It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.
Some newer laptops have Intel integrated video chipsets that require GEM/KMS to work well; they are supported by the vesa driver in X, but performance isn’t great. Johannes Hofmann found this out the hard way. GEM/KMS support is on the way for various BSDs, but it’s not here yet. Just be aware of this if shopping for a new laptop in the next little while…
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.
If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.
Tim Bisson has posted a new batch of patches putting TRIM support into DragonFly. He has a graph in there too!
If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.
It sounds like I’m about to mention something pirate-themed, doesn’t it? Brendan Kosowski needs the rum(4) driver, for (I think) Ralink RT2501USB and RT2601USB wireless. He’s willing to offer a bounty of $100 to anyone who can get it working before the next DragonFly release. Work on it if you can port, or add money if you can use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau continues his relentless network feature improvement/porting: this time, adding the ability for DragonFly to recognize more varieties of Broadcom hardware.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot more changes to the msk(4) driver for Marvell Ethernet chipsets. I link to this commit adding support for Yukon Supreme cards, but there’s a great deal of work from him, recently added.
Sascha Wildner has committed version 3.981 of the mfi(4) driver, for a variety of LSI MegaRAID SAS 92XX devices. Read the commit message for details on the model numbers.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for a wider range of Marvell network interfaces; specifically the chips on board, not just card models. If you’ve got the right chips but they aren’t working for you, you know what to do.
17 different ISA device drivers have been removed by Sascha Wildner. The commit message has device descriptions. This may mean you need to change your kernel configuration file on the next buildkernel, since some of them were in the GENERIC kernel. If you need any of them, speak up. (I don’t think I’ve ever used any of them. Oh darn.)
Thanks to Michael Neumann, there’s more supported Broadcom network card chipsets. There’s some wierdness in setup, though, so look at his commit message.
Tim Bisson has another status report on supporting TRIM in DragonFly. It supports UFS and Hammer slices, and trimming swap too. I’m not sure what else could be done; that sounds pretty complete to me… In any case, if you have a SSD, his code is available to try right now.
If you happen to use a LG P-500 smartphone to get online via USB, as ‘Romick’ does, he’s got a patch that makes that device work under DragonFly. (Sorry, the original users@ email seems to have gone missing.)
Francois Tigeot has repeated his benchmarking, this time changing out the CPU instead of the operating system. There’s still more graphs, yay!
Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has a firmware update for bce(4) (Broadcom NetXtreme II) cards. He’s been doing a lot more incidental network hardware updates I haven’t linked; thanks, Sephe!