release32

DragonFly Release 3.2

Version 3.2.1 released 02 November 2012.

Version 3.2.2 released 16 December 2012. See tagged commit for details.

Big-ticket items

Performance improvements under database load

Significant work has gone into the scheduler to improve performance, using postgres benchmarking as a measure. See the PDF of graphed results to see the improvements. DragonFly should be now one of the best selections for Postgres and other databases.

New USB stack

USB4BSD has been incorporated into this release. 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 3.2 but not built by default. See the original announcement for how to do so.

Availability

Four 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 ISO image with a full X environment. DVD disc required.

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

The GUI images also include a snapshot of our git repos in /usr/src/.git and /usr/pkgsrc/.git which can be incrementally updated after the installation.

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.

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 can be incrementally updated from master sites, post-install. See below for methods to obtain this code using the other images.

MD5 sums

MD5 sums for the compressed images:

MD5 (dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.img.bz2) = a592a2da318c081850a4e7cb28ef18c8

MD5 (dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2) = a6a78642d636d4205e0f3b6b78a6ead9

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.img.bz2) = cdd250a8eaa7331d4130efacf068ded7

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2) = b04e274d58539fee8dbaa70da8cfcfdd

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.img.bz2) = a8af1d8d7d865acf7ab4f49ed5e5321b

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2) = c8ea968b85ddd522ccaa0e6e1f1de17a

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.img.bz2) = 5c1519a46a386ec310cbb285debf6485

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2) = 34c11445c55102ef122b7ae8209e99d5

MD5 sums for the uncompressed images:

MD5 (dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.img) = 52c416d9ea77ef11dace6e24e24a1741

MD5 (dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.iso) = b1a6c18097b9e8ae86929b60b2974f1d

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.img) = c94d6ebde1914b89064af9df7b402d9b

MD5 (dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso) = 21fc0e02557f331d943de2f9682b5df6

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.img) = 2a0900c62432af5e805f8c7b1a71b073

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.iso) = aec7bf8de6813900d23a5c30838def2e

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.img) = beebf543d1c8c22fe4e799120c77f68b

MD5 (dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso) = c5958a04246b7b99b13e33c1032de6ff

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. Type 'make' in /usr to see the available commands for performing these actions.

DragonFly 3.2 Special Installation and Upgrade Notes

Disk size warning - GUI disk installs and installations using HAMMER should be to 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.

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 3.2.1 Release Notes

Kernel changes

Many bug fixes, greatly improving stability. More robust pcb_onfault handling, fixed issues in the namecache module, VM system, etc.

Removed several arbitrary bounds on kernel caches (such as the buffer cache) for x86-64.

Improved control over BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER by adding run-time sysctls.

Removed sio console baud switching when console & getty/login is running on the same serial port.

mmap() now segment-aligns mappings when reasonable to do so.

KTR logging is now frozen on entry to panic.

Removed size cap for tmpfs. This created problems when mounting tmpfs partitions from fstab prior to swap being turned on.

Numerous buffer cache clustering performance improvements.

Numerous vkernel related fixes.

Implicit 64KB I/O request size limitations have been removed. All block devices can now cluster I/O requests up to MAXPHYS (currently 128KB) if they support it.

A new filesystem-independent quota subsystem has been added. See vquota(8)

Fixed floating point rounding for long double in x86_64 platform

Implemented RFC1405 and SACK rescue retransmission

Several Google Summer of Code projects added for PUFFS support, scheduler changes.

tmpfs filesystems can be exported over NFS

Make carp(4) lockless MPSAFE

More RFC3390 conforming

RFC6298 conforming

RFC6633 conforming

Improve RFC4015 support

Implement RFC6675

Implement RFC4653

Fix several SACK related bugs

Optimize SACK scoreboard allocation

Implement "Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm"

Support memory-mapped PCIe configuration space access

Make PAWS robust against segement reordering

Asynchronize TCP's pru_rcvd; improve performance.

ACPICA update (submitted by Magliano Andrea)

Added O_DIRECTORY and O_CLOEXEC support to open(2)

Hardware changes

A driver for the new Ivy Bridge random number generator has been added

Our ACPI reference implementation has been updated

Smart Battery System support has been added

Many ACPI and interrupt routing improvements, as well as bug fixes and workarounds for broken hardware

Watchdog drivers for Intel and AMD chipsets have been imported from FreeBSD. See ichwd(4) and amdsbwd(4).

A ixgbe(4) driver for Intel 10Gb/s ethernet adapters has been added.

