Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for various power states on AMD Phenom and Turion-series processors. He has some specific notes that mention there’s more processor family support on the way. Good news for anyone with an AMD-based laptop.
Huawei modems, often available as USB attachments, have been problematic on DragonFly. However, it looks like it’s fixed. (I dont have one to test.) There’s a lot of names involved, so I’ll just point to the commit message.
Matthew Dillon has put together some new test machines, in preparation for porting the OpenBSD AHCI driver to DragonFly. Check his message if you are thinking about building a new system, as they appear to work well.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit changing how ioapic works may help anyone who has previously had trouble compiling a multiprocessor kernel with IO_APIC enabled. Try it, if that applies to you.
Also, Jordan Gordeev has a potential fix for anyone who has had a failed boot with a ‘BTX Halted’ message; you will have to retrieve it from his Git repo.
Hasso Tepper has added the open source HAL code for ath(4) (old man page), as suggested by Alexander Polakov. I’m not sure if this is related to Dmitry Komissaroff’s work.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
Naoya Sugioka has a Qemu patch to make a cloned tap(4) device work; feedback is desired, and Sepherosa Ziehau has already supplied some.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ability to use High Precision Event Timers (HPET) in DragonFly, based on FreeBSD code. It’s experimental, and he has instructions on how to find if your hardware supports it. It’s apparently a much faster timer than what is used with ACPI, though I do not have details on how that translates into real-world performance.
Naoya Sugioka has the latest version of his kqemu patch; it fixes some issues noted by Johannes Hofman. It may end up in the base system.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added ‘ifpoll’, a feature similar to polling(4). It has to be enabled via a kernel option and so far is only enabled for emx(4); read his commit message for more details.
Sascha Wildner’s added the cxm(4) driver, which supports Hauppauge PVR-250/350 video capture cards. Hasso Tepper kindly donated the hardware for testing.
I’ll note here that I have a Hauppauge TV card (848 chipset, I think) that’s possibly the oldest continuously functioning computer equipment I own; I’ve been using it for close to a decade without a single problem. I have nothing else that has reached the benchmark.
Dmitry Komissaroff has posted a port of wlan, ath_hal and if_ath from FreeBSD. It’s not finished because he lacks the hardware. If you’ve got the hardware, the inclination, or both, please assist.
If you’re using growisofs (or K3b) to burn your DVDs and having some trouble, here’s some tips that may get it working.
Big news: Sepherosa Ziehau has managed to remove the Big Giant Lock from the ip and bridge forwarding path. This includes ipfw, though not yet pf. It is in fact possible to make the whole TCP/UDP code path BGL-free. Sepeherosa helpfully posted some benchmarks to show just how significant the improvements can be.
The iwi(4) firmware has been updated, and there’s an announcement that tells you where to find it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a preference for the emx(4) driver over em(4). This means that loading the emx module or adding the emx device to your kernel config will may turn your em devices into emx. This isn’t dangerous; just a note to keep it from being a surprise.
Edit: Thanks, Sascha Wildner, for pointing out details on which chipsets are affected.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated em(4) to version 6.9.6, with some interesting improvements. It does possible require loading a module now. He also has more patches to test.
Do you use em(4)? Sepherosa Ziehau has an improved version for testing. What’s changed? Dunno.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to fix problems with memory alignment when doing tasks like burning optical media. Try it if you’ve had this problem, or wait, as it will probably be committed soon.
Dmitry Komissaroffis doing a very useful thing and producing code to support more ACPI stuff – specifically, HPET timers, the mysterious Smart Battery, and Asus systems.