Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.
Thanks to Francois Tigeot, the drm/i915 driver now supports Haswell processors, and the special FDI and DDI ports they use. I am late posting this.
If you are using the ATI Mach64 drm driver on DragonFly, Francois Tigeot would like to know. He’s done something that breaks it, but he’s making the educated guess that this more-than-10-years-old card is no longer in use.
If you remember the earlier work to support DragonFly on An Acer c720 Chromebook, it’s been repeated for the c720p. The “p” means it’s a touchscreen.
If you have a DragonFly system with an iwn wireless chipset, and you are having trouble connecting and running in the 5Ghz part of the spectrum only, here’s a tip: the -ht switch may fix it.
There’s been good progress in Francois Tigeot’s work on Haswell graphics support in DragonFly. If you have one of those newer units, you should be able to use the i915 driver with it now – as long as you keep acceleration off. (You won’t notice any difference in 2D anyway.)
If you have a i915 video chipset (which appears to be most every recent laptop), Francois Tigeot would like you to try his huge patch. It doesn’t support Haswell chips yet, though it lays some of the groundwork for it.
A frequent question people ask when trying Hammer is “How can I do software RAID to cover a disk failure?” Hammer provides for streaming one volume to another, so you can duplicate drives, but there isn’t an automatic failover mechanism as there is with a RAID setup. The first answer is usually “get hardware RAID“; my preferred solution. The remaining software solutions are vinum, ccd, and lvm for DragonFly.
If you were looking for something to do, finishing Francois Tigeot’s sound update would help a lot of people. He’s currently tied up with i915 support work. The patches need device cloning to work with devfs, and midi removal.
As mentioned before, the mrsas(4) driver works best for ‘Thunderbolt’ RAID controllers. Now, the switch has happened.
Tethering now works via the urndis(4) device, from a patch contributed by Sascha Wildner/tested by Yellow Rabbit.
(Updated for correct attribution)
Francois Tigeot has been working on making i915 video support work better; with his latest update, it’s worth trying the Intel-specific driver instead of vesa if you have both the 915 chipset and are running X.
Matthew Dillon changed powerd on DragonFly so that the system is set to max performance if powerd is killed. Now you’ll know why your fans turned on!
The mfi(4) driver has had some data corruption problems on “Thunderbird” series RAID controllers. There’s a newer driver, mrsas(4), that replaces mfi(4) for these controllers and does not have these issues, but switching may mean new drive locations and therefore some work to get booting correctly again. Sascha Wildner has an extensive writeup about what this entails, and how to switch now if you have that hardware (recommended).
The max number of CPUs on DragonFly just went from 63 to 64. This is really just a side effect of preparation to move up that limit, but I am entertained by the single-digit bump.
Did you try to install DragonFly relatively recently and it never made it past the bootloader? Apparently there’s a bug in some BIOS when using a smaller USB drive to install. The loader checks multiple places for information, and if it checks somewhere that’s ‘farther’ than the end of the disk (i.e. 6G on a 4G USB key), the machine locks up.
Matthew Dillon and Kyle Davis spent a good number of hours figuring this out today, and Matt committed a fix. So, if you were bit by this problem, try a -LATEST image about 24 hours from now and see if it works.
Sascha Wildner has added the mrsas(4) driver, which works on a variety of LSI Thunderbolt devices – a variety of RAID cards, names for which are listed in the commit message. Note that as of right now, these devices by default get taken by the mfi(4) driver, so you need to take extra steps to get mrsas(4) used.
If you have DragonFly on a laptop, and a docking station for that laptop, it may be better supported now. (no, I don’t know exactly what acpi_dock does.)
Alexandre Perrin contributed an upgrade of wpa_supplicant and hostapd for DragonFly, bringing it from 0.6.10 to version 2.1 – a 4-year jump.