Many drivers for hardware RAID adapters have been updated

A hpt27xx(4) driver for HighPoint RocketRAID 27xx SAS controllers has been added

A hptrr(4) driver for HighPoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx and 25xx has been added

Update igb(4) to 2.2.3, add MSI-X support and various improvements

Update bge(4) support from FreeBSD

Add Broadcom 5718 and 57785 chip-family support (bnx(4))

Add TSO support for IPv4 TCP

Add TSO support in em(4), emx(4), bce(4), bge(4), bnx(4), igb(4), jme(4)

Stabilize alc(4) support

Update em(4)/emx(4) to 7.2.4, fix bugs mentioned in errata

Improve jme(4) multiple reception queue and MSI-X support

New Multiprocessor-safe Work

Introduced a new cpu topology aware scheduler, usched_dfly, and made it the default. This scheduler implements several weighted algorithms and will first try to schedule threads to different sockets (to make best use of on-chip caches). As the load increases threads are then scheduled to real cores, and finally will be scheduled to hyper-threads. Threads with similar load characteristics tend to get spread out more. The scheduler also implements wait/wakeup pairing detection and tries to move related threads closer together to reduce inter-socket cache coherency bandwidth and share L3 caches.

Greatly reduced SMP bottlenecks in the unix domain socket code.

Implemented shared tokens to reduce unnecessary bottlenecks in the VM system, particularly for forked and threaded processes.

Introduced a major pmap optimization for x86-64 which allows page table pages to be shared between UNRELATED processes (so it works for process's separately exec'd or forked), in situations where those processes are mmap()ing the same thing. This feature works extremely well for both sysv shared memory and mmap()-based shared memory. In tests with postgres and a 6GB shared memory block the prior memory consumption from forking is now gone. This page table sharing works even better than the original shm_use_phys sysctl. Also observed significantly faster X application startup.

Removed bottlenecks from the SYSV semaphore module and fixed numerous timing races.

Added ability to bypass hardware timer read for gettimeofday(), added additional CLOCK_* defines for clock_gettime() and friends.

Userland changes

mount(8) now sniffs the label for hints on what type of filesystem is being mounted, when not otherwise specified. UFS is only assumed if no information can be garnered from the sniffing.

Added support for DT_GNU_HASH elf sections (RTLD). Essentially DT_GNU_HASH is a GNU extension to the ELF format that allows symbol searches much faster than the System V ABI standard hash does. For very large programs written in languages such as C++ that tend to link in many libraries with many symbols, the reduction in start-time can be dramatic. Base compilers were updated to generate both SysV and GNU hashes for every dynamic binary and the GNU hash will be used preferentially by the dynamic linker.

Dynamic linker (RTLD) Added support for preinit, init, and fini arrays, DT_RUNPATH, -z nodefaultlib flag, and dflopen. Updated ELF filter implementation and added two new directives to libmap.conf, along with general bug fixes from FreeBSD

Support exception handling on statically linked binaries

Imported terminfo(5) and deprecated termcap. DragonFly is the only BSD using terminfo for its terminal database. Termcap is still installed, but terminfo has a higher priority and is accessed first.

LDVER support added. If the environment variable LDVER is set as "ld.gold" then the gold linker will be used over the default ld.bfd linker, similar to compiler-focused CCVER. Invalid values are ignored.

cut(1) - synced with FreeBSD

realpath(1) - missing posix functionality added (From FreeBSD)

TUI mode added to kgdb, fixed on gdb

boot2 loader reworked for more efficient code so gcc4.6, gcc4.7, and clang will be able to build it within the size limit

dragonfly.pool.ntp.org now exists and is used by default for network time.

LVM stripe support in rconfig

Removals

kzip

Contributed Software

Shipping with pkgsrc-2012Q3 built packages.

Removed gcc 4.1

Added libedit 2012-03-11 from NetBSD

Added libmpc 1.0.1

Added gcc 4.7.2

Updated gcc 4.4 to 4.4.7

Updated grep to 2.12

Updated gdb to 7.4.1

Updated zlib to 1.2.7

Updated ncurses to 5.9

Updated libgmp to 5.0.5

Updated OpenSSL to 1.01c

Updated tzdata to tzdata2012f

Updated sh from FreeBSD

Updated libpcap to 1.3.0

Updated dhclient from OpenBSD

Updated OpenPAM to 'Micrampelis'

Updated xz to 5.0.4

Updated tnftp to newest NetBSD version

Updated libarchive to 3.0.4

Updated tcpdump to 4.3.0

Updated file to 5.11

Security related