DragonFly BSD 5.21 released
DragonFly is an operating system and application environment designed as a continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x family. These operating systems and Linux can be classified as the same category because they are based on UNIX concepts and application programming interface. DragonFly is a branch of this road of development, it can be said, is a BSD to a different from the FreeBSD-5 series of new directions and the development of the opportunity.
DragonFly version 5.2 brings Meltdown/Spectre mitigation, significant improvements to HAMMER2, ipfw, and graphics acceleration.
Meltdown and Spectre mitigation support
- Meltdown isolation and spectre mitigation support added. Meltdown mitigation is automatically enabled for all Intel cpus. Spectre mitigation must be enabled manually via sysctl if desired, using sysctls machdep.spectre_mitigation and machdep.meltdown_mitigation.
HAMMER2
- H2 has received a very large number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We can now recommend H2 as the default root filesystem in non-clustered mode.
- Clustered support is not yet available.
ipfw Updates
- Implement state based “redirect”, i.e. without using libalias.
- ipfw now supports all possible ICMP types.
- Fix ICMP_MAXTYPE assumptions (now 40 as of this release).
Improved graphics support
- The drm/i915 kernel driver has been updated to support Intel Coffeelake GPUs
- Add 24-bit pixel format support to the EFI frame buffer code.
- Significantly improve fbio support for the “scfb” XOrg driver. This allows EFI frame buffers to be used by X in situations where we do not otherwise support the GPU.
- Partly implement the FBIO_BLANK ioctl for display powersaving.
- Syscons waits for drm modesetting at appropriate places, avoiding races.
