If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.
Alexander Polakov is putting together an update for the complex beast that is ACPI, but he has two questions that need an answer, about locking and APICs. Please help if you know something about it, as an up-to-date ACPI helps everyone.
With some recent reports of people running DragonFly on Eee 900 and Acer Aspire netbook models, here’s a link to a recent O’Reilly column that links to a whole bunch of different netbook vendors. If you have some spare cash and an urge for a netbook, try DragonFly on one and report back…
Johannes Hofmann has taken over estd, a “frequency scaling daemon for NetBSD and DragonFly”. The newest release brings multicore support on DragonFly.
Do you have an Acer Aspire One D150 and you want DragonFly to work on it? Alexander Polakov has one something similar, and he got it to boot. Sound and wireless networking works too.
Sdävtaker has reported success booting DragonFly on a Clevo TN120R, which is almost more of a tablet/nettop than a laptop.
Alex Hornung has added support for a bunch of hardware to enable a Soekris 5501 to run DragonFly. We now have a watchdog and gpio framework as a side effect.
It’s been mentioned before, but it’s moved: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA graphics driver that works on DragonFly.
Do you have a recent ASUS system? Constantine Murenin has a patch for you, for hardware monitoring.
If you’re setting up a DragonFly workstation, and you want to use two monitors, here are some suggestions on what video card to use.
If you were bit by the bug where the 64-bit version of DragonFly wouldn’t boot from CD/DVD on your system, Matthew Dillon has some test images of DragonFly 2.4 for testing. Please use and report if it was successful.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.4 on amd64, you may have noticed trouble with USB drives or separate issues with ACPI. Both seem to be fixed by the same commit. It’s been merged to the 2.4 branch, so updating on that branch will get the fixes without moving to 2.5.
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
If you’re running 10G Ethernet, Matthew Dillon’s turned on the inflight limiter by default, which should help keep your system from being overwhelmed if it’s not handling the greater volume of packets. If you’re not running 10G Ethernet, this shouldn’t affect you. If only we all could be so lucky.
Alex Hornung has added support for ATA command passthrough. As a pleasant side effect, smartmontools works with AHCI again.
Are you running DragonFly on a laptop system? Please mention the brand and model number on the appropriate page on the DragonFly website. (Also: Laptop tips and tricks, thanks to Alexander Polakov)
There’s some new HP server hardware out there, and Hasso Tepper found some problems (and lists some potential solutions) with installing DragonFly, mostly centered around keyboard handling. It sounds like NetBSD’s keyboard mux may solve it for us, if someone’s willing to add it…
Alex Hornung has posted a summary of what Unix98 pty devices are, and how they are supported under DevFS. If something screwy happens, there’s even a debug option to turn on.
The 2.4 release will attach disk drives by serial number. Matthew Dillon’s written up a quick HOWTO that describes how to use it. The interesting effect, as he notes, is that a drive can be attached in almost any way – a firewire enclosure, directly to the motherboard, through a card, etc. – and the machine will still happily boot without any changes needed.