/dev/dump

I was recently asked to provide some notes about GLDv2 to GLDv3 conversion for NIC drivers. Here's a rough draft of them. (This is cut-n-paste from mail I sent to an intern at Sun... I'm posting them here so the knowledge isn't lost.) It is really helpful if you don't try to implement 100% of the features of GLDv3 in the first pass. (Some of the existing GLDv3 drivers, such as rge, nge, have incorrectly provided stubs for some functions, so don't use those as references.) Specifically I would not attempt to implement mac_resource allocation (MC_RESOURCES, etc.) or multiaddress support. You really do need to implement VLAN full frame sizes for MTU if your hardware can do it. Almost all NICs can do this. Sometimes the code to do it isn't in any Solaris driver. My preferred reference for alternate code sources is the NetBSD tree, which has an OpenGrok server for their code at http://opengrok.netbsd.org/ Ask me if you have any question about V...

So I need to JumpStart a new system today... no problem, I'll just stick in a NIC and boot it with my etherboot PXE CDROM. No problem, right? Well, lets see, first I need a NIC that supports Solaris. Inventorying what I have in my spare hardware today: Netgear GA311, rev A1 (RealTek 8169S-32, unsupported variant of rge ) Netgear FA311, rev C1 (Nat-Semi DP83815D, unsupported) Netgear FA310TX, rev-D2 (Lite-On LC82C169, unsupported, see below) 3Com 3CR990 TX-97 (unsupported) D-Link 530TX rev A-1 ( dmfe , no x86 support) Zyxel gigE (Via GbE chip, uncertain) Linksys LNE100TX v4.1 (unsupported, yet, see below) Linksys NC100 (unsupported, yet, see below) Macronix MX98715AEC (unsupported, yet, see below) Unbranded RTL8139B (supported, rtls , nevada only) 3Com 3C900-TX (supported, elxl , for now) Well, at least I was able to find something . Of my 8 spare NICs, two of them have marginal support. (This is only the wired ethernet NICs. I have some WLAN devices as well.) I guess I have a ...

I recently decided that I wanted to create a zone with an exclusive IP instance, so that I could run IPsec (and specifically "punchin") in it. I have lots of NICs floating around, so I thought it would be trivial. Turns out that all my NICs were GLDv2, and that IP instances requires GLDv3. My solution? Conversion of mxfe (which were the cards I have in my system) to GLDv3. I figured it would be easier/faster than going out and buying a new Realtek card. And it would have been if not for one really annoying problem in mcopymsg() (see my previous post for that rant.) Anyway, mxfe is humming away nicely now as a GLDv3 NIC on my system. I even got VLANs working with full MTU frames. Yay. I filed PSARC 2007/291 today, if you're interested in it. I'll post the driver sources up somewhere shortly. (On another note, mxfe and afe are "suboptimal" drivers... they just blindly bcopy data, do nothing to reduce tx interrupts, and basically violate all the normal...

This entry could just as easily been titled "Why Bad Documentation is Worse Than No Documentation". I noticed that some functions from strsun.h are now part of the DDI. Great, I thought, I'll update my driver to use them as part of the general GLDv3 cleanup. One major surprise, which I spent about 5-6 hours figuring out tonight. mcopymsg(9f) has a side effect that isn't documented! Specifically, it does freemsg() on the buffer passed in. Don't believe me? Check the source ! The manual page says nothing about this. And reading logically from the name, you'd not think it would do this. The side effect should never have been designed in, in the first place. But if the man page referenced this side effect, I might , just might have caught this problem a couple of hours ago. In my particular case, it was causing hard hangs most of the time. Until I finally got a panic that pointed me into the root of the problem. (Yes, I probably should have set kmem_flags...

