Category: Device support

Hasso Tepper has committed Sascha Wildner’s port of FreeBSD’s devinfo(3) and devinfo(8), for “userspace access to the internal device hierarchy”.  Hasso also updated acpi_battery(4), for battery monitoring.

He’s also ported devd(8) from FreeBSD, with an inital patch for testing.

Mitja Horvat purchased an Intel D945GCLF motherboard, which worked fine with DragonFly except for some minor issues with hardware checksumming on the Realtek 8102EL network card.   He supplied a patch to fix this, which was committed.  Edward O’Callaghan chimed in with some history of why this particular card was problematic in DragonFly and other operating systems.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ids for the JMicron JMC250 and JMC260, both PCIe Ethernet chipsets.  Strangely, the lower model number is gigabit, while the higher number is 100Mbit, if I read my searching correctly.

Hasso Tepper has supplied a patch to sysutils/pciutils that lets it compile on DragonFly; this means you can check the state of your devices and see if they are actually powered down.

Hasso Tepper has another power patch; this one to turn off PCI devices when the corresponding module is unloaded.  This can make laptops cooler by turning off the sound or network, for instance.  It has been commited, though you need to tweak a sysctl to enable it.

Hasso Tepper has updated coretemp(4) to read from all cores, and has a test port of FreeBSD’s acpi_cpu code, which can reduce power usage and heat.

A recent commit from Matthew Dillon enables use of at least a terabyte of swap space.  Is there anyone who can actually use that much yet?  Swap is traditionally 2x available memory, so that would make for 500 gigabytes of RAM.  I don’t think that’s even workable, though you’d be able to build up a heck of a MFS.

Steve O’Hara-Smith found that DVD playback didn’t work unless compiling with gcc34.  Matthew Dillon’s implemented a possible fix.

Gergo Szakal noticed that there is now ath9k, an official open source driver for Atheros 802.11n wireless chipsets. (‘Sunnz’ pointed out it’s still not as open as people would like.)  There is an existing community-built ath(4) driver.

Edit: Gergo Szakal pointed out ath(4) is 802.11b/g and ath9k is 802.11n, so it’s not a direct overlap.  Thanks, Gergo.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for JMicron Gigabit/Fast Ethernet chipsets, apparently with the support of Ethanat JMicron and Pyun YongHyeon of FreeBSD.

Pedro F. Giffuni pointed out something interesting: a project to bring LVM to NetBSD.  We could use this too.

Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch for anyone with an ICH9 chipset-using motherboard.  Give it a try.

Michael Neumann has volunteered himself for adding USB4BSD into DragonFly after the 2.0 release.  (That release is slated for mid-July, by the way.)

A recent commit by Michael Neumann makes qemu work, and also the “HP Compaq” (They’re using both names now?) laptop model 6710b. This apparently was a USB issue.

Sepherosa Ziehau has a new networking patch that gives a 250Kpps performance boost under certain conditions. He’s looking for more hardware testers before next weekend, so if you have a network card on his list, give his patch a try.

Samuel J. Greear asked about HAMMER and if it could be optimized for handling the somewhat-more-common-these-days Solid State Disk. Matthew Dillon responded, and some discussion ensued. (I’m linking to the posts because they’ve got the details.

The recent release of the RadeonHD 1.2 driver lists DragonFly support as a new feature, among other changes. Can someone test and confirm? (found via Google Alerts)

Cristi Magherusan has contributed a patch (which was quickly committed) adding est(4) support for the Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU.

This was mentioned before, but now it’s official: ipw(4) is gone, superseded by iwl(4).

The relentless Sepherosa Ziehau has written a new iwl(4) driver for Intel’s 2100BG wireless chipset.  As he warns, please drop ipw(4) and switch to this more capable driver.