Apparently the recently committed support for Areca RAID cards came with some help directly from Areca, facilitated by Venkatesh Srinivas.  Perhaps next time you’re searching for a RAID card, consider Areca in light of the effort they are willing to contribute for an open-source project…

Sascha Wildner has brought in arcmsr(4), an Areca RAID controller driver.  Please try it if you have the right hardware.

Among other things, Joe Talbott has brought in support for the 6000 and 6050 series of iwn(4) wifi devices.

Sascha Wildner has pulled in a bunch of updates for twa(4), adding more devices for this SATA RAID device driver.  There’s a list of what’s supported now on the man page.

YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed.  Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.

And the torrent of new activity continues: Alexander Polakov has imported FreeBSD’s mptutil(8), good for managing LSI Fusion-MPT controllers.

In this recent note about the new wireless driver framework, Rui Paolo noted how to add a ath(4) device as wlan0 automatically.

Rui Paulo’s work on wireless drivers will be entering 2.7 very soon.  (2.6 is unaffected.)  This will cause problems if you are running acx(4), bwi(4), iwi(4), iwl(4), rtw(4), rum(4), or ural(4), until someone writes a driver that matches the new framework.  If you’re on 2.7 and you need these drivers working, hold off on updates for a bit…

David Shao is working on improving DragonFly’s DRM (kernel graphics drivers, not that other thing).  That’s a good project to start, and also Antonio Huete Jimenez is willing to test it.  We can always use more guinea pigs; if you want to contribute to DragonFly without writing code, testing someone’s dramatic changes is a big help.

Alex Hornung posted a followup about his I/O scheduler work, with some interesting ways to watch the state of your disk’s activity.

Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin posted his work on fan control, involving Winbond Super I/O Hardware Monitors.  He’s had a series of commits up to this point, and this message nicely sums up the work done, including the presentations for it at BSDCan last year and AsiaBSDCon this year. Even if you aren’t planning to adjust your system cooling, it’s a surprisingly in-depth writeup, with more details available.

Constantine A. Murenin’s been adding more support for various monitoring hardware; I want to link to it not just cause it’s news, but it’s nice to see how complete his coverage has been.

Newegg is running some specials: a 64G Kingston SSD for $140, a 256G (yikes!) Crucial SSD for $660, and a Sans Digital port multiplier for $110.  The SSDs are good for using swapcache(8), though 256G is probably overkill.  Doesn’t make me want it less, though…

The port multiplier’s SiI3726 chipset might be supported, or potentially supported, by the sili(4) driver.  Someone have $110 to spare to try this out?

As if Alex Horning wasn’t busy enough with his Linuxulator update, he’s also made it possible to have a vinum root volume in conjunction with using devfs.

Constantine A. Murenin has committed support for aps(4).  This supports various sensors for disk and mouse activity, and even acceleration sensors.

Matthew Dillon’s added support for IGD chipsets, found in various N450-based netbooks.  It was tested on a Gateway LT2104u, for instance.  I didn’t realize there still were Gateway computers.

For those of you wanting to try swapcache: Newegg is running a deal today: 30G OCZ SSD for $90.  That’s after a mail-in rebate, though.

The disklabel64 program will permanently be ‘disklabel’ from now on, with the original disklabel sticking around as disklabel32.   This is for a number of reasons, including 4k physical sector size in newer drives, which is still causing problems for other operating systems.

Matthew Dillon fixed a strange error on boot that had been plaguing some systems.  The problem appears to be some sort of timing issue related to SMP and to other factors as strange as which USB port was being used.  The commit message has more details.

Thanks to some work by Tim Darby, the SiI 3124 SATA controller is now supported.  This, like other SiI devices, should be able to handle hotplugging…

Jan Lentfer needs someone with cryptographic hardware that isn’t padlock (e.g. not VIA) to test his recent OpenSSL upgrade.  Do you have hardware that matches? Please help.

Jan Lentfer has added cryptodev support in openssl.  What does that mean?  It means that separate encryption hardware can be used to offload the computation needed to encrypt data for OpenSSL.  Look at the crypto(3) man page for details.

Newer disks are moving to 4KB sectors (more info), instead of the 512-byte sectors that have been in use for… decades?  There’s been some recent discussion on how to support this, for booting DragonFly.  It should otherwise work.

Alex Hornung pointed out that getting the Linux Test Project to work on DragonFly (using the linuxulator) would be a very helpful step in that same Linux emulation.  Running the LTP does not require programming skills, incidentally.

Alexander Polakov has a further update for his new ACPI code.  He now even provides a DragonFly ISO image and USB image so that a new system can be installed for testing.  There’s already one positive report.  It will probably go in this weekend.

If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.

Alexander Polakov is putting together an update for the complex beast that is ACPI, but he has two questions that need an answer, about locking and APICs.  Please help if you know something about it, as an up-to-date ACPI helps everyone.

With some recent reports of people running DragonFly on Eee 900 and Acer Aspire netbook models, here’s a link to a recent O’Reilly column that links to a whole bunch of different netbook vendors.  If you have some spare cash and an urge for a netbook, try DragonFly on one and report back…

Do you have an Acer Aspire One D150 and you want DragonFly to work on it?  Alexander Polakov has one something similar, and he got it to boot.  Sound and wireless networking works too.

Sdävtaker has reported success booting DragonFly on a Clevo TN120R, which is almost more of a tablet/nettop than a laptop.

It’s been mentioned before, but it’s moved: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA graphics driver that works on DragonFly.

Do you have a recent ASUS system?  Constantine Murenin has a patch for you, for hardware monitoring.

If you’re setting up a DragonFly workstation, and you want to use two monitors, here are some suggestions on what video card to use.

If you were bit by the bug where the 64-bit version of DragonFly wouldn’t boot from CD/DVD on your system, Matthew Dillon has some test images of DragonFly 2.4 for testing.  Please use and report if it was successful.

Alex Hornung has added support for ATA command passthrough.  As a pleasant side effect, smartmontools works with AHCI again.

Are you running DragonFly on a laptop system?  Please mention the brand and model number on the appropriate page on the DragonFly website. (Also: Laptop tips and tricks, thanks to Alexander Polakov)

There’s some new HP server hardware out there, and Hasso Tepper found some problems (and lists some potential solutions) with installing DragonFly, mostly centered around keyboard handling.  It sounds like NetBSD’s keyboard mux may solve it for us, if someone’s willing to add it…

The 2.4 release will attach disk drives by serial number.  Matthew Dillon’s written up a quick HOWTO that describes how to use it.  The interesting effect, as he notes, is that a drive can be attached in almost any way – a firewire enclosure, directly to the motherboard, through a card, etc. – and the machine will still happily boot without any changes needed.

There’s some more explanations of how disk serial number support is working from Matthew Dillon, plus a warning that a full kernel/world rebuild is needed because of these changes.

If I’m reading it right, serial number support, combined with a dynamic /dev, makes it possible to identify a disk by serial number, assign a name to it, and then refer to that disk directly by name in places like /etc/fstab.  Much, much easier than remembering /dev/ad0c or /dev/ad1a, and so on.

Preliminary serial number support for drive identification has been added to DragonFly, with /dev/serno listing the appropriate devices and numbers.

Dennis Melentyev was trying out AHCI support, and as part of that process, Matthew Dillon described the steps needed to deal with disk renaming issues that can come from a NATA -> AHCI switch.  This isn’t needed for most people right now, but I wanted to link to it just in case someone hits that moment of panic.

Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks.  This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.