DragonFly BSD

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.

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 sums for the uncompressed images:

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

Hardware changes

New Multiprocessor-safe Work

Userland changes

Removals

Contributed Software

Security related