Branched, not released. The release should happen in two weeks. One major bug has been squished, and remember the upgrade process from 3.4 to 3.6 is a little different from normal.
Matthew Dillon’s been working to make huge parallel software builds (i.e. dports) go a bit faster, so watch out. This only affects you if you are running DragonFly 3.5, of course.
John Marino has put in a large patch to DragonFly 3.5, updating all sorts of language-related items. As he warns, you will need a full buildworld/buildkernel in a specific order to update. On the plus side, you can now probably use your native language for nvi and for git.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.
If you are running DragonFly 3.5, make sure you do a full buildworld depending on how recent your version is. Just a quickworld will cause problems. DragonFly 3.4.x users are unaffected.
It’s been 2 years since the pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.12/2.13 were getting updated, so I am going to remove them. If you’re running DragonFly 2.12, you’ll want to either build from source or upgrade DragonFly.
As posted in my email to users@: Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
The release ISO/IMG files are all available at the usual mirrors:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/mirrors/
The release notes have details on all the changes:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/
If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
If you have an installed DragonFly 3.2 system and you are looking to upgrade, these (not directly tested) steps should work, as root:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
… And then go through the normal buildworld/buildkernel process found in /usr/src/UPDATING. If you are running a generic kernel, that can be as simple as
make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade
(and then reboot)
If you encounter problems, please report them at bugs.dragonflybsd.org. I get better at testing for each release, but I also get better at discovering new problems just after release.
There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now. I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…
Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.
If you are on DragonFly 3.3, and you are running a kernel built after January 1st, there’s a bug in the way FP context is handled when the kernel supports AVX. (January 1st is when AVX support was committed.) Matthew Dillon has committed a fix and issued a note to update for everyone.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.3, make sure you perform a full buildworld and buildkernel when you next upgrade. Sascha Wildner is mentioning this as a cautionary note after experiencing issues when using quickkernel, after removing a number of syscalls. Once past that point, it should be safe to go back to quickworld/quickkernel.
On the 10th of November, I’m going to remove the binary pkgsrc packages from mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org for DragonFly 2.8 through 2.11. They are closing in on 2 years old at this point, and are from a pkgsrc branch that hasn’t been updated for that long.
If you are actually using version of DragonFly that old, you can continue building from pkgsrc normally; these are just prebuilt packages.
I’ve written a release email that includes the steps for updating from source and updating pkgsrc for existing installs. This release enjoys better performance and new packages, so go, enjoy.
The pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 3.2 are still building… I’ve tagged the release, so it will be ready as soon as the packages are ready.
Remember the new scheduler work? Well, it continued, and now Francois Tigeot has posted pgbench benchmarks of the progress and benchmarks of DragonFly vs. other operating systems. The links are to PDFs; scroll down as each have multiple pages.
The summary result: If you’re running Postgres, you probably want to do it on DragonFly. The numbers are the best results for any BSD, even better to some extent than Linux, which has had its own issues with schedulers and Postgres. DragonFly 3.2 will include these improvements.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
According to Aleksej Saushev, pkgsrc is going to start defaulting to Postgres 9.1 instead of Postgres 8.4 by default, in just a few weeks. That means an upgrade in the next quarterly release, so keep that in mind.
This was going to go into a Lazy Reading post, but then I realized it shouldn’t. Here’s the source: “A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL” (via)
The short version: MySQL, compiled a certain way, will allow 1 out of 256 root login attempts to work no matter what. I was going to link to this for the startlingly large number of MySQL installations found allowing connections from the public Internet, which means breaking into any affected servers would be easy. Then I thought about it… I don’t see a my.cnf installed by pkgsrc for at least MySQL 5.1 by default.
To fix this for your own installation, put
[mysqld]
bind-address=127.0.0.1
in /usr/pkg/etc/my.cnf to disallow remote connections. I don’t know if MySQL on DragonFly from pkgsrc is vulnerable to the issue, but it’s a good idea to not allow remote connections to the database, and ought to be on by default.
Or just use Postgres, if possible.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to SIOCGIFDATA, so if you are using DragonFly-master and pf, you will need a full rebuild. Also pftop, if you use it.
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, libpthread was broken for a short period. If you built anything in the last … 12 hours? You may want to rebuild it. If that doesn’t describe you, it’s a nonevent.
It’s funny that I’m reporting a short-term break in bleeding-edge operating system code as any sort of surprise. It shows something about how stable DragonFly-master is most of the time.
There’s a Day Against DRM sale going on for O’Reilly. 50% off everything, and all the books are DRM-free. I found out about this through Michael Lucas, whose No Starch books are represented there too. It’s a fantastic deal and it’s today only, so strike now while you have the chance.
(I should make a ‘buy buy buy!’ tag for articles.)