Category: Device support

Sepherosa Ziehau has ported nfe(4), support for NVIDIA PCI ethernet adapters, from OpenBSD, with some changes and improvements.

A question about multiple sound sources playing leads to this solution, which may require manual sound device assignment, though it’s not that bad.  Better solutions are possible.

The planned outage of dragonflybsd.org yesterday took longer than planned because two systems didn’t want to boot; both used a Asus A8N SLI motherboard.  Apparently, a lot of people have reported issues with this model.

Sepherosa Ziehau has updated em(4) (That’s an Intel networking chipset) support to version 6.1.4, the latest available from intel.

In a larger conversation about using CF cards in place of normal hard drives, Oliver Fromme mentioned that he’s been building a small computer into the case of a Sony CD player, and has pictures to prove it.  (and yes, it could run DragonFly.)

Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch that updates the em(4) driver (that’s a network chipset, if it’s unfamiliar) to the latest version from Intel’s website. Give it a try if you’ve got the hardware.  It’ll be in the tree in two weeks.

Sepherosa Ziehau has two patches for people to try: miibus(4) for network PHY chips and nfe(4), for NVIDIA ethernet controllers.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has more AMD64 patches for testing, and Joerg Sonnenberger has potential support for Tekram controllers (trm(4))

If you’re thinking about buying a wireless card to use with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau recommends cards supported by the ath(4), ral(4) and acx(4) drivers.  No, I’m not sure which those are.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ath(4) driver, for many models of wireless card, to DragonFly.

estd (Enhanced Speed Step Daemon), a program for controlling the speed (and therefore heat generation and power usage) of a Pentium M, now supports DragonFly.

Bill Marquette has ported the lnc driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly (link forthcoming), which is in itself a port of the le driver from NetBSD.  Pathces are available to try it yourself, or it should be added to DragonFly soon.

YONETANI Tomokazu has added an EST (enhanced speedstep) driver, which allows certain CPUs to be reduced in speed to control battery usage and heat production. See his notes, and some tips on usage from Johannes Hofmann.

Sepherosa Ziehau has improved support for the acx networking chipset, adding WPA2 support, though not yet for the acx100.

Sepherosa Ziehau has his version of the rtw(4) driver available for testing.  This is taken fromt he NetBSD driver, and is used in newer wireless cards.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for a number of network drivers, including vge(4) and ral(4).

Johannes Hofmann has made available a “crude” port of EST, a utility for Pentium M speed control, for DragonFly.

Sepherosa Ziehau has an experimental conversion of 802.11 support found in FreeBSD 6
.

Thomas Schlesinger has written a howto on the wiki for setting up a ipw2200 network adapter.

Thomas Schlesinger is trying to get his ipw2200 wireless connection to work. The pkgsrc package sysutils/iwi_firmware will do it, though it’s not packaged as a binary, so there’s some trickery to install.