Episode Details

DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more.

Headlines

DragonflyBSD 5.4 released

DragonFly version 5.4 brings a new system compiler in GCC 8, improved NUMA support, a large of number network and virtual machine driver updates, and updates to video support. This release is 64-bit only, as with previous releases. The details of all commits between the 5.2 and 5.4 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.4.0rc and 5.4.0.

• Big-ticket items
• Much better support for asymmetric NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) configurations. In particular, both the memory subsystem and the scheduler now understand the Threadripper 2990WX’s architecture. The scheduler will prioritize CPU nodes with direct-attached memory and the memory subsystem will normalize memory queues for CPU nodes without direct-attached memory (which improves cache locality on those CPUs).
• Incremental performance work. DragonFly as a whole is very SMP friendly. The type of performance work we are doing now mostly revolves around improving fairness for shared-vs-exclusive lock clashes, reducing cache ping-ponging due to non-contending SMP locks (i.e. massive use of shared locks on shared resources), and so forth.
• Major updates to dports brings us to within a week or two of FreeBSD’s ports as of this writing, in particular major updates to chromium, and making the whole mess work with gcc-8.
• Major rewriting of the tty clist code and the tty locking code, significantly improving concurrency across multiple ttys and ptys.
• GCC 8
• DragonFly now ships with GCC 8.0, and runs as the default compiler. It is also now used for building dports.
• GCC 4.7.4 and GCC 5.4.1 are still installed. 4.7.4 is our backup compiler, and 5.4.1 is still there to ensure a smooth transition, but should generally not be used. buildworld builds all three by default to ensure maximum compatibility.
• Many passes through world sources were made to address various warnings and errors the new GCC brought with it.
• HAMMER2
• HAMMER2 is recommended as the default root filesystem in non-clustered mode.
• Clustered support is not yet available.
• Increased bulkfree cache to reduce the number of iterations required.
• Fixed numerous bugs.
• Improved support on low-memory machines.
• Significant pre-work on the XOP API to help support future networked operations.
• Details
• Checksums MD5 (dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.img) = 7277d7cffc92837c7d1c5dd11a11b98f MD5 (dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.iso) = 6da7abf036fe9267479837b3c3078408 MD5 (dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.img.bz2) = a77a072c864f4b72fd56b4250c983ff1 MD5 (dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.iso.bz2) = 4dbfec6ccfc1d59c5049455db914d499
• Downloads Links

DragonFly BSD is 64-bit only, as announced during the 3.8 release.

• USB: dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.img as bzip2 file
• ISO: dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.iso as bzip2 file
• Uncompressed ISO: dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.iso (For use with VPS providers as an install image.)

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