Device support – Page 11 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2016/11/222016/11/22

EFI run-time ABI support in DragonFly

UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.

Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.

2016/11/152016/11/14

re(4) users, please test

There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.

2016/11/112016/11/11

Full-offload scan and what it means

Imre Vadasz is working on full-offload scan support for wlan, imported from FreeBSD. That doesn’t change much from a user point of view, other that (I assume) reducing load and power usage a tiny amount. I’m reinforcing something most people don’t think about: there’s tiny computers inside your computer with their own firmware and processors, that you don’t directly control.

2016/11/092016/11/08

nvme(4) added to the kernel

If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.

2016/11/072016/11/01

Braswell and DragonFly

If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.

2016/11/042016/11/01

Trackpad and Elantech support in DragonFly

One of my favorite things: when someone just appears out of nowhere and says, “I needed a change to my software so I did it and here it is to share”. Harald Brinkhof wandered into DragonFly and the first thing he did was update support for trackpads.

2016/11/012016/10/31

MMC/SDCard use now possible

If you have a memory card slot of some sort on your laptop, DragonFly can now reliably access it. Probably even boot from it, though I haven’t seen it happen.

2016/10/20

em(4), re(4), and network issues

If you are using em(4) or re(4) devices for networking, you may want to turn on polling. MSI may or may not help for re(4), along with switching to the emx(4) driver.

2016/10/10

iwm(4) and power management

It looks like I summarized iwm(4) updates too early, cause Imre Vadasz added an actual powersave option. I’d like to see someone with a power meter do some before-and-after testing.

2016/10/06

Recent iwm(4) updates

It’s been a quiet week, but there’s some activity: Imre Vadasz has been committing many improvements to iwm(4). They haven’t been standalone enough for me to build a post around, but the most recent enables a low-power scan mode.

2016/09/29

Synaptics improvements

If you had trouble getting your laptop’s touchpad to work under DragonFly, try again. (If you are running DragonFly-current)

2016/09/21

iwm(4) firmware updates, plus temperature?

For those running DragonFly 4.7, there’s new firmware for all iwm(4) devices. Also, you can get temperature readings off the iwm wireless device now, if I’m reading this correctly.

2016/09/192016/09/15

3D printing on DragonFly

3D printing on DragonFly with a Fabrikator? Yep, it works. (from jh32 on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

2016/09/162016/09/15

Laptop on fire? Use powerd!

Matthew Dillon has added powerd, a utility that will automatically step down processor speed based on reported temperature. The range is configurable, and there’s some other nice-to-have features. This will save your CPU from melting, and probably also your thighs from being burned.

2016/09/15

Hybrid graphics, switcheroo, and DragonFly

karu.pruun has been trying to get a Macbook’s hybrid graphics card to work in DragonFly. He’s been working on a gmux driver, but it needs a framework like Linux’s switcheroo. If this topic interests you, help him out.

2016/08/08

ACPICA and a program inside

Did you know that ACPICA has its own internal ‘coding language’, called AML? I did not, but it’s in DragonFly now in any case. Every program eventually grows big enough to read email, and every specification eventually includes its own programming segment.

2016/07/22

NVMe and IOPS

Matthew Dillon added NVMe support recently, and he also made some changes to DragonFly’s I/O system. His test system was able to reach over a million IOPS. That’s bananas!

2016/07/20

Looking at your battery

If you want to check battery life, ‘sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life’ may help, as Sepherosa Ziehau points out. I’ve always used ‘acpiconf -i 0‘, myself.

2016/07/19

UEFI install story

I like finding “This is how I did it” stories from people, as they are often really useful for anyone else trying to do the same “it”. Here’s Dave MacFarlane’s UEFI install story. (Note he’s still needing touchpad support.)

2016/07/13

UEFI booting and manual installation

karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?