Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot of commits to increase packet-per-second rates without increasing CPU usage. He’s published a sort of progress report/benchmark to show current performance levels. It sounds like he’s expecting even better performance in the future, though I’m not sure how much more he could push out of it, since the bulk performance appears to be close to the rated capacity of the copper…
Sascha Wildner recently brought in support from FreeBSD for HighPoint’s RocketRAID 4520 and 4522 SAS/SATA RAID cards. It’s in the hptiop(4) driver.
Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:
smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006" smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. " smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "
This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.
Sepherosa Ziehau is switching a number of network cards over to use ifpoll, which means they will have capabilities similar to MSI-X, even if the network card doesn’t support it. My suspicion is that it will make these cards perform better in busy situation where they would otherwise get bogged down… but that’s based on hunch rather than empirical testing. As Sepherosa Ziehau pointed out, it certainly can’t hurt.
November’s PDF issue of BSD Magazine is out, with a number of articles including a hardware review of the Netgear Universal Wifi Adapter. We need more BSD-centric device testing.
Sascha Wildner has committed Markus Pfeiffer’s port of USB4BSD to DragonFly. USB network, input , audio, and storage devices (including xhci/USB3 items) may work, though there’s no guarantee for each driver. This is added but not on by default, so see the first link for instructions on how to rebuild your kernel to use it. This will be in (but not default) the DragonFly 3.2 release.
(This is shaping up to be a much bigger release than I anticipated!)
Sascha Wildner’s added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.
Smartmontools will catch impending disk failures about 2/3 of the time, so it’s useful to run it and interpret the results. The results can be somewhat complex, though. However, it can be useful to look at other people talking about the output and glean knowledge from the context.
If you are using an Intel 10G Ethernet card with a 82598GB chipset, you’re using ixgbe(4). You may want to set the net.inet.tcp.sosend_agglim sysctl to a value over 12 in certain circumstances, as described by Francois Tigeot.
Much of this new document has been around in other forms for a while, but now, there’s a brief guide on porting drivers to DragonFly in the source tree.
Because here’s some recommendations on good models, and here’s a way to check SSD health. Seriously, they’re great.
If you have a LSI RAID card, meaning you are using the mfi(4) driver, Sascha Wildner has added /proc/devices to linprocfs, so that LSI’s MegaCLI configuration utility will run.
Sascha Wildner has pushed smart battery support, based on a patch from Dmitry Komissaroff and FreeBSD. He asks people to try it out. It apparently provides for more accurate battery charge level readings?
I noticed that this recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau is a bug fix for jme(4). The commit thanks a JMicron employee for help. It’s always appreciated when a vendor is helpful to an open-source project for hardware support. It’s also something you should consider the next time you are shopping for computer parts.
Francois Tigeot has updated the ixgbe(4) driver, and Sepherosa Ziehau has added TSO support for bce(4) and additional bge(4) related chips, mostly from the FreeBSD drivers.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI support and cleaned up the alc(4) driver. If you’re using a network card with the Atheros AR8131 or AR8132 chipsets, you should see an improvement.
Sascha Wildner has ported over more RocketRaid support, in the form of PCI IDs for various 4xxx and 3xxx series cards for hptiop(4), and a hpt27xx(4) driver that supports even more hardware.
Pierre Abbat is curious about using Hammer on an SSD. The discussion that came from that has some useful points, including notes that a straightforward SSD as disk works for most anything with Hammer other than very intensive database use, due to the history retention. If space is an issue, swapcache on the SSD and attaching a normal HDD is a fine alternative. A SSD with Hammer can leave some features off, though I’d argue that dedup is totally worth is. Also, SSD speed is directly correlated with size.
Sascha Wildner’s added support (from FreeBSD) for the HighPoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx and 25xx, via the hptrr(4) driver.