Category: Device support

With everyone buying tablets lately, the low end of computers is getting pretty low-cost indeed.  Creating single-purpose computers is possible, and I was thinking of doing that to create a Go-testing system.  (Though probably not necessary for me.)  It got me to thinking, though…

How low-cost a system could run DragonFly?  The master-slave and low system requirements of Hammer lead to some interesting possibilities.  There’s no Arduino equivalent for DragonFly because there’s no DragonFly on ARM, despite all my wishing.  DragonFly has been run on Soekris systems before, and might work on a PCEngines ALIX board.  Ebay, my basement, or Craigslist are options too, but not as fun.  Who has suggestions?

ACPI has been updated in DragonFly by Sepherosa Ziehau, to potentially support the very low-power sleep states available with Haswell CPUs.

Note: Sepherosa clarified that the lower power states are not available – yet.

Markus Pfeiffer has added more of his work on USB4BSD to DragonFly, and a reminder: if you want to try it out, there’s just a few options to set.

Matthew Dillon is continuing his work on chromebook hardware, and he’s been playing with the multi-touch touchpad.  There’s a number of new features based on position and the number of fingers used.

The ixgbe(4) driver, for a number of Intel 10Gb network cards, has been updated by Sepherosa Ziehau to version 2.5.15.  Note that this changes the interface name to ‘ix’ by default.  This driver is actually written by Intel.

ISA device support is really gone.  Well, except for keyboard and some spots where it can’t be be removed.  I don’t think I’ve even seen an ISA card in some years…

If you have a bge(4) network card and it’s giving you problems every time you configure it, there’s a fix on the way.

Predrag Punosevac asked for good fileserver examples.  Several people answered, including me – the best answer is from Francois Tigeot, but there’s discussion of IPMI support in the thread.

Related: I wonder if the Backblaze Storage Pod would work for DragonFly?

Multiple transmission queues are possible for the mxge(4) driver; I’m mentioning it because Sepherosa Ziehau’s post about this describes the exact tunables to configure this.

Chris Turner was curious about clock skew when running under a VM, and Sepherosa Ziehau very kindly explained the different types of internal clock for DragonFly, and how to control them – a topic I’ve never understood deeply.

I stole Sepherosa Ziehau’s email subject for the title of this post, because that’s exactly what has happened.  Gigabit networking cards under DragonFly will perform very well under extreme load – all of them.

When Sepherosa Ziehau decides to improve something, he goes all out.  For example, he recently improved the mxge(4) driver for Myricom 10G network cards – which is for relatively older hardware – and improved performance by 150Mbps.

Francois Tigeot posted his work on the KMS driver for Radeon video cards.  He’s looking for help since he’s low on time for the immediate future, and this is a project that could benefit everyone.  (Well, everyone with the right video card.)