Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
It’s now possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using gcc 5, and Matthew Dillon has posted an announcement that describes how. He also separately lists the (small considering the included C++) effect on build time.
Note that gcc 4.7 remains the default compiler.
John Marino has removed gcc 4.4 in DragonFly, and replaced it with gcc 5.0. Two things to note: gcc 5 does not yet successfully build world, and DragonFly is an officially supported platform for gcc with this release.
Here’s a number of DragonFly links to clear out my backlog:
- Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to version 6.7.
- He updated file, too.
- Bill Yuan’s ipfw branch has been updated.
- Matthew Dillon’s been making more Hammer2 commits; check the TODO for status.
- Michael Neumann has Rust working on DragonFly.
- Filesystem encryption on Hammer.
ISO/IMG files for DragonFly 4.0.3 have been uploaded and by now should be available on your favorite mirror. You should update for the OpenSSL upgrade. If you already have DragonFly 4.0.x installed, the normal ‘make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade’ cycle should work just fine.
John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.
DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.
As part of another thread, Steve Petrie posted an in-depth description of how and where and why he’s using DragonFly. Worth looking at either for workflow tips or for just seeing the use case.
If you want to help I/O performance when DragonFly is virtualized, here’s a short checklist of what to work on. I haven’t noticed any problems – but I’m not taxing any of my VMs that heavily.
This page, Varialus et Anisoptera, set up by… I’m not sure of the real name but it’s ‘varialus’ on IRC – has a detailed description of the DragonFly install process and installation of MATE, plus extra notes. I always find these sorts of cheatsheets entertaining.
Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.
Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.
There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.
A fellow whom I’ve only seen named as Bill is working on what he calls ipfw2, though technically what’s already in DragonFly is ipfw2, since it’s the second version of ipfw. Either way, he has a project page up describing what he’s done so far, and what he plans.
If you look at your local DragonFly mirror, you’ll see ISO and IMG versions of DragonFly 4.0.0RC3. Please run, break, and report.
(Check the iso-images directory.)
Matthew Dillon had some followup commits that went in just after I tagged RC2 of DragonFly 4.0 last night, so I’ve tagged RC3. Tagging’s cheap, anyway.