Sepherosa Ziehau has updated em(4) to version 6.9.6, with some interesting improvements. It does possible require loading a module now. He also has more patches to test.
Do you use em(4)? Sepherosa Ziehau has an improved version for testing. What’s changed? Dunno.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to fix problems with memory alignment when doing tasks like burning optical media. Try it if you’ve had this problem, or wait, as it will probably be committed soon.
Dmitry Komissaroffis doing a very useful thing and producing code to support more ACPI stuff – specifically, HPET timers, the mysterious Smart Battery, and Asus systems.
Hasso Tepper is looking for other people with experience and/or interest in porting FreeBSD’s mmc(4) support for SD cards greater than 2G in size. Contact him is that describes you.
Michael Neumann came up with an interesting script that creates a bootable DragonFly USB drive. This makes it possible to boot up and install on a netbook that lacks a normal CDROM, for instance.
Sascha Wildner posted a clarification: ISA and EISA support in any card will be dropped after the 2.2 release is out.
Are you using any ISA-based network cards? Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to remove support very soon after the 2.2 release; speak up if this is a problem. Or, spend a few dollars and buy a card made in the last 10 years.
Sepherosa Ziehau has also added age(4) support, a network chip common to Asus systems. Load the kernel module and report your results.
Michael Neumann reported success booting DragonFly on his Eee PC 1000H, though the wireless/wired network drivers don’t work yet.
Dmitry Komissaroff has a patch that will get DragonFly booting with ACPI on an Asus Eee 701, though just why hasn’t been figured out yet.
Update: new patch
If you have a ciss(4) SCSI-3 card in your computer, Sascha Wildner has a patch for you to try out.
Thanks to the efforts of Hasso Tepper, support for the FreeDesktop HAL (hardware abstraction layer) using the bleeding-edge versions of DragonFly and pkgsrc is available.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a experimental version of the NVIDIA FreeBSD driver changed for DragonFly; the code is available without any support so it’s not as simple as a download, unfortunately.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the Broadcom bge(4) network interface driver so that it apparently now goes as fast as possible; e.g. receiving at the full line rate of 1Gbps.
Hasso Tepper has made some fixes to SATA ATAPI code that fix some of the issues with SATA CD/DVD readers, though some issues remain. Please test if you’ve got the hardware to match.
The newest BSDTalk is about trying various BSDs (including DragonFly) on a EeePC 900A. Little netbooks are this close to being an acceptable price/performance combination for me…
Will Backman, the host, is going to be at MeetBSD, which is happening in 5 days…
I previously posted about Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz’s problem with the xorg driver for the ATI RS480 chipset. It turns out he went and figured out a workaround.
Do you have a Radeon card with a RS480 chipset? Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz noticed a problem when upgrading xorg; here’s his heads-up.
Hasso Tepper has posted a patch that brings DRM code in DragonFly to the very latest version, right out of the DRM repository. Give it a try; it adds support for a number of recent chipsets that may have only worked poorly before.