[ikiwiki.git] / docs / handbook / Configuration / index.mdwn

# Configuration and Tuning 

***Written by Chern Lee.  Based on a tutorial written by Mike Smith.  Also based on [tuning(7)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tuning&section7) written by Matt Dillon.***

[[!toc  levels=3]]

##Synopsis 

One of the important aspects of DragonFly is system configuration. Correct system configuration will help prevent headaches during future upgrades. This chapter will explain much of the DragonFly configuration process, including some of the parameters which can be set to tune a DragonFly system.

After reading this chapter, you will know:

* How to efficiently work with file systems and swap partitions.

* The basics of `rc.conf` configuration and `rc.d` startup systems.

* How to configure and test a network card.

* How to configure virtual hosts on your network devices.

* How to use the various configuration files in `/etc`.

* How to tune DragonFly using `sysctl` variables.

* How to tune disk performance and modify kernel limitations.

## Initial Configuration 

### Partition Layout 

#### Base Partitions 

When laying out file systems with [disklabel(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=disklabel&section=8) remember that hard drives transfer data faster from the outer tracks to the inner. Thus smaller and heavier-accessed file systems should be closer to the outside of the drive, while larger partitions like `/usr` should be placed toward the inner. It is a good idea to create partitions in a similar order to: root, swap, `/var`, `/usr`.
<!-- XXX: on the advent of SSDs, do we really need to talk about this stuff? Who knows where on the platter the partitions land, considering that a hard disk has multiple platters? -->

The size of `/var` reflects the intended machine usage. `/var` is used to hold mailboxes, log files, and printer spools. Mailboxes and log files can grow to unexpected sizes depending on how many users exist and how long log files are kept. Most users would never require a gigabyte, but remember that `/var/tmp` must be large enough to contain packages.

The `/usr` partition holds much of the files required to support the system, the pkgsrc® collection (recommended) and the source code (optional). At least 2 gigabytes would be recommended for this partition.

When selecting partition sizes, keep the space requirements in mind. Running out of space in one partition while barely using another can be a hassle.

#### Swap Partition 

As a rule of thumb, the swap partition should be about double the size of system memory (RAM). For example, if the machine has 128 megabytes of memory, the swap file should be 256 megabytes. Systems with less memory may perform better with more swap. Less than 256 megabytes of swap is not recommended and memory expansion should be considered. The kernel's VM paging algorithms are tuned to perform best when the swap partition is at least two times the size of main memory. Configuring too little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code and might create issues later if more memory is added.
<!-- XXX: do we really recommend double the RAM for swap? IMHO the amount of RAM should be more than enough -->

On larger systems with multiple SCSI disks (or multiple IDE disks operating on different controllers), it is recommend that a swap is configured on each drive (up to four drives). The swap partitions should be approximately the same size. The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data structures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition. Keeping the swap partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to optimally stripe swap space across disks. Large swap sizes are fine, even if swap is not used much. It might be easier to recover from a runaway program before being forced to reboot.

#### Why Partition? 

Several users think a single large partition will be fine, but there are several reasons why this is a bad idea. First, each partition has different operational characteristics and separating them allows the file system to tune accordingly. For example, the root and `/usr` partitions are read-mostly, without much writing. While a lot of reading and writing could occur in `/var` and `/var/tmp`.

By properly partitioning a system, fragmentation introduced in the smaller write heavy partitions will not bleed over into the mostly-read partitions. Keeping the write-loaded partitions closer to the disk's edge, will increase I/O performance in the partitions where it occurs the most. Now while I/O performance in the larger partitions may be needed, shifting them more toward the edge of the disk will not lead to a significant performance improvement over moving `/var` to the edge. Finally, there are safety concerns. A smaller, neater root partition which is mostly read-only has a greater chance of surviving a bad crash.
<!-- XXX: again, same story about the edges of disks... -->

CategoryHandbook

CategoryHandbook-configuration

## Core Configuration 

The principal location for system configuration information is within `/etc/rc.conf`. This file contains a wide range of configuration information, principally used at system startup to configure the system. Its name directly implies this; it is configuration information for the `rc*` files.

An administrator should make entries in the `rc.conf` file to override the default settings from `/etc/defaults/rc.conf`. The defaults file should not be copied verbatim to `/etc` - it contains default values, not examples. All system-specific changes should be made in the `rc.conf` file itself.

A number of strategies may be applied in clustered applications to separate site-wide configuration from system-specific configuration in order to keep administration overhead down. The recommended approach is to place site-wide configuration into another file, such as `/etc/rc.conf.site`, and then include this file into `/etc/rc.conf`, which will contain only system-specific information.

As `rc.conf` is read by [sh(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sh&section=1) it is trivial to achieve this. For example:

* rc.conf:

        hostname="node15.example.com"

        network_interfaces="fxp0 lo0"

        ifconfig_fxp0="inet 10.1.1.1"

  

* rc.conf.site: 

        defaultrouter="10.1.1.254"

        saver="daemon"

        blanktime="100"

  

The `rc.conf.site` file can then be distributed to every system using `rsync` or a similar program, while the `rc.conf` file remains unique.

Upgrading the system using `make world` will not overwrite the `rc.conf` file, so system configuration information will not be lost.

CategoryHandbook

CategoryHandbook-configuration

## Application Configuration 

Typically, installed applications have their own configuration files, with their own syntax, etc. It is important that these files be kept separate from the base system, so that they may be easily located and managed by the package management tools.

Typically, these files are installed in `/usr/pkg/etc`. In the case where an application has a large number of configuration files, a subdirectory will be created to hold them.

Normally, when a port or package is installed, sample configuration files are also installed. These are usually identified with a `.default` suffix. If there are no existing configuration files for the application, they will be created by copying the `.default` files.

For example, consider the contents of the directory `/usr/pkg/etc/httpd`:

    

    total 90

    -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  -   34K Jan 11 12:04 httpd.conf

    -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  -   13K Jan 11 12:02 magic

    -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  -   28K Jan 11 12:02 mime.types

    -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  -   11K Jan 11 12:02 ssl.conf

    
    
    
    
    

## Starting Services 

It is common for a system to host a number of services. These may be started in several different fashions, each having different advantages.

Software installed from a port or the packages collection will often place a script in `/usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d` which is invoked at system startup with a `start` argument, and at system shutdown with a `stop` argument. This is the recommended way for starting system-wide services that are to be run as `root`, or that expect to be started as `root`. These scripts are registered as part of the installation of the package, and will be removed when the package is removed.

A generic startup script in `/usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d` looks like:

    

    #!/bin/sh

    echo -n ' FooBar'

    

    case "$1" in

    start)

            /usr/pkg/bin/foobar

            ;;

    stop)

            kill -9 `cat /var/run/foobar.pid`

            ;;

    
*)

            echo "Usage: `basename $0` {start|stop}" >&2

            exit 64

            ;;

    esac

    

    exit 0

    

<!-- XXX: I don't think we actually look in /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d -->

The startup scripts of DragonFly will look in `/usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d` for scripts that have an `.sh` extension and are executable by `root`. Those scripts that are found are called with an option `start` at startup, and `stop` at shutdown to allow them to carry out their purpose. So if you wanted the above sample script to be picked up and run at the proper time during system startup, you should save it to a file called `FooBar.sh` in `/usr/local/etc/rc.d` and make sure it is executable. You can make a shell script executable with [chmod(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=chmod&section=1) as shown below:

    

    # chmod 755 "FooBar.sh"

Some services expect to be invoked by [inetd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=inetd&section=8) when a connection is received on a suitable port. This is common for mail reader servers (POP and IMAP, etc.). These services are enabled by editing the file `/etc/inetd.conf`. See [inetd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=inetd&section=8) for details on editing this file.

Some additional system services may not be covered by the toggles in `/etc/rc.conf`. These are traditionally enabled by placing the command(s) to invoke them in `/etc/rc.local` (which does not exist by default). Note that `rc.local` is generally regarded as the location of last resort; if there is a better place to start a service, do it there.

 **Note:** Do ***not*** place any commands in `/etc/rc.conf`. To start daemons, or run any commands at boot time, place a script in `/usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d` instead.

It is also possible to use the [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8) daemon to start system services. This approach has a number of advantages, not least being that because [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8) runs these processes as the owner of the `crontab`, services may be started and maintained by non-`root` users.

This takes advantage of a feature of [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8): the time specification may be replaced by `@reboot`, which will cause the job to be run when [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8) is started shortly after system boot.

CategoryHandbook

CategoryHandbook-configuration

## Configuring the cron Utility 

<!-- XXX: can't really comment on this. someone please revise it -->

***Contributed by Tom Rhodes. ***

One of the most useful utilities in DragonFly is [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8). The `cron` utility runs in the background and constantly checks the `/etc/crontab` file. The `cron` utility also checks the `/var/cron/tabs` directory, in search of new `crontab` files. These `crontab` files store information about specific functions which `cron` is supposed to perform at certain times.

