DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 Released With Disruptive Change To Help Chromium, Ported Apps

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is out today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system.

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 includes the usual minor bug fixes ranging from panics, deadlocks, and null pointer dereferences to more prominent fixes this round. The DragonFlyBSD AHCI driver now enforces a 10-second poll of the chipset, a quirk for the Corsair Strafe RGB keyboard, and other fixes.

One of the more noticeable fixes to DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is allowing AMD Zen 2 to boot on DragonFly. They needed a kernel change (unrelated to the Linux+systemd RdRand problem) to boot the newer processors but now things should be in good shape and DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon is finding great results out of the new AMD hardware.

The other prominent change for DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is an API change that's been deemed disruptive but ultimately helps various software ported to DragonFlyBSD. The change to the DragonFly kernel is changing the TCP keep-alive options from being in milliseconds to seconds to match the behavior of other operating systems.

They made this change to specify the keep-alive time in seconds as they end up having to patch various applications being ported to DragonFlyBSD to be in milliseconds up until now and the Chromium web-browser is one such application they continue to have to patch. Without patching, there would be timeouts too fast causing issues for users.

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is available from DragonFlyBSD.org.