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.)



Down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, Gophernicus, and TLS
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