The `cron` utility uses two different types of configuration files, the system crontab and user crontabs. The only difference between these two formats is the sixth field. In the system crontab, the sixth field is the name of a user for the command to run as. This gives the system crontab the ability to run commands as any user. In a user crontab, the sixth field is the command to run, and all commands run as the user who created the crontab; this is an important security feature.

 **Note:** User crontabs allow individual users to schedule tasks without the need for root privileges. Commands in a user's crontab run with the permissions of the user who owns the crontab.

The `root` user can have a user crontab just like any other user. This one is different from `/etc/crontab` (the system crontab). Because of the system crontab, there's usually no need to create a user crontab for `root`.

Let us take a look at the `/etc/crontab` file (the system crontab):

    

    # /etc/crontab - root's crontab for DragonFly

    #

    #                                                                  (1)

    #

    SHELL=/bin/sh

    PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin                            (2)

    HOME=/var/log

    #

    #

    #minute     hour    mday    month   wday    who     command            (3)

    #

    #

    
    */5 *       *       *       *       root    /usr/libexec/atrun (4)

 1. Like most DragonFly configuration files, the `#` character represents a comment. A comment can be placed in the file as a reminder of what and why a desired action is performed. Comments cannot be on the same line as a command or else they will be interpreted as part of the command; they must be on a new line. Blank lines are ignored.

 1. First, the environment must be defined. The equals (`=`) character is used to define any environment settings, as with this example where it is used for the `SHELL`, `PATH`, and `HOME` options. If the shell line is omitted, `cron` will use the default, which is `sh`. If the `PATH` variable is omitted, no default will be used and file locations will need to be absolute. If `HOME` is omitted, `cron` will use the invoking users home directory.

 1. This line defines a total of seven fields. Listed here are the values `minute`, `hour`, `mday`, `month`, `wday`, `who`, and `command`. These are almost all self explanatory. `minute` is the time in minutes the command will be run. `hour` is similar to the `minute` option, just in hours. `mday` stands for day of the month. `month` is similar to `hour` and `minute`, as it designates the month. The `wday` option stands for day of the week. All these fields must be numeric values, and follow the twenty-four hour clock. The `who` field is special, and only exists in the `/etc/crontab` file. This field specifies which user the command should be run as. When a user installs his or her `crontab` file, they will not have this option. Finally, the `command` option is listed. This is the last field, so naturally it should designate the command to be executed.

 1. This last line will define the values discussed above. Notice here we have a `*/5` listing, followed by several more `*` characters. These `*` characters mean ***first-last***, and can be interpreted as ***every*** time. So, judging by this line, it is apparent that the `atrun` command is to be invoked by `root` every five minutes regardless of what day or month it is. For more information on the `atrun` command, see the [atrun(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=atrun&section=8) manual page.Commands can have any number of flags passed to them; however, commands which extend to multiple lines need to be broken with the backslash ***\*** continuation character.

This is the basic set up for every `crontab` file, although there is one thing different about this one. Field number six, where we specified the username, only exists in the system `/etc/crontab` file. This field should be omitted for individual user `crontab` files.

### Installing a Crontab 

 **Important:** You must not use the procedure described here to edit/install the system crontab. Simply use your favorite editor: the `cron` utility will notice that the file has changed and immediately begin using the updated version. If you use `crontab` to load the `/etc/crontab` file you may get an error like `root: not found` because of the system crontab's additional user field.

To install a freshly written user `crontab`, first use your favorite editor to create a file in the proper format, and then use the `crontab` utility. The most common usage is:

    

    % crontab crontab-file

In this example, `crontab-file` is the filename of a `crontab` that was previously created.

There is also an option to list installed `crontab` files: just pass the `-l` option to `crontab` and look over the output.

For users who wish to begin their own crontab file from scratch, without the use of a template, the `crontab -e` option is available. This will invoke the selected editor with an empty file. When the file is saved, it will be automatically installed by the `crontab` command.

If you later want to remove your user `crontab` completely, use `crontab` with the `-r` option.

## Using rc under DragonFly 

***Contributed by Tom Rhodes. ***

DragonFly uses the NetBSD® `rc.d` system for system initialization. Users should notice the files listed in the `/etc/rc.d` directory. Many of these files are for basic services which can be controlled with the `start`, `stop`, and `restart` options. For instance, [sshd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sshd&section=8&manpath=OpenBSD+3.3) can be restarted with the following command:

    

    # /etc/rc.d/sshd restart

This procedure is similar for other services. Of course, services are usually started automatically as specified in [rc.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc.conf&section=5). For example, enabling the Network Address Translation daemon at startup is as simple as adding the following line to `/etc/rc.conf`:

    natd_enable="YES"

If a `natd_enable="NO"` line is already present, then simply change the `NO` to `YES`. The rc scripts will automatically load any other dependent services during the next reboot, as described below.

Another way to add services to the automatic startup/shutdown is to type, for example for `natd`,

     # rcenable natd

Since the `rc.d` system is primarily intended to start/stop services at system startup/shutdown time, the standard `start`, `stop` and `restart` options will only perform their action if the appropriate `/etc/rc.conf` variables are set. For instance the above `sshd restart` command will only work if `sshd_enable` is set to `YES` in `/etc/rc.conf`. To `start`, `stop` or `restart` a service regardless of the settings in `/etc/rc.conf`, the commands should be prefixed with ***force***. For instance to restart `sshd` regardless of the current `/etc/rc.conf` setting, execute the following command:

    

    # /etc/rc.d/sshd forcerestart

It is easy to check if a service is enabled in `/etc/rc.conf` by running the appropriate `rc.d` script with the option `rcvar`. Thus, an administrator can check that `sshd` is in fact enabled in `/etc/rc.conf` by running:

    

    # /etc/rc.d/sshd rcvar

    # sshd

    $sshd_enable=YES

 **Note:** The second line (`# sshd`) is the output from the `rc.d` script, not a `root` prompt.

To determine if a service is running, a `status` option is available. For instance to verify that `sshd` is actually started:

    

    # /etc/rc.d/sshd status

    sshd is running as pid 433.

It is also possible to `reload` a service. This will attempt to send a signal to an individual service, forcing the service to reload its configuration files. In most cases this means sending the service a `SIGHUP` signal.

The  **rcNG**  structure is used both for network services and system initialization. Some services are run only at boot; and the RCNG system is what triggers them.

Many system services depend on other services to function properly. For example, NIS and other RPC-based services may fail to start until after the `rpcbind` (portmapper) service has started. To resolve this issue, information about dependencies and other meta-data is included in the comments at the top of each startup script. The [rcorder(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rcorder&section=8) program is then used to parse these comments during system initialization to determine the order in which system services should be invoked to satisfy the dependencies. The following words may be included at the top of each startup file:

* `PROVIDE`: Specifies the services this file provides.

* `REQUIRE`: Lists services which are required for this service. This file will run ***after*** the specified services.

* `BEFORE`: Lists services which depend on this service. This file will run ***before*** the specified services.

* KEYWORD: When [rcorder(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rcorder&section=8) uses the `-k` option, then only the rc.d files matching this keyword are used. [(1)](#FTN.AEN4751) For example, when using `-k shutdown`, only the `rc.d` scripts defining the `shutdown` keyword are used.

  With the `-s` option, [rcorder(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rcorder&section=8) will skip any `rc.d` script defining the corresponding keyword to skip. For example, scripts defining the `nostart` keyword are skipped at boot time.

By using this method, an administrator can easily control system services without the hassle of ***runlevels*** like some other UNIX® operating systems.

Additional information about the DragonFly `rc.d` system can be found in the [rc(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc&section=8), [rc.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc.conf&section=5), and [rc.subr(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc.subr&section=8) manual pages.

### Using DragonFly's rcrun(8) 

Besides the methods described above DragonFly supports [rcrun(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rcrun&section=8) to control rc(8) scripts.  [rcrun(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rcrun&section=8) provides a number of command for controlling rc(8)

scripts.  The ***start***, ***forcestart***, ***faststart***, ***stop***, ***restart***, and ***rcvar*** commands are just passed to the scripts.  See rc(8) for more information on these commands.

The remaining commands are:

[[!table  data="""
  **disable**  | Sets the corresponding `_enable` variable in rc.conf(5) to ***NO*** and runs the stop command. 
  **enable**   | Sets the corresponding `_enable` variable in rc.conf(5) to ***YES*** and runs the start command. 
  **list**  | Shows the status of the specified scripts.  If no argument is specified, the status of all scripts is shown. |

"""]]

To enable the [dntpd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dntpd&section=8) service, you can use:

     # rcenable dntpd
     
 

To check if [dntpd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dntpd&section=8) is running you can use the following command:

    

    # rclist dntpd

    rcng_dntpd=stopped

To start [dntpd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dntpd&section=8):

    

    # rcstart dntpd

    Running /etc/rc.d/dntpd start

    Starting dntpd.

Restart and stop works the same way:

    

    # rcrestart dntpd

    Stopping dntpd.

    Starting dntpd.

    

    # rcstop dntpd

    Stopping dntpd.

If a service is not enabled in `/etc/rc.conf`, but you want it start anyway, execute the following:

    

    # rcforce dntpd

    Running /etc/rc.d/dntpd forcestart

    Starting dntpd.

