Category: Device support

I didn’t read far enough ahead in my backlog, if that makes sense.  i915 has another update, to 20160808.

If you’ve got a pcm audio device – and you probably do – and a headphone jack – ditto – this thread may help you find the right sysctl to enable it on DragonFly.

Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 driver to 20160725.  What does that mean for users?  I don’t know; there isn’t a changelog.  But higher version numbers are always more fun!

If you post about a problem and later solve it, you will help many people in the future if you summarize the problem and (very important) the fix.  In this case, Nelson H. F. Beebe installing DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on his Dell Precision 7920 workstation.

Just like it’s always DNS, if you have to ask what your sound device is… it’s probably hda.  That’s been the answer I think I’ve seen every time for maybe a decade?

Thanks to Pierre-Alain Toret, we know 2008 Macbooks and Samsung NP370R5E-A04FR laptop models support Dragonfly.  If you have DragonFly running on a model not mentioned, please add it.

There’s a refresh of the iwm(4) driver in DragonFly, which will apparently help most for iwm-9000 and iwm-9260 owners.

I don’t know which product names correspond with those chipsets, but you may be able to tell who you are.  Interesting note: original driver via OpenBSD, then synced from FreeBSD version.  Cross-pollination!

i915 DRM has been updated to match the Linux 4.8.17 version, in DragonFly.  It includes some OpenBSD work too, interestingly.

This is minor, but I’ll mention it because it might bite you someday: if you are using powerd to minimize CPU power usage, and also trying to push a high data rate through your serial port, you might drop characters.  It’s mentioned in the powerd(8) man page, which has an entertaining bugs section.

If you have an Elantech touchpad IC type 15 on your laptop (and you do if it’s a ThinkPad L480 or Huawei Magicbook), it’s now supported in DragonFly.  Thanks to K Staring for the fix.

The i915(4) driver now supports some newer models of Intel GPU, thanks to Francois Tigeot.

If you have newer AMD hardware, it’s a little better supported now.

Francois Tigeot has made a number of updates to the ttm and radeon code, bringing it line with the Linux 4.9 kernel version.  If you have a radeon(4)-using video card, you may find this useful.

Also, evergreeen and radeonsi chipset users have acceleration disabled.  You may not notice depending on your workload.

As an example of how old design decisions have lasting effects, the POSIX standard still calls for terminal output to accommodate mechanical delay, as noted in this DragonFly commit – i.e. if output was still a line printer instead of a glass TTY, or, as it is 99.9% of the time today, xterm or puTTY or etc. etc.

After 56k, I stopped paying attention, but apparently there’s stated baud rates of 460,800 and 921,600.  And your DragonFly terminal can handle them, too.

Do you have a Coffee Lake Intel CPU?  Cause corepower(4) in DragonFly now supports it.

The radeon driver support on DragonFly now matches Linux 4.7.10.  Update and test, especially if you have one of the chipsets mentioned.