DragonFly BSD Digest » Device support

Odd DVD drive issue

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:16:44 +0000

Edward Berger found that using a LG/Hitachi DVD drive kept him from successfully booting a DragonFly install CD. Using other manufacturers worked out fine. What causes the problem? I don’t know, but it’s worth mentioning it out loud in case someone else gets bit by it.

Setting up a DragonFly wireless access point

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:33:22 +0000

What if you have a DragonFly system that you want to use for an wireless access point? Andrey N. Oktyabrski did, and he helpfully listed his solution.

Things that have been updated

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:27:38 +0000

I need to catch up on some older stuff, so here is a longer list of recent updates: libarchive to 3.0.2, xz to 5.0.3, mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) (LSI MegaRAID driver) updated, ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 AHCI devices (on motherboards I assume) updated, and the PHY ID for the Atheros F1 added. Thanks to everyone who did the work! I bet I missed something.

Better MSI support

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:42:16 +0000

That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts. MSI is what deals with all that traffic. High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance. Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.

There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.

New ECC device

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:56:01 +0000

Sepherosa Ziehau has ~~added~~ updated the ‘ecc’ device, for Intel E3-1200 series systems. What’s it do? It will report on memory errors, and potentially fix them.

You should have ECC memory in your server already. If not, you oughta.

Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, ecc(4) already existed, but didn’t support Intel controllers. Also, the Xeon X3400 series is supported now too.

Remember rcrun?

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:44:05 +0000

I think a lot of people don’t realize rcrun exists, and run files in /etc/rc.d directly. If you’re one of those people, read the rcrun(8) manpage. Then, notice that Sascha Wildner has extended rcrun to work with the etc/rc.d in /usr/local and /usr/pkg too.

Video and USB fix

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:38:38 +0000

Matthew Dillon has written a contiguous memory mapper, which is designed to fix problems with video cards and USB drives that need a big chunk of memory to keep. This can affect booting or later on, when disconnecting/reconnecting a USB drive. If this still doesn’t fix the problem for you, try adjusting the sysctl ‘vm.dma_reserved’ to something bigger, like 64M. It defaults to 16M.

(Normal mailarchive isn’t updating because of an ongoing upgrade to crater.dragonflybsd.org – sorry!)

Do you have a Geode? Well, good news!

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:38:56 +0000

John Marino added tuning support within GCC 4.4 for the Geode CPU. Waaaay back when, these were x86 -compatible Cyrix chips. Nowadays I think they are most common in single-board computers.

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/30

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:53:31 +0000

It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy! Keep going, sky!

Richard Stallman’s requirements when giving talks/lectures. (via) I read this not unreasonable but long list and thought about it. Every requirement on there probably has an experience/story behind it… (“If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad.” – so this)
Continuing the famous computer people trend of dying, John McCarthy died. He invented LISP (((insert parentheses joke here))) among other things, and wrote this story. (also via)
I mentioned issues over the time zone database previously, but there’s a new home, and we’re still getting updates in DragonFly.
And, it’s Dennis Ritchie Day. (via) That linked article does a good job of describing just how universal his influence has been.
64-bit ARM chips. (design PDF) This is just the announcement, but I bet these will be a good porting target in the next year or two if these designs wander out into the general market. (via many places)
I’ve linked to similar deals before, but this one’s quite cheap: the Power Squid power strip sold as surplus. I find the design and name both great.
Speaking of names, “I think Dragonfly is the coolest, cuz of the name.“
I like this article on web advertising just because it has blocked-out screenshots that show exactly how much space gets used up by ads.

Unrelated link of the week: Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. Most of the jokes revolve around games you may or may not know, with the occasional realistic experience that I’ve had myself.

Got an r600-based video card?

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:53:56 +0000

That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name. Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year. Most newer Radeons should work (?).

MMC/SD cards now automatically supported

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:34:49 +0000

I did not realize this, but MMC/SD cards are not supported in the default DragonFly kernel. Or at least, they weren’t until now. (also committed to 2.12)

Update: PCI-based MMC/SD readers, specifically. USB ones were already recognized as umass devices.

Per-CPU hardware resources

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 02:54:19 +0000

It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.

GEM/KMS warning

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:19:48 +0000

Some newer laptops have Intel integrated video chipsets that require GEM/KMS to work well; they are supported by the vesa driver in X, but performance isn’t great. Johannes Hofmann found this out the hard way. GEM/KMS support is on the way for various BSDs, but it’s not here yet. Just be aware of this if shopping for a new laptop in the next little while…

TRIM arrives for DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:42:31 +0000

Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.

Update for ndis(4)

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:36:41 +0000

Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.

safe(4) added

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 01:20:34 +0000

Sascha Wildner has added safe(4), which will help if you have a SafeNet chip on your crypto accelerator card. Untested, so you know what to do if you have this hardware.

Try x86_64 again

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:25:14 +0000

If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.

New patches for TRIM support

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 23:35:21 +0000

Tim Bisson has posted a new batch of patches putting TRIM support into DragonFly. He has a graph in there too!

New HighPoint RocketRAID support

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:38:46 +0000

If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.

A bounty for rum(4)

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 23:18:44 +0000

It sounds like I’m about to mention something pirate-themed, doesn’t it? Brendan Kosowski needs the rum(4) driver, for (I think) Ralink RT2501USB and RT2601USB wireless. He’s willing to offer a bounty of $100 to anyone who can get it working before the next DragonFly release. Work on it if you can port, or add money if you can use it.