# DragonFly Release 2.8
## x yyyy 20xx (2.8)

The DragonFly 2.8 release is here!

Wait, no it's not!  This is a page set up for work done on the 2.7 development branch, so that we can write it down as it happens.  When 2.8 is rolled, we'll use this page for the release.

## Availability

[[mirrors|mirrors]]

### MD5 sums

* foo
* bar 

### pkgsrc packages

We offer thousands of pre-built [pkgsrc](http://www.pkgsrc.org) packages for this release.   The [pkg_radd(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=pkg_radd&section=ANY) utility may be used to download pre-built binary packages.  The path can be overridden by setting BINPKG_SITES in `/etc/settings.conf`.

To get a list of all packages, let [pkg_search(1)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=pkg_search&section=ANY) download the summary file for that release:

    # pkg_search -d

We supply a Makefile in /usr to track the pkgsrc tree.  We also supply a Git mirror of the NetBSD pkgsrc CVS repo as
well as the pkgsrc/wip (work in progress) repo at git://git.dragonflybsd.org/pkgsrc.git.  We recommend that
users use it, instead of pulling from NetBSD with CVS.  Our Git mirror is updated four times a day.

## DragonFly 2.6.x Special Installation and Upgrade Notes

**New Loader** - The forth loader is no longer in the system. The new loader, 'dloader', has to be installed before an 'installkernel'. If you are updating from an older system such as DragonFly 2.4 it is recommended to run an installworld before the installkernel to update the loader. Otherwise you can simply do the following before the 'installkernel'.

> cd /usr/src/sys/boot
> make all install


**BIND removal** - BIND is no longer in the base system.  If you are using BIND or any of the associated utilities (host, nslookup, etc.), this method will allow you to transition to the version in pkgsrc:

>     # cd /usr/pksrc/net/bind96; 
>     # bmake all install clean

or

>     # pkg_radd bind96

>     # cp /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc.d/named9 /etc/rc.d/
>     # /etc/rc.d/named stop
>
>edit /etc/rc.conf, and  remove 
>
>     named_enable="YES"
>
>then add
>
>     named9_enable="YES"
>     named_chrootdir="/etc/namedb"
>     named_flags="-c named.conf"
>     named_program="/usr/pkg/sbin/named"
>
>     # chown -R named /etc/namedb
>     # /etc/rc.d/named9 start
>
>Test your setup with host, dig and so on. Check for a running named process with ps. Error messages should go to /var/log/messages.


## DragonFly 2.8 Release Notes

### Release Improvements

> ### Kernel changes
* dsched, an IO Scheduler framework and dsched_fq, a Fair Queuing I/O scheduler policy
* Device Mapper imported from NetBSD
* stripe and crypt targets for the Device Mapper
* select/poll hoisted onto kqueue
* LWKT tokens reworked
* MP Lock removed from VM and pmaps (sorta: its still taken with the vm token, but the groundwork is there)
* VM: Idle time page zeroing
* Major update of pf  from OpenBSD 3.5 to 4.2, keeping DragonFly specific additions (support for pickups and fairq)
* swapoff added
* Major network work (NEEDS MORE DETAILS).
* Major performance improvements to softcrypto on SMP systems
* kern_udev - A framework to associate optional information with device nodes
* initrd (initial ramdisk/malloc disk) support
* Removal of shared spinlocks and renaming of the spinlock API
* Added support for AES-XTS and AES-CTR to the opencrypto framework
* proplib imported from NetBSD
* Removal of the forth loader in favour of a C-only loader, 'dloader'
* Fixing of {MADV,MAP}_NOSYNC, resulting in a great performance improvement for vkernels
* add TCP-MD5 (RFC 2385) support to ipsec (XXX: or is it fast_ipsec?)
* rewrite the LWKT scheduler's priority mechanism (XXX: more info?)


> ### HAMMER changes
* foo
* bar 

> ### Hardware changes (non-networking)
* Driver for Areca RAID controllers (arcmsr)
* aesni crypto driver
* AHCI support for recent AMD SATA chipsets
* VIA Padlock support fixed
* foo
* bar 

> ### Hardware changes (networking)
* New wireless network card framework

> ### Userland changes
* Power/CPU frequency management daemon
* libdevattr - A library giving access to additional information about kernel device nodes with an API that is mostly compatible with Linux' libudev.
* udevd - A support daemon for libdevattr
* Kernel programming guide (section 9 man pages) updated and extended.
* mkinitrd - A tool to generate an initrd image to be able to boot from crypto, lvm and other devices
* crashinfo, a tool to automatically extract some useful information from kernel dumps in a text format
* proplib imported from NetBSD
* added sha512 support to libmd
* ioprio, a utility to change the I/O priority of a process doing I/O on a disk with the dsched_fq policy

> ### amd64 related changes
* foo
* bar 

> ### Removals
* BIND is no longer in the base system.  See Special Upgrade notes above for a migration path.

> ### Contributed Software
* Imported drill and libldns as a resolving utility in base as BIND has gone
* Imported lvm (Logical Volume Manager)
* Imported cryptsetup for use with the new device mapper crypto target, dm_target_crypt
* Updated awk to 20100523

>### Security related
* Improved stability of tmpfs so that a simple user can't panic the system due to kva exhaustion

>### Big-ticket items

**thingname** - thingsdesc

**thingname** - thingsdesc