A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away. Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.
(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)
Do you have a Western Digital model 1021 external disk drive? Matthias Rampke does, and he found he had to make some USB quirk entries to get it to work reliably.
I’m going to just title these “Lazy Reading” – I end up with too much diverse information/links to fit within the title.
Tim Bisson posted new network tests contrasting the virtio driver against emulated re(4) in virtual environments. Previously, the virtio driver performed worse, but a more developed test suite seems to deliver more positive results.
Sascha Wildner is continuing his huge driver-adding streak, this time with tws(4). It’s a port of the FreeBSD driver, for “LSI 3ware 9750 series SATA/SAS RAID controllers”. The commit message has a list of individual models, and further credits.
Sascha Wildner re-added burncd(8); it still works for some people. As Matthew Dillon pointed out, cdrecord is probably the better long-term bet.
Sascha Wildner continues the driver update streak, bringing in the updated FreeBSD version of the aac(4) driver. This adds support for 40+ Adaptec AdvancedRAID cards – the aac(4) man page has a very long list.
Tim Bisson put together support for the RealTek 8168E network card, under the re(4) driver. It’s in DragonFly now.
Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don’t know if there’s even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.
Sascha Wildner has continued his driver-adding run, bringing in mps(4). This supports various LSI Logic SAS controllers, taken from FreeBSD. Support isn’t complete or tested, but it’s enough to start with.
Tim Bisson posted a note on the progress he and Pratyush have made on a virtio driver for DragonFly, ported from NetBSD. This is for use in virtualized environments; his post links to graphs (yay!) that show the performance improvement over emulated IDE. His note also links to the code and documentation.
As Matthew Dillon works on supporting his new 48-core system, he’s written some notes on power usage and scheduling/drivers that may be worth a read.
Sepherosa Ziehau fixed a clock issue with the JMicron JMC250/JMC260 chipset, used with the jme(4) driver, and apparently JMicron helped out with hardware for testing this fix. So, thanks, Sephe, and thanks, JMicron! (buy their stuff)
Bleeding-edge DragonFly may suffer some instability issues; Matthew Dillon is making scheduler changes to accomodate larger numbers of CPUs. On the other hand: yay, better performance!
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
Matthew Dillon has made it possible to boot DragonFly on 24-CPU systems. Also, we’re currently limited to 32G of RAM. Oh, to have such limitations; I was considering myself lucky to have 4 CPUs.
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
