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.

Sepherosa Ziehau’s added support for the Broadcom 5906/5906M chipset(s?) to the bge(4) driver.

Hardware checksum support has been added to the re(4) (RealTek) driver by Sepherosa Ziehau, for the 8102E, 8102EL, 8168C, 8168CP and 8168D chipsets.  He’s been committing a lot of other work too - this was just the easiest to summarize.

Do you have a Realtek 8101E card?  Are you running bleeding edge DragonFly?  If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test out his recent changes.

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.