DragonFly BSD Digest » DragonFly

tpm(4) module added

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:30:45 +0000

The tpm(4) driver has been added by Sascha Wildner, ported from FreeBSD. What’s it do?

From the man page: “The tpm driver provides support for various trusted platform modules (TPM) that can store cryptographic keys.” Crypto keys stored in hardware, where they are in theory unmangleable, instead of on the disk. At least, that’s my impression after 30 seconds of research.

More IP forwarding performance

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:51:45 +0000

Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some numbers showing improvements in ip forwarding rates. He’s done this before, except this time it’s with bnx(4), probably because of his recent commits.

More updates

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:44:50 +0000

This time it’s less and libedit, updated by John Marino.

Many upgrades, and Hammer

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:28:13 +0000

John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).

In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2′s flush sequencing.

Update: tcsh too.

Usage for dports and pkgsrc

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 09 May 2013 02:21:54 +0000

In the week after DragonFly 3.4 was released, Francois Tigeot was tracking downloads for each type of packaging system. It looks like dports downloads far outnumber pkgsrc. I think there’s reasons it appears different in uptake, but it’s still neat to see people trying the new system.

sili(4) testers needed

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:46:25 +0000

If you have a sili(4) device, Francois Tigeot needs you to run a particular patch and tell him what happens. He’s testing a larger I/O request size, and wants to see how it will work out “in the field”.

DragonFly and Bittorrent

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 May 2013 17:03:42 +0000

I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.

Kimsufi servers, DragonFly, and French

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:43:03 +0000

If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

HAMMER file system resizing

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 May 2013 02:52:24 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered about how you can resize/move a HAMMER filesystem, follow this thread for a variety of answers.

More about the DragonFly boot process

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:54:12 +0000

Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.

DragonFly 2.12/2.13 package removal

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:39:23 +0000

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.

Howto: dports and xfce4

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:35:34 +0000

‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.

i386 end-of-life appears on the horizon

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:32:24 +0000

John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop? Follow the thread for details. There’s no final answer, yet.

DragonFly 3.4 released!

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:26:49 +0000

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.

Are you using hotplugd?

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:04:16 +0000

Are you using hotplugd? If you are, this post from ‘william opensource4you’ about a small patch he made may be useful to you.

Updates for libmpfd, grep, diff, and libbsdxml

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:59:07 +0000

John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.

DragonFly 3.4 release very soon

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:22:09 +0000

As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.

The 3.4 improvements, quantified

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:14:27 +0000

Francois Tigeot put together some examples of the improvements from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4. The improvement in tmpfs performance is pretty dramatic.

DragonFly 3.3/3.5 users and dports

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:52:49 +0000

If you’re running DragonFly-current, which right now means version 3.3 and very soon 3.5, you are probably running pkgsrc. If you want to transition to dports, this pair of posts from John Marino will tell you how.

Google Summer of Code: students, apply!

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:42:12 +0000

Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.

I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.