#### Notes 

[[!table  data="""
<tablestyle="width:100%"> [(1)](configtuning-rcng.html#AEN4751) | Previously this was used to define *BSD dependent features.
| |

"""]]

## Setting Up Network Interface Cards 

***Contributed by Marc Fonvieille. ***

Nowadays we can not think about a computer without thinking about a network connection. Adding and configuring a network card is a common task for any DragonFly administrator.

### Locating the Correct Driver 

Before you begin, you should know the model of the card you have, the chip it uses, and whether it is a PCI or ISA card. DragonFly supports a wide variety of both PCI and ISA cards. Check the Hardware Compatibility List for your release to see if your card is supported.

Once you are sure your card is supported, you need to determine the proper driver for the card. The file `/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/LINT` will give you the list of network interfaces drivers with some information about the supported chipsets/cards. If you have doubts about which driver is the correct one, read the manual page of the driver. The manual page will give you more information about the supported hardware and even the possible problems that could occur.

If you own a common card, most of the time you will not have to look very hard for a driver. Drivers for common network cards are present in the `GENERIC` kernel, so your card should show up during boot, like so:

    

    dc0: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 0xd3800000-0xd38

    000ff irq 15 at device 11.0 on pci0

    dc0: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:da

    miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0

    ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0

    ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

    dc1: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xd3000000-0xd30

    000ff irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0

    dc1: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:db

    miibus1: <MII bus> on dc1

    ukphy1: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus1

    ukphy1:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

In this example, we see that two cards using the [dc(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dc&section=4) driver are present on the system.

To use your network card, you will need to load the proper driver. This may be accomplished in one of two ways. The easiest way is to simply load a kernel module for your network card with [kldload(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=kldload&section=8). A module is not available for all network card drivers (ISA cards and cards using the [ed(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=ed&section=4) driver, for example). Alternatively, you may statically compile the support for your card into your kernel. Check `/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/LINT` and the manual page of the driver to know what to add in your kernel configuration file. For more information about recompiling your kernel, please see [kernelconfig.html Chapter 9]. If your card was detected at boot by your kernel (`GENERIC`) you do not have to build a new kernel.

### Configuring the Network Card 

Once the right driver is loaded for the network card, the card needs to be configured. As with many other things, the network card may have been configured at installation time.

To display the configuration for the network interfaces on your system, enter the following command:

    

    % ifconfig

    dc0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

            inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255

            ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da

            media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)

            status: active

    dc1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

            inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255

            ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:db

            media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP

            status: no carrier

    lp0: flags=8810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

    lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384

            inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000

    tun0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

 **Note:** Note that entries concerning IPv6 (`inet6` etc.) were omitted in this example.

In this example, the following devices were displayed:

* `dc0`: The first Ethernet interface

* `dc1`: The second Ethernet interface

* `lp0`: The parallel port interface

* `lo0`: The loopback device

* `tun0`: The tunnel device used by  **ppp** 

DragonFly uses the driver name followed by the order in which one the card is detected at the kernel boot to name the network card, starting the count at zero. For example, `sis2` would be the third network card on the system using the [sis(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sis&section=4) driver.

In this example, the `dc0` device is up and running. The key indicators are:

  1. `UP` means that the card is configured and ready.

  1. The card has an Internet (`inet`) address (in this case `192.168.1.3`).

  1. It has a valid subnet mask (`netmask`; `0xffffff00` is the same as `255.255.255.0`).

  1. It has a valid broadcast address (in this case, `192.168.1.255`).

  1. The MAC address of the card (`ether`) is `00:a0:cc:da:da:da`

  1. The physical media selection is on autoselection mode (`media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)`). We see that `dc1` was configured to run with `10baseT/UTP` media. For more information on available media types for a driver, please refer to its manual page.

  1. The status of the link (`status`) is `active`, i.e. the carrier is detected. For `dc1`, we see `status: no carrier`. This is normal when an Ethernet cable is not plugged into the card.

If the [ifconfig(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=ifconfig&section=8) output had shown something similar to:

    

    dc0: flags=8843<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

                ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da

it would indicate the card has not been configured.

To configure your card, you need `root` privileges. The network card configuration can be done from the command line with [ifconfig(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=ifconfig&section=8) as root.

    

    # ifconfig dc0 inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0

Manually configuring the care has the disadvantage that you would have to do it after each reboot of the system. The file `/etc/rc.conf` is where to add the network card's configuration.

Open `/etc/rc.conf` in your favorite editor. You need to add a line for each network card present on the system, for example in our case, we added these lines:

    

    ifconfig_dc0="inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0"

    ifconfig_dc1="inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 media 10baseT/UTP"

You have to replace `dc0`, `dc1`, and so on, with the correct device for your cards, and the addresses with the proper ones. You should read the card driver and [ifconfig(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#ifconfig&section8) manual pages for more details about the allowed options and also [rc.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc.conf&section=5) manual page for more information on the syntax of `/etc/rc.conf`.

If you configured the network during installation, some lines about the network card(s) may be already present. Double check `/etc/rc.conf` before adding any lines.

You will also have to edit the file `/etc/hosts` to add the names and the IP addresses of various machines of the LAN, if they are not already there. For more information please refer to [hosts(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=hosts&section=5) and to `/usr/share/examples/etc/hosts`.

### Testing and Troubleshooting 

Once you have made the necessary changes in `/etc/rc.conf`, you should reboot your system. This will allow the change(s) to the interface(s) to be applied, and verify that the system restarts without any configuration errors.

Once the system has been rebooted, you should test the network interfaces.

#### Testing the Ethernet Card 

To verify that an Ethernet card is configured correctly, you have to try two things. First, ping the interface itself, and then ping another machine on the LAN.

First test the local interface:

    

    % ping -c5 192.168.1.3

    PING 192.168.1.3 (192.168.1.3): 56 data bytes

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq#0 ttl64 time=0.082 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq#1 ttl64 time=0.074 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq#2 ttl64 time=0.076 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq#3 ttl64 time=0.108 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq#4 ttl64 time=0.076 ms

    

    --- 192.168.1.3 ping statistics ---

    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss

    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.074/0.083/0.108/0.013 ms

Now we have to ping another machine on the LAN:

    

    % ping -c5 192.168.1.2

    PING 192.168.1.2 (192.168.1.2): 56 data bytes

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq#0 ttl64 time=0.726 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq#1 ttl64 time=0.766 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq#2 ttl64 time=0.700 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq#3 ttl64 time=0.747 ms

    64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq#4 ttl64 time=0.704 ms

    

    --- 192.168.1.2 ping statistics ---

    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss

    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.700/0.729/0.766/0.025 ms

You could also use the machine name instead of `192.168.1.2` if you have set up the `/etc/hosts` file.

#### Troubleshooting 

Troubleshooting hardware and software configurations is always a pain, and a pain which can be alleviated by checking the simple things first. Is your network cable plugged in? Have you properly configured the network services? Did you configure the firewall correctly? Is the card you are using supported by DragonFly? Always check the hardware notes before sending off a bug report. Update your version of DragonFly to the latest PREVIEW version. Check the mailing list archives, or perhaps search the Internet.

If the card works, yet performance is poor, it would be worthwhile to read over the [tuning(7)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tuning&section=7) manual page. You can also check the network configuration as incorrect network settings can cause slow connections.

Some users experience one or two ***device timeouts***, which is normal for some cards. If they continue, or are bothersome, you may wish to be sure the device is not conflicting with another device. Double check the cable connections. Perhaps you may just need to get another card.

At times, users see a few ***`watchdog timeout`*** errors. The first thing to do here is to check your network cable. Many cards require a PCI slot which supports Bus Mastering. On some old motherboards, only one PCI slot allows it (usually slot 0). Check the network card and the motherboard documentation to determine if that may be the problem.

***`No route to host`*** messages occur if the system is unable to route a packet to the destination host. This can happen if no default route is specified, or if a cable is unplugged. Check the output of `netstat -rn` and make sure there is a valid route to the host you are trying to reach. If there is not, read on to [advanced-networking.html Chapter 19].

***`ping: sendto: Permission denied`*** error messages are often caused by a misconfigured firewall. If `ipfw` is enabled in the kernel but no rules have been defined, then the default policy is to deny all traffic, even ping requests! Read on to [firewalls.html Section 10.7] for more information.

Sometimes performance of the card is poor, or below average. In these cases it is best to set the media selection mode from `autoselect` to the correct media selection. While this usually works for most hardware, it may not resolve this issue for everyone. Again, check all the network settings, and read over the [tuning(7)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tuning&section=7) manual page.

## Virtual Hosts 

A very common use of DragonFly is virtual site hosting, where one server appears to the network as many servers. This is achieved by assigning multiple network addresses to a single interface.

A given network interface has one ***real*** address, and may have any number of ***alias*** addresses. These aliases are normally added by placing alias entries in `/etc/rc.conf`.

An alias entry for the interface `fxp0` looks like:

    

    ifconfig_fxp0_alias0="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"

Note that alias entries must start with `alias0` and proceed upwards in order, (for example, `_alias1`, `_alias2`, and so on). The configuration process will stop at the first missing number.

