If you have a em(4)/emx(4) card, AKA ‘Intel(R) PRO/1000’, Michael Neumann has an update for you. It’s from Intel’s 7.2.4 release of the code. This is to support the new I218 cards. Initial reports are positive.
Matthew Dillon brought in some wireless networking updates – the ath(4), iwn(4), and wpi(4) drivers are updated. There’s porting notes if you need them, too. In related news, rum(4) is also improved. The updates apparently benefited DragonFly and FreeBSD at the same time.
Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 drivers in DragonFly (remember the call for testing) to match what’s in Linux 3.10, which means you should get excellent accelerated video performance on most any recent Intel video chipset, on DragonFly.
If you have very recent alc(4) hardware, it may be supported now. If you are booting over NFS, it may be faster now. These changes are unrelated other than both being recent – NFS is improved for any chipset.
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
- Running DragonFly-master
- Using a i915 chipset
- (optional) On a chipset that is not Haswell or Ivy Bridge
… He could use your testing and feedback.
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner porting from FreeBSD, mixer(8) now remembers state. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.
Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.
Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.
You can now control your backlight settings through sysctl and enjoy greater video support/stability – as long as you are using a i915 video chipset on DragonFly.
From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.
I had to type it that way because it rhymes. Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer. What’s it do? It’s a machine management standard.
If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.
Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.