release210

DragonFly Release 2.10

26 April 2011 (2.10.1)

The DragonFly 2.10 release is here!

Big-ticket items

Hardware and multiprocessor support - This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support.

Hammer Deduplication - Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data.

Packet Filter (pf) - Pf was updated to a version based upon OpenBSD 4.4. The previous version of pf in DragonFly was based on OpenBSD 4.2.

Compiler updates - DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step.

New bridging functionality - The bridging system has been rewritten. Multiple interfaces on a single system can be bound together transparently under a single virtual MAC address, and bandwidth aggregated to that new interface.

MP Performance - The MPLOCK (the primary lock, that when held ensures only a single cpu is operating within the kernel) has been removed from every area except the VM system. DragonFly is one of the few non-academic operating systems to use a primary sychronization mechanism that is not a blocking mutex

Overall Performance - DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).

ACPI Support - Major update to DragonFly's ACPI support have been made, particularly for interrupt routing.

Availability

Three 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.

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 2G USB stick needed)

A GUI bootable USB disk-key image with a full X environment. Minimum 4G USB stick needed. Some sticks labelled as "4GB" actually provide just something like 3.88e9 bytes, short of any reasonable "4GB" value. The image is pretty crammed towards "4GB", you better check actual sizes before the large download.

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

The GUI bootable USB image also contains the DragonFly git repo in /usr/src and the PkgSrc git repo in /usr/pkgsrc. The code can be trivially checked out using these repos and even an old repo can be incrementally updated from master sites post-install.

MD5 sums

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.10.1_REL.img.bz2) = 3b296fdbdb6189c802954b1267956048

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.10.1_REL.iso.bz2) = 3761a7deedcf4b07168a822cb068bf27

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-2.10.1_REL.img.bz2) = ae4df7b369f1c6129638eb0daa424cab

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.10.1_REL.img.bz2) = 3cc9df8f74f8c329605ad08cd8045a80

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.10.1_REL.iso.bz2) = 980305aa5282138a3fdecbe182334e53

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-2.10.1_REL.img.bz2) = 13243061d32cc68d95eeb8cf36aefb1d

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.10.1_REL.img) = d9c210e32b34d5697744c3db60d8c734

MD5 (dfly-i386-2.10.1_REL.iso) = 7ead78315076382bc3410c6af12d4bcd

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-2.10.1_REL.img) = 152188ac8ba600c4428e774d6e70a787

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.10.1_REL.img) = 088ee5b4119b1a7fc8986912f15d06fb

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-2.10.1_REL.iso) = 069f8c819b4a0418c05ca1a8b375092b

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-2.10.1_REL.img) = ab4ed9e564efe6d48122a3b1c949cfd4

pkgsrc packages

We offer roughly 10,000 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/pkg_radd.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 2.10 Special Installation and Upgrade Notes

Using deduplication - Hammer volumes need to be upgraded to version 5 to use deduplication. The 'hammer version-upgrade <filesystem> <version>' command will perform this in-place. To enable periodic deduplication, run 'hammer viconfig' on each PFS and add the line 'dedup 1d 5m'.

APIC_IO - The APIC_IO kernel option can now also be controlled via the hw.apic_io_enable /boot/loader.conf tunable. The kernel option simply specifies the default now.

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.)

Interrupt Routing Issues - If you are experiencing interrupt routing issues there are several boot options you can try. You can try booting both UP and MP kernels (both are available via the boot menu), you can try booting without ACPI, you can boot with ACPI but disable ACPI-based interrupt routing by setting debug.acpi.disabled="pcib", you can disable use of the IO APICs by setting hw.apic_io_enable=0, and you can enable an emergency interrupt polling thread by setting kern.emergency_intr_enable=1. Once you have a working system you can edit /boot/loader.conf on the USB stick to set your new defaults in stone.

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 2.10 Release Notes

Release Improvements