Category: Device support

Here’s two items I meant to post and for some reason did not:

• Sven Gaerner posted a short description of how he migrated his DragonFly system from a hard disk to a SSD.  This may be useful for anyone considering a move.  Decent-sized SSDs are reaching low prices these days.
• Tim Bisson posted an update on his work on TRIM support for DragonFly.  The code is available now if you’re feeling lucky.

 

Sepherosa Ziehau’s made it possible for uniprocessor kernels to use the LAPIC and IOAPIC functions on x86_64, which means better timer support, less need to fiddle with configs, and more supported hardware.  A win all around!  Set hw.lapic_enable=”0″ if there’s trouble.  The same changes for i386 are on the way.

I haven’t covered recent disk encryption work evenly, here, so I’ll point at a recent discussion instead.  Alex Hornung mentioned a cryptsetup(8) man page that may help, as does any dm-crypt tutorial out there on the Internet.  (DragonFly has the same userland tools.)   The DragonFly installer will create encrypted disks at install time, too.

The I/O APIC is now always on unless you say otherwise.  This may not make a clear difference to you, but enabling that kernel option has always been a somewhat iffy thing; working for some configurations and not others.  Now, it’s one less thing to worry about.

I posted something about this before, but now it’s definite: bleeding-edge users of DragonFly can boot a multiprocessor kernel on a single-processor machine.

If you’ve ever wanted to really make sure of all the network interfaces supported on your DragonFly system, you can create an exhaustive (and exhausting) list.

Samuel Greear has a totally untested update to the NVIDIA video driver available.  It may not work, but it’s not like that’ll be any different than the current state of the driver.

Tim Bisson has inital TRIM support working for UFS.  His lengthy posting talks about how it’s done, and shows how much it speeds things up.  He’s looking for testers, so please try it if you have a SSD.  (The usual warnings apply about testing code that specifically deletes things.)

For those not familiar with TRIM in SSD context, here’s the least annoying page with an explanation that I could find in a few seconds of Googling.

Francois Tigeot did some testing of various hardware RAID adapters (Areca, LSI, 3ware, and Adaptec) in DragonFly, and reported thoroughly on each.  This may come as no surprise, but it sounds like Areca adapters are worth the money.

Update: There’s an updated mpt(4) driver, and the performance issues are fixed by enabling write caching.

To go along with the recently-added suggested hardware page on the DragonFly website, Francois Tigeot puts in a good word for SuperMicro boards and DragonFly, and links to some good hardware combinations.

If you have a USB printer, you may not have been able to print since the kqueue changes came in for… DragonFly 2.8?  Anyway, Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to ulpt(4) that means USB and kqueue play nicely together.

Hey, it rhymes!  Matthew Dillon’s added support for 4-port Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E cards from Intel.  I wish I had one.

Matthew Dillon made some changes to swapcache(8).  Swapcache is now able to cache a lot more data, and the result is that general disk performance for _all_ disks is accelerated by an included SSD using swapcache.  Performance previously restricted to all-SSD systems or serious RAID setups is now possible with much less investment.

In addition to that, the long-term wear on the SSD appears to be less of a problem than expected.

Chris Turner is looking to implement something similar to OpenBSD’s mount_vnd(8) operation, where virtual disks can be mounted at boot.  He talks about some of the work and ideas at length.  If you don’t feel like reading about it, you can instead mess with it; he has a tarball of the current state of his work linked in his message.

Joe Talbott has some changes for both Intel and non-Intel wifi NICs; please try out his branch and report the results.

Sascha Wildner’s removed the meteor(4) code because it apparently no longer builds, and it’s unlikely anyone uses an actual video board that requires this driver, at this point.  If you do, speak up.

Do you have a Western Digital model 1021 external disk drive?  Matthias Rampke does, and he found he had to make some USB quirk entries to get it to work reliably.