The calculation of alias netmasks is important, but fortunately quite simple. For a given interface, there must be one address which correctly represents the network's netmask. Any other addresses which fall within this network must have a netmask of all `1`s (expressed as either `255.255.255.255` or `0xffffffff`).

For example, consider the case where the `fxp0` interface is connected to two networks, the `10.1.1.0` network with a netmask of `255.255.255.0` and the `202.0.75.16` network with a netmask of `255.255.255.240`. We want the system to appear at `10.1.1.1` through `10.1.1.5` and at `202.0.75.17` through `202.0.75.20`. As noted above, only the first address in a given network range (in this case, `10.0.1.1` and `202.0.75.17`) should have a real netmask; all the rest (`10.1.1.2` through `10.1.1.5` and `202.0.75.18` through `202.0.75.20`) must be configured with a netmask of `255.255.255.255`.

The following entries configure the adapter correctly for this arrangement:

    

     ifconfig_fxp0="inet 10.1.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias0="inet 10.1.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias1="inet 10.1.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias2="inet 10.1.1.4 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias3="inet 10.1.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias4="inet 202.0.75.17 netmask 255.255.255.240"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias5="inet 202.0.75.18 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias6="inet 202.0.75.19 netmask 255.255.255.255"

     ifconfig_fxp0_alias7="inet 202.0.75.20 netmask 255.255.255.255"

CategoryHandbook

CategoryHandbook-configuration

## Configuration Files 

### /etc Layout 

There are a number of directories in which configuration information is kept. These include:

[[!table  data="""
 `/etc` | Generic system configuration information; data here is system-specific. 
 `/etc/defaults` | Default versions of system configuration files. 
 `/etc/mail` | Extra [sendmail(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendmail&section=8) configuration, other MTA configuration files. 
 `/etc/ppp` | Configuration for both user- and kernel-ppp programs. 
 `/etc/namedb` | Default location for [named(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=named&section=8) data. Normally `named.conf` and zone files are stored here. 
 `/usr/local/etc` | Configuration files for installed applications. May contain per-application subdirectories. 
 `/usr/local/etc/rc.d` | Start/stop scripts for installed applications. 
 `/var/db` | Automatically generated system-specific database files, such as the package database, the locate database, and so on |

"""]]

### Hostnames 

#### /etc/resolv.conf 

`/etc/resolv.conf` dictates how DragonFly's resolver accesses the Internet Domain Name System (DNS).

The most common entries to `resolv.conf` are:

[[!table  data="""
 `nameserver` | The IP address of a name server the resolver should query. The servers are queried in the order listed with a maximum of three.
 `search` | Search list for hostname lookup. This is normally determined by the domain of the local hostname. 
 `domain` | The local domain name. |

"""]]

A typical `resolv.conf`:

    

    search example.com

    nameserver 147.11.1.11

    nameserver 147.11.100.30

 **Note:** Only one of the `search` and `domain` options should be used.

If you are using DHCP, [dhclient(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dhclient&section=8) usually rewrites `resolv.conf` with information received from the DHCP server.

#### /etc/hosts 

`/etc/hosts` is a simple text database reminiscent of the old Internet. It works in conjunction with DNS and NIS providing name to IP address mappings. Local computers connected via a LAN can be placed in here for simplistic naming purposes instead of setting up a [named(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=named&section=8) server. Additionally, `/etc/hosts` can be used to provide a local record of Internet names, reducing the need to query externally for commonly accessed names.

    

    #

    #

    # Host Database

    # This file should contain the addresses and aliases

    # for local hosts that share this file.

    # In the presence of the domain name service or NIS, this file may

    # not be consulted at all; see /etc/nsswitch.conf for the resolution order.

    #

    #

    ::1                     localhost localhost.my.domain myname.my.domain

    127.0.0.1               localhost localhost.my.domain myname.my.domain

    #

    # Imaginary network.

    #10.0.0.2               myname.my.domain myname

    #10.0.0.3               myfriend.my.domain myfriend

    #

    # According to RFC 1918, you can use the following IP networks for

    # private nets which will never be connected to the Internet:

    #

    #       10.0.0.0        -   10.255.255.255

    #       172.16.0.0      -   172.31.255.255

    #       192.168.0.0     -   192.168.255.255

    #

    # In case you want to be able to connect to the Internet, you need

    # real official assigned numbers.  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not try

    # to invent your own network numbers but instead get one from your

    # network provider (if any) or from the Internet Registry (ftp to

    # rs.internic.net, directory `/templates').

    #

`/etc/hosts` takes on the simple format of:

    

    [Internet address] [official hostname] [alias1] [alias2] ...

For example:

    

    10.0.0.1 myRealHostname.example.com myRealHostname foobar1 foobar2

Consult [hosts(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=hosts&section=5) for more information.

### Log File Configuration 

#### syslog.conf 

`syslog.conf` is the configuration file for the [syslogd(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=syslogd&section=8) program. It indicates which types of `syslog` messages are logged to particular log files.

    

    #

    #

    #       Spaces ARE valid field separators in this file. However,

    #       other *nix-like systems still insist on using tabs as field

    #       separators. If you are sharing this file between systems, you

    #       may want to use only tabs as field separators here.

    #       Consult the syslog.conf(5) manual page.

    
*.err;kern.debug;auth.notice;mail.crit          /dev/console

    *.notice;kern.debug;lpr.info;mail.crit;news.err /var/log/messages

    security.*                                      /var/log/security

    mail.info                                       /var/log/maillog

    lpr.info                                        /var/log/lpd-errs

    cron.*                                          /var/log/cron

    
*.err                                           root

    *.notice;news.err                               root

    *.alert                                         root

    *.emerg                                         *

    # uncomment this to log all writes to /dev/console to /var/log/console.log

    #console.info                                   /var/log/console.log

    # uncomment this to enable logging of all log messages to /var/log/all.log

    #*.*                                            /var/log/all.log

    # uncomment this to enable logging to a remote log host named loghost

    #*.*                                            @loghost

    # uncomment these if you're running inn

    # news.crit                                     /var/log/news/news.crit

    # news.err                                      /var/log/news/news.err

    # news.notice                                   /var/log/news/news.notice

    !startslip

    
*.*                                             /var/log/slip.log

    !ppp

    
*.*                                             /var/log/ppp.log

Consult the [syslog.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=syslog.conf&section=5) manual page for more information.

#### newsyslog.conf 

`newsyslog.conf` is the configuration file for [newsyslog(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=newsyslog&section=8), a program that is normally scheduled to run by [cron(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cron&section=8). [newsyslog(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=newsyslog&section=8) determines when log files require archiving or rearranging. `logfile` is moved to `logfile.0`, `logfile.0` is moved to `logfile.1`, and so on. Alternatively, the log files may be archived in [gzip(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=gzip&section=1) format causing them to be named: `logfile.0.gz`, `logfile.1.gz`, and so on.

`newsyslog.conf` indicates which log files are to be managed, how many are to be kept, and when they are to be touched. Log files can be rearranged and/or archived when they have either reached a certain size, or at a certain periodic time/date.

    

    # configuration file for newsyslog

    #

    #

    # filename          [owner:group]    mode count size when [ZB] [/pid_file] [sig_num]

    /var/log/cron                           600  3     100  *     Z

    /var/log/amd.log                        644  7     100  *     Z

    /var/log/kerberos.log                   644  7     100  *     Z

    /var/log/lpd-errs                       644  7     100  *     Z

    /var/log/maillog                        644  7     *    @T00  Z

    /var/log/sendmail.st                    644  10    *    168   B

    /var/log/messages                       644  5     100  *     Z

    /var/log/all.log                        600  7     *    @T00  Z

    /var/log/slip.log                       600  3     100  *     Z

    /var/log/ppp.log                        600  3     100  *     Z

    /var/log/security                       600  10    100  *     Z

    /var/log/wtmp                           644  3     *    @01T05 B

    /var/log/daily.log                      640  7     *    @T00  Z

    /var/log/weekly.log                     640  5     1    $W6D0 Z

    /var/log/monthly.log                    640  12    *    $M1D0 Z

    /var/log/console.log                    640  5     100  *     Z

Consult the [newsyslog(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=newsyslog&section=8) manual page for more information.

### sysctl.conf 

`sysctl.conf` looks much like `rc.conf`. Values are set in a `variable=value` form. The specified values are set after the system goes into multi-user mode. Not all variables are settable in this mode.

A sample `sysctl.conf` turning off logging of fatal signal exits and letting Linux programs know they are really running under DragonFly:

    

    kern.logsigexit=0       # Do not log fatal signal exits (e.g. sig 11)

    compat.linux.osname=DragonFly

    compat.linux.osrelease=4.3-STABLE

    
    
    
    
    
## Tuning with sysctl 

[sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8) is an interface that allows you to make changes to a running DragonFly system. This includes many advanced options of the TCP/IP stack and virtual memory system that can dramatically improve performance for an experienced system administrator. Over five hundred system variables can be read and set using [sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8).

