If you wanted to try IPFW3 and NAT, nans_nans1 has done the experimentation for you, and wrote down the steps.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 4.0.6 ISO and .img files. (Does that capitalization make sense?) They should be available at your nearest mirror, or will be shortly. I am still working on the 4.2 release candidate images.
This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
If you are using a DragonFly system with accelerated video, and you have noticed that you can’t return to a text console after exiting xorg – Sascha Wildner/Imre Vadasz have a branch for you to try. Please do so if you have time and are on master; this is the last big item to fix before the next release.
That’s Non Uniform Memory Architecture, and John Baldwin is talking about how it works on FreeBSD, tonight/now, in New York City for NYCBUG. There’s several more events this month with NYCBUG, so look at the announcement for tonight’s location and more dates.
If you were running a version of DragonFly 4.1 (i.e. the master version, not release) built between the 20th and 25th, rebuild. There’s a UFS bug introduced in that short timeframe.
If you are running 4.0.x release or built your version of DragonFly-master outside of that date range – you are unaffected.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where the DragonFly website is hosted, is temporarily down while a disk is replaced. Images and binary packages are still available.
Jesse Wattenbarger wrote in with his success story of switching to DragonFly, both for server and desktop. Of note is his noticeable speedup with swapcache.
If you’re running DragonFly-master and you have an Intel video chipset, Francois Tigeot has an update for you. It brings accelerated Intel video up to match the Linux 3.14 version, adds Broadwell chipset support, and should generally improve performance. He lists how to test right in the message.
DragonFly now has GCC 5.1 release. If you are running DragonFly master (i.e. 4.1), you’ll probably want to both rebuild world and kernel, and update your packages so they all match. There’s already packages built with GCC 5.1, so binary package upgrades can happen quickly. There’s GCC 4.7 packages still available if you aren’t making the jump yet.
If you’re on DragonFly 4.0.x – nothing’s changed.
Here’s some comments from Matthew Dillon on page coloring in DragonFly; a topic that comes up every year for some reason.
The release candidate for GCC5 (5.1.0) is out, and it’s in DragonFly too. It’s not yet switched over to run as the default – that’ll require the release.
The default compiler in DragonFly is going to change over from GCC 4.7 to GCC 5.x very soon, to match the GCC 5.1 release. This means that packages built for DragonFly-master won’t be compatible with the old ones. You will need to reinstall packages when you next ‘pkg install’. John Marino has an extensive writeup detailing what’s needed, and the actual change is some days off.
If you are using DragonFly 4.0.x (the release), this doesn’t affect you at all.
I have had trouble with my daily/weekly periodic reports never making it to my GMail account. Sascha Wildner pointed out to me that periodic.conf has its own answer already:
daily_output=”/var/log/daily.log”
daily_status_security_output=”/var/log/security.log”
weekly_output=”/var/log/weekly.log”
monthly_output=”/var/log/monthly.log”
… and newsyslog is already set to take care of them. There’s more in the periodic.conf man page.
There’s been some linking to the updated HAMMER2 design document. The Reddit link doesn’t have anything specific, but the Hacker News one has some details (including a credit code!) for installing DragonFly on a Vultr VPS.
Noticed in the most recent time zone data update for DragonFly: some people keep Mars time.
Happy Easter! It means chocolate for me.
- Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter. Substitute “open source work” for “design” in this story. (via)
- The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty. Quoted from the article: They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, “But he’s right about most things.” (via)
- COMPUTERS IN OUR LIVES.
- Where we went wrong, or, The one thing Philip Greenspun got right (in 1997).
- A Round Pie in a Square Box. I admit I read it at first just because it mentioned pie, but it is an interesting history. (via)
- istruecryptauditedyet.com. (via)
- How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT. I shall now be annoying: Should have used pfSense, and it’s not a doubling of speed, it’s a doubling of capacity. Any connection on either link is still limited to the speed of that link. (via)
- Oblique Strategies, the website. The Wikipedia entry on Oblique Strategies will tell you what that is, though I could have sworn I talked about it before. (via)
- How a bad RJ45 termination can ruin a cable. First time I’ve seen a check other than “It lights up the tester; must be fine.” (via)
- Some slick awk built-ins.
- Origins of the tilde.
- My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure. (via)
- free-for-dev, a list of ‘as-a-service’ items offered free, for development or whatever. (via)
- /dev/notrandom, an April Fools item I actually liked. (via)
- MISTAKES WERE MADE: COMPUTER HISTORY, DECOMPILED. April 17th in NYC.
- Vintage Computer Festival East, happening same day in New Jersey.
- The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing. At Bard College now.
- (Last 3 links all via SIGCIS, an excellent resource.)
- Creating a BBS in 2015. (via)
- Dueling Unixes and the Unix Wars [pdf]. (via)
- Is BSD UNIX?
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jason Shiga’s comics. It’s an article about the comics, not the comics themselves, so go to his site next. (via)
Also unrelated: tea is one of the topics I link here, and alert reader Jeff Ramnani pointed out Strand Tea as a good source. I also saw Deep Mills referenced in the UK. Anyone else have a favorite online vendor?
This week’s BSDNow has the usual roundup of news, including some… suspicious items, plus an interview of Kamila Soucková about conferences and Google Summer of Code. They note this Hammer2 proposal.
John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.