DragonFly BSD

release34

DragonFly Release 3.4

Version 3.4.1 released 29 April 2013.

Version 3.4.2 released 27 May 2013. See the tagged commit for details.

Version 3.4.3 released 26 August 2013. See the tagged commit for details.

Big-ticket items

Experimental packaging system: dports

John Marino has created a system, DPorts, that uses the FreeBSD ports system to build ports for DragonFly, and uses pkgng to manage the binary packages produced from those ports.

The default packaging system on DragonFly is pkgsrc. To use DPorts, you must remove or disable pkgsrc packages. Pkgsrc and DPorts cannot be used at the same time, or have packages mixed together. See the DPorts Howto page for details on installing and using DPorts. Note: this is the first release with DPorts, and this is still experimental.

The DragonFly snapshots are built using dports. (and also have XFCE for the desktop)

Performance improvements under extreme load

The process of testing poudriere, a tool for mass-producing binary dports packages, exposed stability issues when repeatedly mounting and unmounting many tmpfs systems on large multicore (48) systems. These issues have been fixed. In addition to stability, several changes were made to improve performance in situations with heavy processor and disk usage.

Improvements in poudriere performance, tmpfs performance, and CPU usage (graphs are linked in those message) were graphed by Francois Tigeot and posted on the kernel@dragonflybsd.org mailing list.

New default compiler

The two base compilers have swapped roles. GCC 4.7, introduced as an alternative compiler with Release 3.2, is now the primary compiler used to build DragonFly. GCC 4.4 remains on the system and still has an important role as the primary DPorts compiler. GCC 4.7 brings OpenMP (parallel programming) support to DragonFly via libgomp as well as stack smashing protection via libssp, neither of which was supported by GCC 4.4. The newer compiler also offers improved C++ and Objective-C support, and introduces Link-Time Optimization (LTO) support.

New USB stack

USB4BSD is available this release, though not by default. More USB devices are compatible with DragonFly, and xhci (USB 3.0) users may be able to take full advantage of their newer hardware. Since this is a new feature, it is available in 3.4 but not built by default. See the original announcement for how to do so. This feature was available in DragonFly 3.2 but is still experimental.

Availability

Two release options are now available for 32-bit as well as for 64-bit. 64-bit installations are recommended if you do not need the Linux emulation layer.

The release ISO images should be available on most of the mirrors. If the ISO is not available on a certain mirror, please try another one or download it from the DragonFly master site. Each image is in the "Live CD" format, meaning that it boots into a running and fully functional DragonFly system, which can be used for testing or system recovery tasks as well as installation. Check the hardware page or boot a Live CD to check for compatibility.

MD5 sums

MD5 sums for the compressed images:

MD5 sums for the uncompressed images:

pkgsrc packages

Prebuilt pkgsrc packages are built using pkgsrc-2013Q1. 'pkg_radd' can be used to automatically install binary pkgsrc packages and dependencies.

We supply a Makefile in /usr to track the pkgsrc tree and we supply a Git mirror of the NetBSD pkgsrc CVS repo at git://git.dragonflybsd.org/pkgsrcv2.git. We recommend that users use it, instead of pulling from NetBSD with CVS. Our Git mirror is updated several times a day. Type 'make' in /usr to see the available commands for performing these actions.

DragonFly 3.4 Special Installation and Upgrade Notes

Disk size warning - Installations using HAMMER should use disks over 50G in size. HAMMER history will consume disk space quickly. Either use UFS on smaller disks, or prune your file history carefully.

Virtual PC users - Virtual PC does not supply serial numbers for the virtual disks. The system may need to be manually directed in the boot loader if the disk identifier changes. (Hit ? in the boot loader for a list of available volumes.)

Qemu users - If you see a large number of error messages on the console when booting, you may need to boot DragonFly with ACPI disabled. This can be done in the menu presented at initial boot. If that doesn't help, try placing hw.ioapic_enable=0 in /boot/loader.conf.

VMWare Player users - xorg.conf may require additional configuration to display a desktop on the i386 GUI DragonFly images.

Installer Crypt Options - The installer can encrypt the root volume and the swap volume. It will not work properly for other volumes despite any additional check-boxes you might see. Installer and boot-time support works but is still a bit rough around the edges. Performance will be relatively high on multi-core machines.

DragonFly 3.4.2 Release Notes

For a list of per-commit changes between 3.4.1 and 3.4.2, see the 3.4.2 tag commit.

The major reasons for this point release were fixes for DragonFly under Xen with more than 2 CPUs specified, and for booting x86_64 DragonFly in KVM.

DragonFly 3.4.0/3.4.1 Release Notes

For a list of per-commit changes, see the 3.4.0rc tag commit and the 3.4.1 tag commit.

Kernel changes

Hardware changes

HAMMER2

Userland changes

Removals

Contributed Software

Security related