At its core, [sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8) serves two functions: to read and to modify system settings.

To view all readable variables:

    

    % sysctl -a

To read a particular variable, for example, `kern.maxproc`:

    

    % sysctl kern.maxproc

    kern.maxproc: 1044

To set a particular variable, use the intuitive `***variable***`=`***value***` syntax:

    

    # sysctl kern.maxfiles=5000

    kern.maxfiles: 2088 -< 5000

Settings of sysctl variables are usually either strings, numbers, or booleans (a boolean being `1` for yes or a `0` for no).

If you want to set automatically some variables each time the machine boots, add them to the `/etc/sysctl.conf` file. For more information see the [sysctl.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl.conf&section=5) manual page and the [configtuning-configfiles.html#CONFIGTUNING-SYSCTLCONF Section 6.10.4].

### sysctl(8) Read-only 

***Contributed by Tom Rhodes. ***

In some cases it may be desirable to modify read-only [sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8) values. While this is not recommended, it is also sometimes unavoidable.

For instance on some laptop models the [cardbus(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cardbus&section=4) device will not probe memory ranges, and fail with errors which look similar to:

    

    cbb0: Could not map register memory

    device_probe_and_attach: cbb0 attach returned 12

Cases like the one above usually require the modification of some default [sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8) settings which are set read only. To overcome these situations a user can put [sysctl(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sysctl&section=8) ***OIDs*** in their local `/boot/loader.conf`. Default settings are located in the `/boot/defaults/loader.conf` file.

Fixing the problem mentioned above would require a user to set `hw.pci.allow_unsupported_io_range=1` in the aforementioned file. Now [cardbus(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=cardbus&section=4) will work properly.

## Tuning Disks 

### Sysctl Variables 

#### `vfs.vmiodirenable` 

The `vfs.vmiodirenable` sysctl variable may be set to either 0 (off) or 1 (on); it is 1 by default. This variable controls how directories are cached by the system. Most directories are small, using just a single fragment (typically 1 K) in the file system and less (typically 512 bytes) in the buffer cache. With this variable turned off (to 0), the buffer cache will only cache a fixed number of directories even if ou have a huge amount of memory. When turned on (to 1), this sysctl allows the buffer cache to use the VM Page Cache to cache the directories, making all the memory available for caching directories. However, the minimum in-core memory used to cache a directory is the physical page size (typically 4 K) rather than 512  bytes. We recommend keeping this option on if you are running any services which manipulate large numbers of files. Such services can include web caches, large mail systems, and news systems. Keeping this option on will generally not reduce performance even with the wasted memory but you should experiment to find out.

#### `vfs.write_behind` 

The `vfs.write_behind` sysctl variable defaults to `1` (on). This tells the file system to issue media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing large sequential files. The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. However, this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn it off.

#### `vfs.hirunningspace` 

The `vfs.hirunningspace` sysctl variable determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to disk controllers system-wide at any given instance. The default is usually sufficient but on machines with lots of disks you may want to bump it up to four or five ***megabytes***. Note that setting too high a value (exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely bad clustering performance. Do not set this value arbitrarily high! Higher write values may add latency to reads occurring at the same time.

There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls. We do not recommend modifying these values. The VM system does an extremely good job of automatically tuning itself.

#### `vm.swap_idle_enabled` 

The `vm.swap_idle_enabled` sysctl variable is useful in large multi-user systems where you have lots of users entering and leaving the system and lots of idle processes. Such systems tend to generate a great deal of continuous pressure on free memory reserves. Turning this feature on and tweaking the swapout hysteresis (in idle seconds) via `vm.swap_idle_threshold1` and `vm.swap_idle_threshold2` allows you to depress the priority of memory pages associated with idle processes more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm. This gives a helping hand to the pageout daemon. Do not turn this option on unless you need it, because the tradeoff you are making is essentially pre-page memory sooner rather than later; thus eating more swap and disk bandwidth. In a small system this option will have a determinable effect but in a large system that is already doing moderate paging this option allows the VM system to stage whole processes into and out of memory easily.

#### `hw.ata.wc` 

IDE drives lie about when a write completes. With IDE write caching turned on, IDE hard drives not only write data to disk out of order, but will sometimes delay writing some blocks indefinitely when under heavy disk loads. A crash or power failure may cause serious file system corruption. Turning off write caching will remove the danger of this data loss, but will also cause disk operations to proceed ***very slowly.*** Change this only if prepared to suffer with the disk slowdown.

Changing this variable must be done from the boot loader at boot time. Attempting to do it after the kernel boots will have no effect.

For more information, please see [ata(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=ata&section=4) manual page.

<!-- XXX: add some more sysctls, e.g. relating to AHCI, nata, ... -->

### Soft Updates 

**Note** that soft updates are only available on UFS.

The [tunefs(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tunefs&section=8) program can be used to fine-tune a UFS file system. This program has many different options, but for now we are only concerned with toggling Soft Updates on and off, which is done by:

    

    # tunefs -n enable /filesystem

    # tunefs -n disable /filesystem

A filesystem cannot be modified with [tunefs(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=tunefs&section=8) while it is mounted. A good time to enable Soft Updates is before any partitions have been mounted, in single-user mode.

 **Note:** It is possible to enable Soft Updates at filesystem creation time, through use of the `-U` option to [newfs(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=newfs&section=8).

Soft Updates drastically improves meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion, through the use of a memory cache. We recommend to use Soft Updates on all of your file systems. There are two downsides to Soft Updates that you should be aware of: First, Soft Updates guarantees filesystem consistency in the case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind updating the physical disk. If your system crashes you may lose more work than otherwise. Secondly, Soft Updates delays the freeing of filesystem blocks. If you have a filesystem (such as the root filesystem) which is almost full, performing a major update, such as `make installworld`, can cause the filesystem to run out of space and the update to fail.

#### More Details about Soft Updates 
<!-- XXX: consider axing this section -->

There are two traditional approaches to writing a file systems meta-data back to disk. (Meta-data updates are updates to non-content data like inodes or directories.)

Historically, the default behavior was to write out meta-data updates synchronously. If a directory had been changed, the system waited until the change was actually written to disk. The file data buffers (file contents) were passed through the buffer cache and backed up to disk later on asynchronously. The advantage of this implementation is that it operates safely. If there is a failure during an update, the meta-data are always in a consistent state. A file is either created completely or not at all. If the data blocks of a file did not find their way out of the buffer cache onto the disk by the time of the crash, [fsck(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#fsck&section8) is able to recognize this and repair the filesystem by setting the file length to 0. Additionally, the implementation is clear and simple. The disadvantage is that meta-data changes are slow. An `rm -r`, for instance, touches all the files in a directory sequentially, but each directory change (deletion of a file) will be written synchronously to the disk. This includes updates to the directory itself, to the inode table, and possibly to indirect blocks allocated by the file. Similar considerations apply for unrolling large hierarchies (`tar -x`).

The second case is asynchronous meta-data updates. This is the default for Linux/ext2fs and `mount -o async` for *BSD ufs. All meta-data updates are simply being passed through the buffer cache too, that is, they will be intermixed with the updates of the file content data. The advantage of this implementation is there is no need to wait until each meta-data update has been written to disk, so all operations which cause huge amounts of meta-data updates work much faster than in the synchronous case. Also, the implementation is still clear and simple, so there is a low risk for bugs creeping into the code. The disadvantage is that there is no guarantee at all for a consistent state of the filesystem. If there is a failure during an operation that updated large amounts of meta-data (like a power failure, or someone pressing the reset button), the filesystem will be left in an unpredictable state. There is no opportunity to examine the state of the filesystem when the system comes up again; the data blocks of a file could already have been written to the disk while the updates of the inode table or the associated directory were not. It is actually impossible to implement a `fsck` which is able to clean up the resulting chaos (because the necessary information is not available on the disk). If the filesystem has been damaged beyond repair, the only choice is to use [newfs(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#newfs&section8) on it and restore it from backup.

The usual solution for this problem was to implement ***dirty region logging***, which is also referred to as ***journaling***, although that term is not used consistently and is occasionally applied to other forms of transaction logging as well. Meta-data updates are still written synchronously, but only into a small region of the disk. Later on they will be moved to their proper location. Because the logging area is a small, contiguous region on the disk, there are no long distances for the disk heads to move, even during heavy operations, so these operations are quicker than synchronous updates. Additionally the complexity of the implementation is fairly limited, so the risk of bugs being present is low. A disadvantage is that all meta-data are written twice (once into the logging region and once to the proper location) so for normal work, a performance ***pessimization*** might result. On the other hand, in case of a crash, all pending meta-data operations can be quickly either rolled-back or completed from the logging area after the system comes up again, resulting in a fast filesystem startup.

