release28

DragonFly Release 2.8

30 October 2010 (2.8.2)

The DragonFly 2.8 release is here!

Big-ticket items

Return of the GUI - The 2.8 release includes a larger 4G USB image with a working X environment and full sources in addition to the standard 700M ISO and 1G USB images.

Crypto support - A cryptsetup compatible cryptographic device mapper target was written for DragonFly. This means that it is now possible to encrypt DragonFly partitions (e.g., HAMMER and UFS). While it is possible to only encrypt any partition like /home/ , it is also possible to encrypt the whole root file system. The latter is especially useful for mobile devices. It is also possible to encrypt the swap partition while still being able to dump a kernel core. Further, the code is SMP aware, so expect a speedup if using multi-core machines and don't have cryptographic hardware support.

Packet Filter (pf) - Pf was updated to a version based upon OpenBSD 4.2. The previous version of pf in DragonFly was based on OpenBSD 3.5. This, in addition to laying the ground for further following OpenBSD's implementation, introduced several performance gains: Information like route-to, altq, tags, etc are now stored in the mbuf header directly. This was partially already the case up to DragonFly 2.6, but now the implementation corresponds to OpenBSD's.

Furthermore an often unnecessary checksumming was removed, which gains another 10% performance. Also state tables and interface bound states were reimplemented and the pf_test_*() functions where fold into pf_test_rule() to make things clearer. DragonFly-specific additions, support for fairq packet queueing and pickups, have remained intact.

WiFi Stack Update - FreeBSD's WiFi (802.11) network stack has been ported. While not all WiFi drivers have been ported the ability to port drivers from FreeBSD much more easily will allow us to ultimately add support for more and newer WiFi devices in the near future.

MP Performance - The multiprocessor work that has been ongoing in DragonFly is really starting to bear fruit. The MPLOCK (The primary lock, that when held ensures only a single cpu is operating within the kernel) has been pushed back significantly with this release. Most of the frontend code now uses soft tokens instead of the MPLOCK, though for safety these particular soft tokens still acquire the MPLOCK. We will be phasing out the safety feature as work progresses.

More importantly, HAMMER now runs with a per-mount lock and has specific optimizations to run 100% MPSAFE in the cached read & stat paths.

Much of the system backend including the buffer cache, the networking subsystem (protocol stacks and netif drivers), and the AHCI disk driver are now completely MP-safe and do not acquire the MPLOCK at all. For most intents and purposes the system is running MP-safe. I don't want to sell this short because large portions of the core infrastructure have been MP-safe for years. But now those MP-safe paths for the first time can reach all the way from userland to the device drivers on the backend.

Availability

Three release options are now available for 32-bit as well as for 64-bit.

An ISO, to be burned to a physical cd or used as an image to install a virtual machine.

A bootable USB disk-key image (minimum 1G USB stick needed)

A GUI bootable USB disk-key image with a full X environment (4G USB stick needed).

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

MD5 sums

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2) = 2123df13f656fc84f752bd742ba497fc

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.8.2_REL.iso.bz2) = 80ba243f241dfa66828e0cb752a06ff3

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2) = 9ce3f7d99dc32650214b99f4a38104dc

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2) = 71dd11dbe0a87fbd8811e5b1000626f3

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.8.2_REL.iso.bz2) = 7d73c5d693be29b9efd1f2886508466e

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2) = e5cb712ace4b5216cfb7a349197acc30

pkgsrc packages

We offer thousands of pre-built pkgsrc packages for this release. The pkg_radd(1) utility may be used to download pre-built binary packages. The path can be overridden by setting BINPKG_BASE in /etc/settings.conf .

To get a list of all packages, let pkg_search(1) download the summary file for that release:

# pkg_search -d

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.

DragonFly 2.8.x Special Installation and Upgrade Notes

New Loader - The forth loader is no longer in the system. The new loader, 'dloader', has to be installed before an 'installkernel'. If you are updating from an older system such as DragonFly 2.6 it is recommended to run an installworld before the installkernel to update the loader. Otherwise you can simply do the following before the 'installkernel'.

# cd /usr/src/sys/boot # make all install

BIND removal - BIND is no longer in the base system. If you are using BIND or any of the associated utilities (host, nslookup, etc.), this method will allow you to transition to the version in pkgsrc:

# cd /usr/pksrc/net/bind96 # bmake all install clean

or

# pkg_radd bind96 # cp /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/named9 /etc/rc.d/ # /etc/rc.d/named stop

edit /etc/rc.conf, and remove

named_enable="YES"

then add

named9_enable="YES" named_chrootdir="/etc/namedb" named_flags="-c named.conf" named_program="/usr/pkg/sbin/named" # chown -R named /etc/namedb # /etc/rc.d/named9 start

Test your setup with host , dig and so on. Check for a running named process with ps. Error messages should go to /var/log/messages .

OpenSSL upgrade - OpenSSL has been upgraded, and SHLIB_MAJOR was bumped for libssh and libcrypto . This shouldn't break any 3rd-party software, but you'll need to recompile your 3rd-party software if you want it to link against the new version of OpenSSL.

libevent removal - Any previously installed applications depending on the libevent library in base will require recompilation, as this library is no longer supplied as standard.

VirtualBox, Virtual PC, and VMWare users - Unless your virtual hard disk is 50G or larger, we recommend doing a UFS install and not the default HAMMER install. We also recommend installing from the CD ISO and not the GUI IMG. A more serious installation should use HAMMER with at least a 50G disk image and can install from the GUI IMG.

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.)

DragonFly 2.8 Release Notes

Release Improvements