A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s added TSO support (that’s TCP Segmentation Offloading”, or “Large Segment Offload” going by Wikipedia) within IPv4 on DragonFly, pushing segmentation work from the CPU to the network card. There’s also some DragonFly-specific improvements.
There’s been a lot of commits from him lately focused around network card improvements; they haven’t been easily summarizable, but it’s worth watching if you are interested in high-bandwidth usage and the hardware to support it.
The ciss(4) device, if you don’t know offhand, is for a variety of SCSI-3 adapters – mostly ones labeled “HP Smart Array”. Sascha Wildner has imported a large number of driver updates from FreeBSD.
Not all flavors of Atom CPU support frequency scaling, as Sven Gaerner found out. This means more heat and more power usage. There’s further details scattered through the thread, but Sascha Wildner found what seems to be the definitive answer of which variants do and do not.
Thanks to David Christensen of Broadcom, Sepherosa Ziehau was able to add BCM5718 and BCM57785 support in the new bnx(4) driver.
From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.
Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?
New company Gainframe is offering up OpenBSD dmesg/pcidump/usbdevs output for every system they build. I was originally going to link to this in a Lazy Reading entry, but then I realized it’s also a new company specializing in BSD-compatible hardware. Read the interview; I met Michael Dexter at the last NYCBSDCon and he is a decent guy.
We need more of this sort of specifically targeted work. Sites that rely on crowd-sourced contribution are good, but it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and you need a very large crowd for it to work.
Francois Tigeot has added the Intel PRO/10GbE driver from FreeBSD, or ixgbe(4). A couple features are turned off, for now.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added igb(4) version 2.2.3 direct from Intel, for support of their 82575 and 82576 Ethernet controller chips. It now shares a hardware abstraction layer with the em(4) driver, too.
If you are having USB issues on boot with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau’s sysctl suggestions may help you.
BSDTalk 213 is out, with 14 minutes of conversation with Paul Schenkeveld about EuroBSDCon. EuroBSDCon is happening in late October, in Poland. Also, the BSDTalk website has a new layout.
Venkatesh Srinivas posted an explanation of the virtio update he’s working on. I linked to the work before, but not his explanation, which goes into the ‘vm_balloon’ device.
Sascha Wildner’s posted an update to the acpi_asus(4) module, so it’s worth updating if you have an appropriate Asus machine and are running DragonFly-current.
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on integration of Tim Bisson’s virtio-bhyve drivers into DragonFly. This would make throughput better in KVM/Qemu. His bug ticket has some questions that could use answers.
Francois Tigeot has added ichwd(4), a driver for the watchdog function on some Intel ICH motherboard chipsets. Sascha Wildner has also made the kernel option for it on by default. (Look for /dev/wdog.)
Update: Francois Tigeot sent a link to an excellent page explaining hardware watchdogs.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.