A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
Two minor things that were keeping me from mounting Windows shares on boot of my DragonFly system: the right location for nsmb.conf and using proper capitalization. I’m writing it here to save someone else 10 minutes of search.
‘mazocomp’ has updated the DragonFly mirrors list to include HTTPS links where appropriate, which would be most everywhere. An excellent idea.
While I’m talking about mirrors, there’s some new DPorts pkg mirrors too.
If you have a lot of RAM on your DragonFly system, there’s a patch that you may find useful. If you weren’t able to install that system, well, there’s another potential fix out there.
One advantage of having a link ‘backlog’ is that I can pick and choose a bit, to present grouped items.
If you’d like to set a particular sysctl(8), you enter it into /etc/sysctl.conf. A common mistake is to copy the command line and put “sysctl foo=bar” in sysctl.conf instead of “foo=bar”. This used to cause a warning, but it still bit people, as it would cause a long stream of error messages during boot – with no clear reason, as the kernel tried to understand the command. Now, that typo is handled automatically.
Two links I yoinked from conversation in EFNet #dragonflybsd: there’s a “powersave” power management page on dragonflybsd.org that for some reason wasn’t linked in the main documentation page. I fixed that, and you may want to look at it and change your mwait settings, or look at the corepower(4) module. (From ivadasz’s comments; thanks!)
There’s also an older page on DragonFly and grub2 that may be interesting to anyone looking to boot. (From aly’s comments; thanks!)
On your next DragonFly upgrade, watch the end of your ‘make upgrade’ output. You may have some deprecated files, especially if your system has been upgraded through several releases.
= You have 11 now deprecated files.
= Once you are sure that none of your third party (ports or local)
= software are still using them, rerun with REMOVE_DEPRECATED set.
The now-deprecated files will be listed just before this warning. They aren’t removed automatically in case there’s installed software still linking to them. If you are running only dports software, and are up to date with all of it, you are probably fine to remove these files:
make -DREMOVE_DEPRECATED upgrade
If you have software you compiled yourself some time ago, it may have linked to these old files. One way to search for that would be to use find to find all executable files that are in particular directories, and then use ldd to see what shared libraries are used by each executable:
find /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin -type f -perm +a+x -print -exec ldd {} \;
… and then grep for the names of the deprecated files. You’ll get a bunch of “not a dynamic executable” errors when you do this because it’s a rough example I did for this post, but you can always pipe the stdout of the command to a file and review later. If you do turn up any executables linked to the deprecated files – recompile!
(If you have a better find string or strategy, please comment.)
Eerielinux has a new Ravenports article: Ravenports explained: Why not just join XYZ? I am linking it now because it’s DragonFly related, but it does touch on all the BSDs. It reviews the reasons for Ravenports – and its competitive advantages, if you look at it a certain way. It’s a followup to the Ravenports update and review linked here previously.
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress starts today. (I linked to the multi-day schedule.) It’s one of the few places you can see hacking, from the ground up. So, even if you aren’t near it, you can still see it, live.
Merry almost Christmas! I hope you like reading, because I’m linking to some large collections of text.
BSD Now episode 277 touches on a bunch of things like updating FreeBSD from 11 to 12, and Knuth history, but it links to some helpful directions for using nmap, which I think is one of those basic tools that should be in everyone’s arsenal, along with wireshark.
It’s a classic Lazy Reading this week – some deep dives, some history, some stuff that will take a while to explore. Enjoy!
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
Still lots of BSD stuff happening.
For better or worse, there’s different browser options out there, especially for non-mainstream platforms. You know what I mean. DragonFly developer tuxillo has put together a helpful page listing options and how to get them to build.
For future edification: If you have HAMMER2 installed, the bulkfree operation will create console/dmesg activity even when nothing is wrong, to show operations are happening.
If you happen to be using DragonFly from a network location that only allows http/https as outbound traffic, you won’t be able to update /usr/src using defaults. /usr/Makefile pulls DragonFly source using a git:// URL.
The fix is to use the read-only Github mirror. You can set origin manually or just change GITHOST in /usr/Makefile (or GITURL_SRC if you are on DragonFly-master) to “https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD”.
(Guess what I did today? Updated to note it’s different on -master. Thanks tuxillo for reminding me of this whole thing.)
DragonFly has an automated installer, called PFI, for “pre-flight installer”. It’s not well-known, and there isn’t a man page to link to for it that I can find. Because of that, I jump at any chance I can get to link documentation or example configs.
I like to repeat this from time to time: loading the appropriate sound driver on DragonFly consists of loading all the sound kernel modules and seeing which one sticks, in dmesg . Chances are good it’s snd_hda anyway.