Your local mirror should have a copy of the release candidate for DragonFly 4.0.0 by now. Please try it out and report problems. Note that this is a x86_64 only version; there’s no i386 version though you may be able to manually build on i386.
It’s been possible to install and run clang on DragonFly for a long time, of course, and at least build world with it. However, John Marino is putting in significant work to make clang one of the system compilers, replacing the older gcc44 that’s in DragonFly now. (The newer gcc47 stays.) This won’t be part of the next release, but it should be available soon after.
I noted the last few things that should be committed before the DragonFly release. People have spoken up for most of them, but it wouldn’t hurt to try recent -master with the upmap/kpmap work that recently went in. Benchmarks wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.
The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600 CPU in it. It works, however.
Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward. Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages. I went for XFCE4 because I could. Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.
Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:
moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0"
The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:
Option "NoAccel"
Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.
I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:
git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)
It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time. (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)
I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.
And… that’s about it. It’s a working desktop. Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive. I wish I had done this a long time ago.
I’m doing this little extra feature because I ran into several news items over the past week or so that made me say “what the hell?” out loud to my monitor.
Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager. All? Almost all? Linux distributions use gparted, which is open source and can be updated. Why not add to that? Also, it’s yet another preannouncement about how this new replacement tool will work – it’s not functional yet.
Text streams should be the fallback interface in Unix. Every 2 or 3 years someone gets this idea in some form – somehow it doesn’t overcome 40+ years of text usage.
Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems. Nobody can find fault with ideas like easier package management and signing. (Though maybe having the same upgrade mechanism for base + 3rd party software isn’t a good idea) However. this answer, coming from part of the group behind systemd, ties all software installation into having a btrfs volume – even requiring a virtual btrfs volume if there isn’t one installed. Incompatible software versions are dealt with by turning /usr into a sort of container. That kills any sort of need to interoperate with other software. And of course it assumes there is no Unix but Linux. (via)
Grump grump grump.
If you are on DragonFly, using pf, using altq, and using fairq to control usage, there’s a latency bug that Matthew Dillon recently fixed. He’s posted an announcement and committed fixes to master and 3.8, so it’s only an upgrade away.
You should perform a full world and kernel install if on master.
Several people (including me) have been getting bit by a problem: when performing an installworld with a changed kernel, the vn kernel module is loaded, but it was built by the previous kernel and may cause problems when it doesn’t match up.
To fix that, vn is now built in, instead of being a separate module. The rescue initrd (which is what is being mounted when it has this problem) is now installed via a ‘make rescue‘ command that can wait until a successful installworld and reboot.
If you are tracking DragonFly master, your next kernel build should be full, not quick.
It took me a little while, but DragonFly 3.8.2 images are uploaded now to the main site. Check the 3.8.2 changelog if you didn’t before. This is a recommended upgrade for the newer OpenSSL, and should otherwise have little impact on the programs you have installed.
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.8.2, which exists mostly to accommodate the latest release of OpenSSL. (Security fixes, which should not be a surprise.) I will build images as soon as I get a chance.
If you have a particular favorite thing in DragonFly, Damian Vincino would like to know about it.
Rust has been ported to DragonFly by Michael Neumann. His blog has implementation details, and you can pull from his repo to get a buildable version. This may be useful, as he notes, for anyone wanting to build Rust on other BSDs.
Thanks to Nicolas Thery, there’s a POSIX semaphore test suite on DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD. Anyone want to integrate it into dfregress?
There’s a recently talked about bug in SYSRET that apparently affects a lot of operating systems, including Linux and several BSDs. It looks like DragonFly is not affected, but Matthew Dillon has put in changes just in case.
The portable (meaning ready to be brought into other operating systems) version of LibreSSL is out.
Some dports packages can’t be installed in combination with others. The easy way to find the conflict without doing the install? Look for CONFLICTS= in the Makefile. If you don’t have the dports tree on disk, you can always look online.
If you’re looking to use LDAP on DragonFly, follow this thread (read the first, keep going) as people talk about implementing it, what they installed, etc. I haven’t tried it myself, yet.
ACPICA has been updated by Sascha Wildner to version 20140627, which as you can guess from the version, is the most recent. See the included changelog for what’s different.
Another ‘quiet’ week – lots of commit activity in the other BSDs, but not a lot to point at directly.
- PostgreSQL/FreeBSD performance and scalability on a 40-core machine. (PDF link, via) There’s comparison to DragonFly’s results, mentioned here before. DragonFly’s solution of shared page tables is dismissed because it would require work to do, though I think that’s a symptom of FreeBSD’s more complex locking model rather than complexity of what’s in DragonFly.
- pkgsrc-2014Q2 is out.
- Here’s some notes on the systemd compatibility GSoC/OpenBSD project.
- The FreeBSD ixgbe(4) driver understands RSS, and so does igb(4).
- FreeBSD GENERIC kernels can now use vt(4), the replacements for syscons.
- FreeBSD images can now boot UEFI.
- FreeBSD 9/10 users using the WITH_NEW_XORG option have a temporary binary ports repository to use, to handle the change in the drivers.
I have a backlog from stuff I missed last week while traveling, so we all benefit!
- PC-BSD 10.0.2-RC2 is out.
- PC-BSD will be at SouthEast LinuxFest.
- Here’s the roadmap for Lumina, PC-BSD’s new desktop environment.
- DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/06/16.
- FreeNAS vs. NAS4Free. Didn’t need to be 8 pages. (via)
- Peter’s pf tutorial is very popular.
- The freeze for pkgsrc-2014Q2 has started. (I’m a bit late on this one.)
- pkgsrc has a new Pkgsrc Management Committee.
- This thread, “Best pdf viewer in pkgsrc?” may be useful even if you aren’t on pkgsrc.
- NetBSD gained vmx(4) from OpenBSD.
- NetBSD now has pigz 2.3.1, which apparently stands for ‘parallel gzip‘.
- Here’s one OpenBSD/GSoC project status update; I haven’t seen others.
- Another OpenBSD desktop project started.
- BoringSSL. (via) Already, benefits.
- Ways to test pf.
- FreeBSD/gnats has gone away, and none too soon.
- Again, I love to see cross–pollination.
- The July and August NYCBUG meetings: timekeeping and OpenBSD ports. Here’s some notes on what to expect for the August meeting.