A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
… He could use your testing and feedback.
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner porting from FreeBSD, mixer(8) now remembers state. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.
Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.
Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.
You can now control your backlight settings through sysctl and enjoy greater video support/stability – as long as you are using a i915 video chipset on DragonFly.
From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.
I had to type it that way because it rhymes. Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer. What’s it do? It’s a machine management standard.
If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.
Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.
Imre Vadaz’s recent change to dev/drm, adding kqueue support, has (from anecdotal reports in IRC) made video performance much better. It’s committed to DragonFly 4.0, so it’ll be in the next release.
I said “USB ethernet drivers should work now” yesterday, but didn’t specify what works with the new USB structure in DragonFly. Sascha has fixed that by explicitly porting aue(4), cue(4), ipheth(4) and kue(4) from FreeBSD. As his commit notes, there’s still a few more devices to go.
If you’ve got a USB Ethernet device on DragonFly, it should work. Also, some cell phones tether correctly now, when they may have had trouble before.
Sascha Wildner brought in led(4) from FreeBSD. It’s a driver for flashing LEDs, as you might have guessed. I’d like to see someone make Blinkenlights, whether BeBox-style or just generally mysterious.
The powersaving page on dragonflybsd.org has seen a bunch of updates; this should be handy even if you aren’t on battery power that often.