So this weekend I had to do a system reinstall. Thankfully I had all my data on a pair of sata drives in a ZFS raidz. But I had to totally reinstall my system with a new motherboard, new SATA controller, etc. I had to redo a bunch of things manually... NIS, passed, DHCP, etc. The one thing that I didn't have to worry about: ZFS. I just plugged my SATA drives in, and did "zpool import -f data" (my dataset was called "data", which I could have figured out by just doing "zfs import" without options.) That was it. One command only, and my raidz mirror was back in business, mounted in the right place, and even the right ZFS fileystems were NFS exported with the right options. Thank-you ZFS! ZFS developers, I owe you a round, or three. Let me know if you want want to collect. :-)

A few things that I love about OpenSolaris, but that Solaris 10 lacks: * Xorg default support for Intel GMA 950 * SATA ATAPI device support * WPA (coming in build 64) * NWAM (network auto-magic) * DMFE is GLDv3 I'm not sure which of these will be coming to a Solaris 10 update in the future, but I can tell you I was immensely pleased with my upgrade from Solaris 10 update 4 (on a Intel mobo, with a Core 2 Duo cpu) to Solaris Nevada b62. As part of the deal, I switched to a SATA DVD drive; my system is now entirely SATA (no legacy PATA ribbon cables in the box!) I'm sure there are lots of other useful features too, but at this point, I've put Nevada into "production" use at home, and I'm not looking back. (And yes, I realize b62 isn't the latest, but I didn't have a copy of snv_63, and the machine I was "reinstalling" ... thanks to an unexpected mobo replacement, was my network server.)

Some of you may recall my recent putback of the removal of in.tnamed. Well, there has been some nasty fallout, thanks to SMF and the upgrade process. snv64 (which will have to be respun as a result of this nastiness) was hanging during upgrade, thanks to chicken and egg dependencies in the upgrade script. I fixed the hang, but there is a warning message coming from inetd that I can't seem to locate. Along the way, I've found references to the network/tname service in a few surprising places. The things I've had to edit, thanks to SMF: usr/src/tools/scripts/bfu.sh usr/src/pkgdefs/SUNWcsr/postinstall usr/src/cmd/svc/profile/generic_net_limited.xml usr/src/cmd/svc/prophist/prophist.SUNWcsr usr/src/cmd/cmd-inet/usr.sbin/tname.xml (removed) And *still* we see a warning from inetd. See 6556092 in bugster for more info. Anyway, I'm waiting for folks to decide whether to allow the warning to stay, or to backout the change to remove in.tnamed. If the later is taken, I will r...

David Gwynne (dlg on #opensolaris) has created a very nice driver for LSI MegaRaid SAS controllers. You can find it here . I have not got any hardware, so I've not tested it, but this driver is the model of simplicity and elegance for an HBA, from what I can tell, weighing in at only 1500 lines. A great deal of that is no doubt thanks to the simple model of the hardware, but the simplicity and elegance in the driver should be credited to David as well. I'd like to sponsor this myself for integration into Nevada, but I haven't got any hardware. If you have hardware to loan for qualification testing, give me a shout, because this looks like a prime candidate for a Nevada integration.

The conversion of hme to gldv3 looks like it is a success. The driver "Just Worked" from the first time I loaded it. Yay. Still to be tested are the main areas of risk: VLANs, SUSPEND/RESUME, and DDI detach. Stay tuned for more on that front. I'm going to have to preserve qfe as a seperate driver, I think, because renaming/renumbering devices is just going to cause too much grief in the field. But, what I'm going to do is make hme.c and qfe.c very small (say ~50 lines each), and have them use a common misc module to provide the entire functionality. I have now received several qfe boards as well, so I'll be testing on x86 soon, as well. Watch this space for the code review to be posted. For the curious, some size comparisions: gd78059@sr1-umpk-52{8}> wc pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c{,.orig} 6498 19423 171291 pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c 8889 26403 232421 pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c.orig 15387 45826 403712 total size in the kernel ...

Subject says it all. This is the eri conversion to nemo. There is more testing yet to be done, but note that this means that eri will inherit VLAN and link aggregation support. Neat, huh?

I'm up in MPK this week. (Wed, Thur, and leaving Friday night.) If any fellow Solaris geeks up here are up for a pub outing, e-mail me.