Category: Goings-on

When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive.  So far, so good.  The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works.  However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard.  If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.

It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.

Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one.  It’s apparently similar to usched(8).

Shamelessly copied from my own users@ post: I tagged 5.6.1 and built it earlier today.  This version has a corrected sshd_config and fixes a lockup bug in ttm. The ISO should be showing up on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org in the next 20 minutes or so, or you can rebuild using the normal process on an existing 5.6 system:

cd /usr/src
git pull
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
make upgrade

If you are still on 5.4 or earlier, you need to bring in 5.6 sources, which is noted in the 5.6.0 announcement.

DragonFly 5.6.0 has been released.  This version brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2.  Matthew Dillon did some informal testing of the VM improvements, and posted results to the users@ list.

My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading (pay no attention to my 5.4 typo), as do the release notes.

 

ISO and IMG files of DragonFly 5.6rc1 should start showing up at mirrors over the next few hours.  This is the release candidate, not the release, so don’t install unless you want to test.

Thanks to a suggestion from Lassi Kortela, man.dragonflybsd.org now exists and takes you directly to the online man page interface, similar to man.(free/net/open)bsd.org.

That sounds like a good thing, right?  No automatic bugs, just manually placed ones.  What it really means is that bugs.dragonflybsd.org no longer autocreates users, cause there was a certain amount of spam coming through freely created accounts there.  It may be hard to tell the next step.

If, like me, you’ve been running DragonFly for a long time, and you haven’t switched away from tcsh for your account or for root, you may not have ‘set autorehash’ in your .cshrc.  Newer installs have it.

Put that into .cshrc if you don’t have it, and it’ll save 15 seconds of the rest of your life not typing ‘rehash’… assuming you can overcome the muscle reflex.