Category: Device support

mxge(4) and ecc(4) have been updated by Sepherosa Ziehau.  Not sure what’s new for mxge(4), a 10G network card driver, but ecc(4) now supports the memory controller for new Haswell systems.

Francois Tigeot wrote up a summary of DragonFly’s support for newer Intel video chipsets. (short summary: much better recently)  KMS support is now the default in DragonFly.  There’s still work ongoing.

I’m just going to roll all these updates from Sepherosa Ziehau together into one post, because it’s a lot:  He’s updated igb(4) to 2.3.10, updated em(4) to 7.3.8, merged the hardware abstraction layer of those two drivers, enabled TSO on all PCI-E em(4) chipsets, and added support for a whole slew of Realtek chipsets in the re(4) driver.  Whew!

You may have trouble switching back to a vty if you’re running a recent Intel video chipset and using KMS.  It’s a side effect of the new KMS support, but it is being worked on.

If you’re curious about the hardware being used for the colocated dragonflybsd.org servers (this includes the website, the repository, the mailing lists, dports build machines, etc.), here’s the ‘MicroCloud’ product page.  DragonFly’s model was purchased from iXsystems.   Apparently those Haswell processors have a fantastic power consumption to performance ratio.  (via)

I’m a bit slow in posting this, but that’s OK since it’s a work in progress: Markus Pfeiffer has added some more work on USB4BSD porting to DragonFly, including some device–specific changes.

I’d be really surprised to find this affects anyone, but it’s possible: some kernel options specific to Cyrix processors have been removed, by Sascha Wildner.

If you have a computer with one of the very-very-new Haswell processors from Intel, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that will interest you.  They shave off (in the example given) about 20% of CPU power usage without much effect on performance.

Thanks to the effort of a number of people, DragonFly (-current) now supports KMS and accelerated video on Intel 915 chipsets.  It’s 2D and x86_64 only for now, but it’s much, much better than just using the vesa driver.

Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly.  This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.

If you have an Emulex BladeEngine 2 or 3, or an Emulex Lancer, it should work in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner’s recent commit.   Emulex has 10Gb network cards, in case you were like me and not familiar with the name.

(You thought I was going to type “Sepherosa Ziehau”, didn’t you?)  

If you have a mps(4) device (LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS disk controller), you may be interested in Matthew Dillon’s large commit of bugfixes from FreeBSD.  Specifically, he notes that the drive gets ‘overtagged’, and performance can be greatly improved by reducing the number of tags used.

The tpm(4) driver has been added by Sascha Wildner, ported from FreeBSD.  What’s it do?

From the man page: “The tpm driver provides support for various trusted platform modules (TPM) that can store cryptographic keys.” Crypto keys stored in hardware, where they are in theory unmangleable, instead of on the disk. At least, that’s my impression after 30 seconds of research.

Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some numbers showing improvements in ip forwarding rates.  He’s done this before, except this time it’s with bnx(4), probably because of his recent commits.

If you have a sili(4) device, Francois Tigeot needs you to run a particular patch and tell him what happens.  He’s testing a larger I/O request size, and wants to see how it will work out “in the field”.

John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop?  Follow the thread for details.  There’s no final answer, yet.

Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon.   Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.