Kirk McKusick, the developer of Berkeley FFS, solved this problem with Soft Updates: all pending meta-data updates are kept in memory and written out to disk in a sorted sequence (***ordered meta-data updates***). This has the effect that, in case of heavy meta-data operations, later updates to an item ***catch*** the earlier ones if the earlier ones are still in memory and have not already been written to disk. So all operations on, say, a directory are generally performed in memory before the update is written to disk (the data blocks are sorted according to their position so that they will not be on the disk ahead of their meta-data). If the system crashes, this causes an implicit ***log rewind***: all operations which did not find their way to the disk appear as if they had never happened. A consistent filesystem state is maintained that appears to be the one of 30 to 60 seconds earlier. The algorithm used guarantees that all resources in use are marked as such in their appropriate bitmaps: blocks and inodes. After a crash, the only resource allocation error that occurs is that resources are marked as ***used*** which are actually ***free***. [fsck(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#fsck&section8) recognizes this situation, and frees the resources that are no longer used. It is safe to ignore the dirty state of the filesystem after a crash by forcibly mounting it with `mount -f`. In order to free resources that may be unused, [fsck(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=fsck&section=8) needs to be run at a later time.

The advantage is that meta-data operations are nearly as fast as asynchronous updates (i.e. faster than with ***logging***, which has to write the meta-data twice). The disadvantages are the complexity of the code (implying a higher risk for bugs in an area that is highly sensitive regarding loss of user data), and a higher memory consumption. Additionally there are some idiosyncrasies one has to get used to. After a crash, the state of the filesystem appears to be somewhat ***older***. In situations where the standard synchronous approach would have caused some zero-length files to remain after the `fsck`, these files do not exist at all with a Soft Updates filesystem because neither the meta-data nor the file contents have ever been written to disk. Disk space is not released until the updates have been written to disk, which may take place some time after running `rm`. This may cause problems when installing large amounts of data on a filesystem that does not have enough free space to hold all the files twice.

## Tuning Kernel Limits 

### File/Process Limits 

#### `kern.maxfiles` 

<!-- XXX: revise this section; someone who knows about it -->

`kern.maxfiles` can be raised or lowered based upon your system requirements. This variable indicates the maximum number of file descriptors on your system. When the file descriptor table is full, ***`file: table is full`*** will show up repeatedly in the system message buffer, which can be viewed with the `dmesg` command.

Each open file, socket, or fifo uses one file descriptor. A large-scale production server may easily require many thousands of file descriptors, depending on the kind and number of services running concurrently.

`kern.maxfile`'s default value is dictated by the `MAXUSERS` option in your kernel configuration file. `kern.maxfiles` grows proportionally to the value of `MAXUSERS`. When compiling a custom kernel, it is a good idea to set this kernel configuration option according to the uses of your system. From this number, the kernel is given most of its pre-defined limits. Even though a production machine may not actually have 256 users connected at once, the resources needed may be similar to a high-scale web server.

 **Note:** Setting `MAXUSERS` to `0` in your kernel configuration file will choose a reasonable default value based on the amount of RAM present in your system. It is set to 0 in the default GENERIC kernel.

#### `kern.ipc.somaxconn` 

The `kern.ipc.somaxconn` sysctl variable limits the size of the listen queue for accepting new TCP connections. The default value of `128` is typically too low for robust handling of new connections in a heavily loaded web server environment. For such environments, it is recommended to increase this value to `1024` or higher. The service daemon may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g. [sendmail(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendmail&section=8), or  **Apache** ) but will often have a directive in its configuration file to adjust the queue size. Large listen queues also do a better job of avoiding Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

### Network Limits 

The `NMBCLUSTERS` kernel configuration option dictates the amount of network Mbufs available to the system. A heavily-trafficked server with a low number of Mbufs will hinder DragonFly's ability. Each cluster represents approximately 2 K of memory, so a value of 1024 represents 2 megabytes of kernel memory reserved for network buffers. A simple calculation can be done to figure out how many are needed. If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simultaneous connections, and each connection eats a 16 K receive and 16 K send buffer, you need approximately 32 MB worth of network buffers to cover the web server. A good rule of thumb is to multiply by 2, so 2x32 MB / 2 KB # 64 MB / 2 kB  32768. We recommend values between 4096 and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of memory. Under no circumstances should you specify an arbitrarily high value for this parameter as it could lead to a boot time crash. The `-m` option to [netstat(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=netstat&section=1) may be used to observe network cluster use. `kern.ipc.nmbclusters` loader tunable should be used to tune this at boot time.

<!-- XXX: mention kern.ipc.mbufs sysctl -->

For busy servers that make extensive use of the [sendfile(2)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendfile&section=2) system call, it may be necessary to increase the number of [sendfile(2)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendfile&section=2) buffers via the `NSFBUFS` kernel configuration option or by setting its value in `/boot/loader.conf` (see [loader(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=loader&section=8) for details). A common indicator that this parameter needs to be adjusted is when processes are seen in the `sfbufa` state. The sysctl variable `kern.ipc.nsfbufs` is a read-only glimpse at the kernel configured variable. This parameter nominally scales with `kern.maxusers`, however it may be necessary to tune accordingly.

 **Important:** Even though a socket has been marked as non-blocking, calling [sendfile(2)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendfile&section=2) on the non-blocking socket may result in the [sendfile(2)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sendfile&section=2) call blocking until enough `struct sf_buf`'s are made available.

#### `net.inet.ip.portrange.*` 

The `net.inet.ip.portrange.*` sysctl variables control the port number ranges automatically bound to TCP and UDP sockets. There are three ranges: a low range, a default range, and a high range. Most network programs use the default range which is controlled by the `net.inet.ip.portrange.first` and `net.inet.ip.portrange.last`, which default to 1024 and 5000, respectively. Bound port ranges are used for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out of ports under certain circumstances. This most commonly occurs when you are running a heavily loaded web proxy. The port range is not an issue when running servers which handle mainly incoming connections, such as a normal web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such as a mail relay. For situations where you may run yourself out of ports, it is recommended to increase `net.inet.ip.portrange.last` modestly. A value of `10000`, `20000` or `30000` may be reasonable. You should also consider firewall effects when changing the port range. Some firewalls may block large ranges of ports (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems to use higher ranges of ports for outgoing connections -- for this reason it is recommended that `net.inet.ip.portrange.first` be lowered.

#### TCP Bandwidth Delay Product 
<!-- XXX: Revise this stuff, I'm not familiar with it -->

The TCP Bandwidth Delay Product Limiting is similar to TCP/Vegas in NetBSD. It can be enabled by setting `net.inet.tcp.inflight_enable` sysctl variable to `1`. The system will attempt to calculate the bandwidth delay product for each connection and limit the amount of data queued to the network to just the amount required to maintain optimum throughput.

This feature is useful if you are serving data over modems, Gigabit Ethernet, or even high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth delay product), especially if you are also using window scaling or have configured a large send window. If you enable this option, you should also be sure to set `net.inet.tcp.inflight_debug` to `0` (disable debugging), and for production use setting `net.inet.tcp.inflight_min` to at least `6144` may be beneficial. However, note that setting high minimums may effectively disable bandwidth limiting depending on the link. The limiting feature reduces the amount of data built up in intermediate route and switch packet queues as well as reduces the amount of data built up in the local host's interface queue. With fewer packets queued up, interactive connections, especially over slow modems, will also be able to operate with lower ***Round Trip Times***. However, note that this feature only effects data transmission (uploading / server side). It has no effect on data reception (downloading).

Adjusting `net.inet.tcp.inflight_stab` is ***not*** recommended. This parameter defaults to 20, representing 2 maximal packets added to the bandwidth delay product window calculation. The additional window is required to stabilize the algorithm and improve responsiveness to changing conditions, but it can also result in higher ping times over slow links (though still much lower than you would get without the inflight algorithm). In such cases, you may wish to try reducing this parameter to 15, 10, or 5; and may also have to reduce `net.inet.tcp.inflight_min` (for example, to 3500) to get the desired effect. Reducing these parameters should be done as a last resort only.

## Adding Swap Space 
<!-- XXX: swapcache -->

No matter how well you plan, sometimes a system does not run as you expect. If you find you need more swap space, it is simple enough to add. You have three ways to increase swap space: adding a new hard drive, enabling swap over NFS, and creating a swap file on an existing partition.

### Swap on a New Hard Drive 

The best way to add swap, of course, is to use this as an excuse to add another hard drive. You can always use another hard drive, after all. If you can do this, go reread the discussion about swap space in [configtuning-initial.html Section 6.2] for some suggestions on how to best arrange your swap.

### Swapping over NFS 

Swapping over NFS is only recommended if you do not have local storage to swap to. Even though DragonFly has an excellent NFS implementation, NFS swapping will be limited by the available network bandwidth and puts an additional burden on the NFS server.

### Swapfiles 

We do NOT recommend swapping to a file.  At best you can use this technique to swap to a file over NFS, but generally speaking paging to a file can lead to system deadlocks in low-memory situations due to resources needed by the filesystem itself to execute the paging operation.

You can create a file of a specified size to use as a swap file. In our example here we will use a 64M file called `/usr/swap0`. You can use any name you want, of course.  On a real system you will want to size the swap to at least be the same as the amount of physical ram in the machine, and as already mentioned, we do NOT recommend swapping to a file due to the deadlock risk.

