Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert bought a new laptop, and wants to throttle the speed to reduce heat and power usage. He’s updated some of DragonFly’s est support from NetBSD’s est, the ‘Enhanced Speed Step‘ driver, which does just that. (These patches are not yet in the DragonFly src tree.) If you’re interested, don’t forget estd.
Sepherosa Ziehau, an already-prolific committer, has now committed a large quantity of updates: a sync of USB support from FreeBSD, along with the ural(4) (wireless CardBus) and rum(4) (wireless 802.11 over USB) drivers originally from OpenBSD.
Thomas Spanjaard’s ‘nata’ system now has a features description, plus how to patch and install, for those feeling adventurous.
If you happen to run out of bpfx devices, Joerg Sonnenberger has an easy solution: MAKEDEV more.
Thomas Spanjaard committed his new version (from FreeBSD, avoiding GEOM) of the ata architecture (nata). It can be compiled with this patch, though it’s not ready for use yet.
Matthew Dillon has added some rough notes on how to port FreeBSD drivers over to DragonFly.
YONETANI Tomokazu has a patch to update to the latest version of ACPI. Please test, if you’re running bleeding edge code, and especially if you have a laptop.
Porting/coding machine Sepherosa Ziehau has added stge(4) support, which works with a number of gigabit ethernet cards.
The virtual kernel work Matthew Dillon is doing will help support architectures other than x86 someday, but the work isn’t complete yet.
I post this in part because I see people ask “Does DragonFly support the AMD64?” relatively often. There’s also other platforms that are becoming more common (ARM) or less (PowerPC) that would be nice to support.
Of course, AMD64 is a relative term, since it certainly works on AMD64 – you’re reading this web page served from such a system now.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a test version of the FreeBSD stge(4) driver ported to DragonFly, which supports a good number of gigabit networking devices. Please test and give feedback.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a slew of new/revised drivers for testing: ural(4), rum(4), re(4), and sk(4). They are, I think, all network drivers. They are not yet committed, so please test if you have the right hardware.
Matthew Dillon wrote up a short bit on SMP hardware support, and how it needs to improve. Aso, as part of virtual kernel support, he committed the potential future ability to compile kernels on non-native architectures, i.e. cross-compilation, which can be handy.
Matthew Dillon has reorganized the /usr/src/sys/ topology. Kernel config files will still work as before, though they’ve moved, for different architectures, once those architectures are actually supported. Changes are already in.
Sepherosa Ziehau has improved transmission speed for 802.11x networking under adverse conditions. In other words, faster wireless. See the post for the technical terminology.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s port of FreeBSD-6’s sound infrastructure (including the HDA driver) is available. See his post for more details. It’s an easy install, requiring a simple patch and kernel or module build.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has brought over FreeBSD’s high definition audio support, making it possible to get sound from ICH8 chipsets, for instance. It’s not yet committed; contact corecode if you want to try it out.
(No mailing list post yet; he announced this on the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has created a framework for controlling transmission rates, for wireless.
A question about multiple sound sources playing leads to this solution, which may require manual sound device assignment, though it’s not that bad. Better solutions are possible.