen this Wednesday the 7th. You may remember a similar event at the end of August. This will be led by George Brocklehurst from the original event, with NYCBUG members present. If you missed the previous one, try this out – by all accounts, these code readings are inordinately fun.