 **Example 6-1. Creating a Swapfile** 

  1. Be certain that your kernel configuration includes the vnode driver. It is ***not*** in recent versions of `GENERIC`.

      

         pseudo-device   vn 1   #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device)

  

  1. Create a swapfile (`/usr/swap0`):  Ensure there is sufficient space on the filesystem for the swapfile.  Pre-zero the file.  On HAMMER2, also disable the check mode and compression to prevent block reallocation on write.  The following sequence is for HAMMER2.

         # echo -n > /usr/swap0
         # hammer2 setcheck none /usr/swap0
         # hammer2 setcomp none /usr/swap0 
         # dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/swap0 bs=1024k count=64

  

  1. Set proper permissions on (`/usr/swap0`):

      

         # chmod 0600 /usr/swap0

  

  1. Enable the swap file in `/etc/rc.conf`:

      

         swapfile="/usr/swap0"   # Set to name of swapfile if aux swapfile desired.

  

  1. Reboot the machine or to enable the swap file immediately, type:

      

         # vnconfig -e /dev/vn0 /usr/swap0 swap

  

## Power and Resource Management 

***Written by Hiten Pandya and Tom Rhodes. ***

It is very important to utilize hardware resources in an efficient manner. Before ACPI was introduced, it was very difficult and inflexible for operating systems to manage the power usage and thermal properties of a system. The hardware was controlled by some sort of BIOS embedded interface, such as ***Plug and Play BIOS (PNPBIOS)***, or ***Advanced Power Management (APM)*** and so on. Power and Resource Management is one of the key components of a modern operating system. For example, you may want an operating system to monitor system limits (and possibly alert you) in case your system temperature increased unexpectedly.

In this section, we will provide comprehensive information about ACPI. References will be provided for further reading at the end. Please be aware that ACPI is available on DragonFly systems as a default kernel module.

### What Is ACPI? 

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is a standard written by an alliance of vendors to provide a standard interface for hardware resources and power management (hence the name). It is a key element in ***Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management***, i.e.: it provides more control and flexibility to the operating system (OS). Modern systems ***stretched*** the limits of the current Plug and Play interfaces (such as APM), prior to the introduction of ACPI. ACPI is the direct successor to APM (Advanced Power Management).

### Shortcomings of Advanced Power Management (APM) 

The ***Advanced Power Management (APM)*** facility control's the power usage of a system based on its activity. The APM BIOS is supplied by the (system) vendor and it is specific to the hardware platform. An APM driver in the OS mediates access to the ***APM Software Interface***, which allows management of power levels.

There are four major problems in APM. Firstly, power management is done by the (vendor-specific) BIOS, and the OS does not have any knowledge of it. One example of this, is when the user sets idle-time values for a hard drive in the APM BIOS, that when exceeded, it (BIOS) would spin down the hard drive, without the consent of the OS. Secondly, the APM logic is embedded in the BIOS, and it operates outside the scope of the OS. This means users can only fix problems in their APM BIOS by flashing a new one into the ROM; which, is a very dangerous procedure, and if it fails, it could leave the system in an unrecoverable state. Thirdly, APM is a vendor-specific technology, which, means that there is a lot or parity (duplication of efforts) and bugs found in one vendor's BIOS, may not be solved in others. Last but not the least, the APM BIOS did not have enough room to implement a sophisticated power policy, or one that can adapt very well to the purpose of the machine.

***Plug and Play BIOS (PNPBIOS)*** was unreliable in many situations. PNPBIOS is 16-bit technology, so the OS has to use 16-bit emulation in order to ***interface*** with PNPBIOS methods.

The DragonFly APM driver is documented in the [apm(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=apm&section=4) manual page.

### Configuring ACPI 

The `acpi.ko` driver is loaded by default at start up by the [loader(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=loader&section=8) and should ***not*** be compiled into the kernel. The reasoning behind this is that modules are easier to work with, say if switching to another `acpi.ko` without doing a kernel rebuild. This has the advantage of making testing easier. Another reason is that starting ACPI after a system has been brought up is not too useful, and in some cases can be fatal. In doubt, just disable ACPI all together. This driver should not and can not be unloaded because the system bus uses it for various hardware interactions. ACPI can be disabled with the [acpiconf(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpiconf&section=8) utility. In fact most of the interaction with ACPI can be done via [acpiconf(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpiconf&section=8). Basically this means, if anything about ACPI is in the [dmesg(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dmesg&section=8) output, then most likely it is already running.

 **Note:** ACPI and APM cannot coexist and should be used separately. The last one to load will terminate if the driver notices the other running.

In the simplest form, ACPI can be used to put the system into a sleep mode with [acpiconf(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpiconf&section=8), the `-s` flag, and a `1-5` option. Most users will only need `1`. Option `5` will do a soft-off which is the same action as:

  

    # halt -p

The other options are available. Check out the [acpiconf(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpiconf&section=8) manual page for more information.

## Using and Debugging DragonFly ACPI 

***Written by Nate Lawson. With contributions from Peter Schultz and Tom Rhodes. ***

ACPI is a fundamentally new way of discovering devices, managing power usage, and providing standardized access to various hardware previously managed by the BIOS. Progress is being made toward ACPI working on all systems, but bugs in some motherboards ***ACPI Machine Language*** (AML) bytecode, incompleteness in DragonFly's kernel subsystems, and bugs in the Intel ACPI-CA interpreter continue to appear.

This document is intended to help you assist the DragonFly ACPI maintainers in identifying the root cause of problems you observe and debugging and developing a solution. Thanks for reading this and we hope we can solve your system's problems.

### Submitting Debugging Information 

 **Note:** Before submitting a problem, be sure you are running the latest BIOS version and, if available, embedded controller firmware version.

For those of you that want to submit a problem right away, please send the following information to [bugs](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/)

* Description of the buggy behavior, including system type and model and anything that causes the bug to appear. Also, please note as accurately as possible when the bug began occurring if it is new for you.

* The dmesg output after ***boot `-v`***, including any error messages generated by you exercising the bug.

* dmesg output from ***boot `-v`*** with ACPI disabled, if disabling it helps fix the problem.

* Output from ***sysctl hw.acpi***. This is also a good way of figuring out what features your system offers.

* URL where your ***ACPI Source Language*** (ASL) can be found. Do ***not*** send the ASL directly to the list as it can be very large. Generate a copy of your ASL by running this command:
      

      # acpidump -t -d > name-system.asl

  

  (Substitute your login name for `name` and manufacturer/model for `system`. Example: `njl-FooCo6000.asl`)

### Background 

ACPI is present in all modern computers that conform to the ia32 (x86), ia64 (Itanium), and amd64 (AMD) architectures. The full standard has many features including CPU performance management, power planes control, thermal zones, various battery systems, embedded controllers, and bus enumeration. Most systems implement less than the full standard. For instance, a desktop system usually only implements the bus enumeration parts while a laptop might have cooling and battery management support as well. Laptops also have suspend and resume, with their own associated complexity.

An ACPI-compliant system has various components. The BIOS and chipset vendors provide various fixed tables (e.g., FADT) in memory that specify things like the APIC map (used for SMP), config registers, and simple configuration values. Additionally, a table of bytecode (the ***Differentiated System Description Table*** DSDT) is provided that specifies a tree-like name space of devices and methods.

The ACPI driver must parse the fixed tables, implement an interpreter for the bytecode, and modify device drivers and the kernel to accept information from the ACPI subsystem. For DragonFly, Intel has provided an interpreter (ACPI-CA) that is shared with Linux and NetBSD®. The path to the ACPI-CA source code is `src/sys/dev/acpica5`.  Finally, drivers that implement various ACPI devices are found in `src/sys/dev/acpica5`.

### Common Problems 

For ACPI to work correctly, all the parts have to work correctly. Here are some common problems, in order of frequency of appearance, and some possible workarounds or fixes.

#### Suspend/Resume 

ACPI has three suspend to RAM (STR) states, `S1`-`S3`, and one suspend to disk state (`STD`), called `S4`. `S5` is ***soft off*** and is the normal state your system is in when plugged in but not powered up. `S4` can actually be implemented two separate ways. `S4`BIOS is a BIOS-assisted suspend to disk. `S4`OS is implemented entirely by the operating system.

Start by checking `sysctl` `hw.acpi` for the suspend-related items. Here are the results for my Thinkpad:

    hw.acpi.supported_sleep_state: S3 S4 S5

    hw.acpi.s4bios: 0

This means that I can use `acpiconf -s` to test `S3`, `S4`OS, and `S5`. If `s4bios` was one (`1`), I would have `S4`BIOS support instead of `S4` OS.

When testing suspend/resume, start with `S1`, if supported. This state is most likely to work since it doesn't require much driver support. No one has implemented `S2` but if you have it, it's similar to `S1`. The next thing to try is `S3`. This is the deepest STR state and requires a lot of driver support to properly reinitialize your hardware. If you have problems resuming, feel free to email the [bugs](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/) list but do not expect the problem to be resolved since there are a lot of drivers/hardware that need more testing and work.

