DragonFly BSD 2.2 has been released

The 2.2 release of DragonFly BSD represents major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration, and a brand new release infrastructure with multiple target options.

The release ISO images are available here.

Release improvements

• A new DVD ISO release image is now available, in addition to the CD release.
• The new DVD release has a full X environment ready-to-go and many packages pre-installed.
• A full pkgsrc tar is now available on the CD/DVD in /usr.
• Full sources tar now available on the DVD (kernel sources only on the CD), in /usr.
• The nrelease build now trivializes package selection for people creating customized releases.
• The installer is now able to create a HAMMER filesystem setup.

Kernel changes

• First step towards AMD64 support (done by Jordan Gordeev during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• The system control intr_mpsafe is enabled by default.
• Move /kernel to /boot/kernel and /modules to /boot/modules.
• Add RFC3542 support (done by Dashu Huang during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Add HW checksum support to the loopback interface, which doubles performance.
• acpi_cpu(4) update. It’s now possible to use higher (lower power usage) C states than C1 in modern (multicore) CPUs.
• First steps to use network threads without the Big Giant Lock (this feature is considered experimental).
• Fixed CVE-2008-2476 IPv6 security issue with modified patches from NetBSD.
• bridge_input works now in parallel.
• Fix bugs in dealing with low-memory situations when the system has run out of swap or has no swap.
• Major rewrite of usched_bsd4 and related support logic, plus additional improvements to the LWKT scheduler.
• Major revamping of the pageout and low-memory handling code.
• suser_* replaced with priv_* implementation from FreeBSD.

HAMMER changes

• HAMMER is now considered production-capable. Many bug fixes and other improvements have been made.
• It is now possible to boot from a HAMMER-only disk. No need for a single UFS partition for /boot. However, for production systems we still recommend a small UFS /boot followed by swap followed by one large HAMMER partition.
• Add HAMMER read support to the boot loader.
• Now uses per-mount kmalloc pools for bulk data structures, particularly for inodes and records.

Hardware changes

• Add ACPI support module for IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptops (from FreeBSD).
• Add ACPI support module Asus laptops (from FreeBSD).
• Add acpi_video(4) – a driver for ACPI video extensions (from FreeBSD).
• It is possible to power down PCI devices during detach. This should save some power when using mobile devices (from FreeBSD).
• Update acpi_battery(4) related code to the latest one from FreeBSD HEAD.
• Correctly handle Intel G33 chips and add support for G45 chips to the agp(4) driver (from FreeBSD).
• Fixed CVE-2008-3831. Affects the Intel G33 series and newer only.
• Sync ciss(4) with FreeBSD’s RELENG_4 branch.
• Sync iir(4) with FreeBSD. This fixes disk recognition with the Intel RAID Controller SRCU42L.

Networking

• Add support for cards with “RealTek 8102EL PCIe 10/100baseTX” chipset.
• Add poling support for jme(4).
• Add driver for Attansic PHYs (from FreeBSD).
• Add ale(4) for Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller (from FreeBSD).
• Add age(4) for Attansic/Atheros L1 gigabit ethernet controller (from FreeBSD).

Userland changes

• The DragonFly source repositories are now maintained with git instead of CVS. See development(7) for instructions how to clone the repository.
• A lot of man pages were updated due to the switch to git.
• Add LiveDVD support to our nrelease framework. (done by Louisa Luciani during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Enhance the DragonFly Mail Agent (done by Max Lindner during the Google Summer of Code 2008).
• Add a new multi-player terminal game: hunt.
• Bring in the devinfo(3) library and devinfo(8) utility from FreeBSD. The utility and library can be used to view the internal device hierarchy.
• Add devctl(4) and devd(8) from FreeBSD and enable related support in acpi_thinkpad(4).
• Update sensorsd(8) to the latest version from OpenBSD (October 2008).
• Sync libc/stdtime and zdump(8)/zic(8) with tzcode2008h from elsie.
• Symlink /dev/dsp to /dev/audio to preserve compatibility with older programs (all pkgsrc apps by default up to 2008Q3).
• A new daily periodic script cleans up all HAMMER volumes at night.
• Sync libusbhid with other BSDs. Sync usbhidctl with FreeBSD.
• Add ftw(), nftw(), associated header files and documentation.
• Fixed hundreds of warnings in various userland tools.
• i486 is now the default architecture for gcc(1).
• dntpd: Can now connect to NTP servers with IPv6 addresses.
• dntpd: Fix hang in dntpd startup when network down.
• Use BIND’s resolver in libc.
• Add nsswitch.conf(5) support and add the Name Service Cache Daemon nscd(8) from FreeBSD.
• Import several pam_* modules from FreeBSD.
• Several bugs in the installer were fixed.
• nrelease: Additional to the ISO generation, nrelease can now generate an USB stick image.
• nrelease: It is now possible to build chosen pkgsrc packages in a chroot.
• telnetd: filter potentially dangerous environment variables passed from telnet client.

Removals

• Removed the ISC DHCP server and client. NOTE: If you install DragonFly 2.2 from the live CD, you already have a pkgsrc version of the DHCP server installed. If you update from a previous version, you have to install the pkgsrc version manually.
• Remove rexecd(8).
• Remove libskey(3), it is replaced by libopie.
• Remove ISA part of sr(4).
• Remove ISA network device cx(4).

Contributed software

• Bring in the privilege separation ready DHCP client from OpenBSD.
• Bring in pam_passwdqc from the Openwall project.
• Update OpenPAM to Hydrangea.
• Update OpenSSH to version 5.1p1.
• Update OpenSSL to version 0.9.8j.
• Sync zoneinfo database with tzdata2009b.