To help isolate the problem, remove as many drivers from your kernel as possible. If it works, you can narrow down which driver is the problem by loading drivers until it fails again. Typically binary drivers like `nvidia.ko`,  **X11**  display drivers, and USB will have the most problems while Ethernet interfaces usually work fine. If you can load/unload the drivers ok, you can automate this by putting the appropriate commands in `/etc/rc.suspend` and `/etc/rc.resume`. There is a commented-out example for unloading and loading a driver. Try setting `hw.acpi.reset_video` to zero (0) if your display is messed up after resume. Try setting longer or shorter values for `hw.acpi.sleep_delay` to see if that helps.

Another thing to try is load a recent Linux distribution with ACPI support and test their suspend/resume support on the same hardware. If it works on Linux, it's likely a DragonFly driver problem and narrowing down which driver causes the problems will help us fix the problem. Note that the ACPI maintainers do not usually maintain other drivers (e.g sound, ATA, etc.) so any work done on tracking down a driver problem should probably eventually be posted to the [bugs](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/) list and mailed to the driver maintainer. If you are feeling adventurous, go ahead and start putting some debugging [printf(3)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#printf&section3)s in a problematic driver to track down where in its resume function it hangs.

Finally, try disabling ACPI and enabling APM instead. If suspend/resume works with APM, you may be better off sticking with APM, especially on older hardware (pre-2000). It took vendors a while to get ACPI support correct and older hardware is more likely to have BIOS problems with ACPI.

<-- XXX: mention sensors somewhere; but not in this section -->

#### System Hangs (temporary or permanent) 

Most system hangs are a result of lost interrupts or an interrupt storm. Chipsets have a lot of problems based on how the BIOS configures interrupts before boot, correctness of the APIC (MADT) table, and routing of the ***System Control Interrupt*** (SCI).

Interrupt storms can be distinguished from lost interrupts by checking the output of `vmstat -i` and looking at the line that has `acpi0`. If the counter is increasing at more than a couple per second, you have an interrupt storm. If the system appears hung, try breaking to DDB ( **CTRL** + **ALT** + **ESC**  on console) and type `show interrupts`.

Your best hope when dealing with interrupt problems is to try disabling APIC support with `hint.apic.0.disabled="1"` in `loader.conf`.

#### Panics 

Panics are relatively rare for ACPI and are the top priority to be fixed. The first step is to isolate the steps to reproduce the panic (if possible) and get a backtrace. Follow the advice for enabling `options DDB` and setting up a serial console (see [ this section](serialconsole-setup.html#SERIALCONSOLE-DDB)) or setting up a [dump(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=dump&section=8) partition. You can get a backtrace in DDB with `tr`. If you have to handwrite the backtrace, be sure to at least get the lowest five (5) and top five (5) lines in the trace.

Then, try to isolate the problem by booting with ACPI disabled. If that works, you can isolate the ACPI subsystem by using various values of `debug.acpi.disable`. See the [acpi(4)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpi&section=4) manual page for some examples.

#### System Powers Up After Suspend or Shutdown 

First, try setting `hw.acpi.disable_on_poweroff#0` in [loader.conf(5)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=loader.conf&section=5). This keeps ACPI from disabling various events during the shutdown process. Some systems need this value set to ***1*** (the default) for the same reason. This usually fixes the problem of a system powering up spontaneously after a suspend or poweroff.

#### Other Problems 

If you have other problems with ACPI (working with a docking station, devices not detected, etc.), please email a description to the mailing list as well; however, some of these issues may be related to unfinished parts of the ACPI subsystem so they might take a while to be implemented. Please be patient and prepared to test patches we may send you.

### ASL, acpidump, and IASL 
<!-- XXX: IMHO all this crap about fixing your DSDT etc should  be axed -->

The most common problem is the BIOS vendors providing incorrect (or outright buggy!) bytecode. This is usually manifested by kernel console messages like this:

    

    ACPI-1287: *** Error: Method execution failed [\\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.FIGD._STA] \\

    (Node 0xc3f6d160), AE_NOT_FOUND

Often, you can resolve these problems by updating your BIOS to the latest revision. Most console messages are harmless but if you have other problems like battery status not working, they're a good place to start looking for problems in the AML. The bytecode, known as AML, is compiled from a source language called ASL. The AML is found in the table known as the DSDT. To get a copy of your ASL, use [acpidump(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpidump&section=8). You should use both the `-t` (show contents of the fixed tables) and `-d` (disassemble AML to ASL) options. See the [submitting Debugging Information](acpi-debug.html#ACPI-SUBMITDEBUG) section for an example syntax.

The simplest first check you can do is to recompile your ASL to check for errors. Warnings can usually be ignored but errors are bugs that will usually prevent ACPI from working correctly. To recompile your ASL, issue the following command:

    

    # iasl your.asl

### Fixing Your ASL 

In the long run, our goal is for almost everyone to have ACPI work without any user intervention. At this point, however, we are still developing workarounds for common mistakes made by the BIOS vendors. The Microsoft interpreter (`acpi.sys` and `acpiec.sys`) does not strictly check for adherence to the standard, and thus many BIOS vendors who only test ACPI under Windows never fix their ASL. We hope to continue to identify and document exactly what non-standard behavior is allowed by Microsoft's interpreter and replicate it so DragonFly can work without forcing users to fix the ASL. As a workaround and to help us identify behavior, you can fix the ASL manually. If this works for you, please send a [diff(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=diff&section=1) of the old and new ASL so we can possibly work around the buggy behavior in ACPI-CA and thus make your fix unnecessary.

Here is a list of common error messages, their cause, and how to fix them:

#### OS dependencies 

Some AML assumes the world consists of various Windows versions. You can tell DragonFly to claim it is any OS to see if this fixes problems you may have. An easy way to override this is to set `hw.acpi.osname=Windows 2001` in `/boot/loader.conf` or other similar strings you find in the ASL.

#### Missing Return statements 

Some methods do not explicitly return a value as the standard requires. While ACPI-CA does not handle this, DragonFly has a workaround that allows it to return the value implicitly. You can also add explicit Return statements where required if you know what value should be returned. To force `iasl` to compile the ASL, use the `-f` flag.

#### Overriding the Default AML 

After you customize `your.asl`, you will want to compile it, run:
   

    # iasl your.asl

You can add the `-f` flag to force creation of the AML, even if there are errors during compilation. Remember that some errors (e.g., missing Return statements) are automatically worked around by the interpreter.

`DSDT.aml` is the default output filename for `iasl`. You can load this instead of your BIOS's buggy copy (which is still present in flash memory) by editing `/boot/loader.conf` as follows:

    

    acpi_dsdt_load="YES"

    acpi_dsdt_name="/boot/DSDT.aml"

Be sure to copy your `DSDT.aml` to the `/boot` directory.

### Getting Debugging Output From ACPI 

The ACPI driver has a very flexible debugging facility. It allows you to specify a set of subsystems as well as the level of verbosity. The subsystems you wish to debug are specified as ***layers*** and are broken down into ACPI-CA components (ACPI_ALL_COMPONENTS) and ACPI hardware support (ACPI_ALL_DRIVERS). The verbosity of debugging output is specified as the ***level*** and ranges from ACPI_LV_ERROR (just report errors) to ACPI_LV_VERBOSE (everything). The ***level*** is a bitmask so multiple options can be set at once, separated by spaces. In practice, you will want to use a serial console to log the output if it is so long it flushes the console message buffer.

Debugging output is not enabled by default. To enable it, add `options ACPI_DEBUG` to your kernel config if ACPI is compiled into the kernel. You can add `ACPI_DEBUG=1` to your `/etc/make.conf` to enable it globally. If it is a module, you can recompile just your `acpi.ko` module as follows:

    

    # cd /sys/dev/acpica5 && make clean && make ACPI_DEBUG=1

Install `acpi.ko` in `/boot/kernel` and add your desired level and layer to `loader.conf`. This example enables debug messages for all ACPI-CA components and all ACPI hardware drivers (CPU, LID, etc.) It will only output error messages, the least verbose level.

    

    debug.acpi.layer="ACPI_ALL_COMPONENTS ACPI_ALL_DRIVERS"

    debug.acpi.level="ACPI_LV_ERROR"

If the information you want is triggered by a specific event (say, a suspend and then resume), you can leave out changes to `loader.conf` and instead use `sysctl` to specify the layer and level after booting and preparing your system for the specific event. The `sysctl`s are named the same as the tunables in `loader.conf`.

### References 

More information about ACPI may be found in the following locations:

* The [FreeBSD ACPI mailing list](http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-acpi) (This is FreeBSD-specific; posting DragonFly questions here may not generate much of an answer.)

* The ACPI Mailing List Archives (FreeBSD) http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/

* The old ACPI Mailing List Archives (FreeBSD) http://home.jp.FreeBSD.org/mail-list/acpi-jp/

* The ACPI 2.0 Specification http://acpi.info/spec.htm

* DragonFly Manual pages: [acpidump(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpidump&section8), [acpiconf(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpiconf&section=8), [acpidb(8)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=acpidb&section=8)

* [DSDT debugging resource](http://www.cpqlinux.com/acpi-howto.html#fix_broken_dsdt). (Uses Compaq as an example but generally useful.)