/dev/dump

Using my new framework changes (which have not integrated yet), along with changes in the framework designed to simplify drivers by providing certain ordering guarantees, I've been able to shrink a lot of the audio drivers (and in the process have also found a number of small bugs that I think ultimately were responsible for jitter and corruption). Ths simplest driver so far -- audiovia97, which is about as simple an AC'97 driver that can be, is only 686 lines. Several others are now less than 800 lines, and no longer need any locking primitives. As far as device drivers go, this is minuscule. In fact, I challenge anyone to identify a driver that fully services any "real" piece of hardware, fully supporting said hardware, in fewer lines of space. (And in case you are wondering, a significant fraction of those 686 lines of audiovia97 is still comments and whitespace and even the 30+ lines of boilerplate -- the driver is written to be as readable as reasonably poss...

I was looking, and one of the legacy device drivers we still support is the Enterprise 10000 Inter-Domain Network. This is a memory based interconnect network that emulates an ethernet. It occurs to me that we could update this driver to use the GLDv3, which would potentially have a significant performance boost for it. (Really, a better solution would be to create a new low level MAC type for it Nemo, but clearly that's probably too much pain for a product that is no longer shipping). Anyway, I'd be interested to hear of any sites which use IDN on E10K class systems, and would like to see this (already high performance) network get another boost. The other legacy SPARC drivers which are not GLDv3 compliant are: cassini (ce) (probably never going to be GLDv3, but that's another matter) gem (ge) -- this one could be easily converted *if* I had fiber cards to test it with, although there are political concerns as well. (It uses the same MAC controller as "eri",...

I integrated a replacement for mixerctl (and also removed mixerctl) back in build 130. Well, build 130 is coming out really soon (I believe it is available internally in SXCE form now.) I think therefore that it is time to provide more detail here about the new audioctl syntax: NAME audioctl - audio mixer control command line application SYNOPSIS audioctl list-devices audioctl show-device [-v] [-d device ] audioctl show-control [-v] [-d device] [control ...] audioctl set-control [-v] [-d device] control value audioctl save-controls [-d device] [-f] file audioctl load-controls [-d device] file DESCRIPTION The audioctl command is used to control various features of the audio mixer and to get information about the audio mixer and the audio device. The audioctl command operates on the following data types: device An audio device, such as "audiohd#0". The subcommands that accept this do so as an argument to an option -d. ...

I am frequently needing to know "which system am I using". (I have trouble keeping track of which ones are which) -- i.e. is this the laptop, the Ultra 20, the whitebox, etc. I had been using smbios a lot, but that's a bit awkward and non-portable to SPARC or systems that don't support smbios. Here's a quick script that can quickly tell me what model I'm working on. It works on SPARC and x86 alike. I have it stored in ~/bin/system -- it only works on Solaris of course. Feel free to borrow, reuse, whatever -- I hereby donate it to the public domain: #!/usr/bin/ksh sysconf=`/usr/sbin/prtdiag | head -1` biosconf=`/usr/sbin/prtdiag | head -2 | tail -1` sysconf=${sysconf#*:} biosconf=${biosconf#*:} sysconf=`echo ${sysconf} | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^ //g'` biosconf=`echo ${biosconf} | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^ //g'` if [ -z "$sysconf" ] then printf "BIOS: %s\n" "$biosconf" else printf "%s\n" "$sysconf...

Some of you may know that I keep a salt water reef aquarium (210 gallon). Well, one of the challenges with such aquariums is lighting -- most corals need a large amount of high quality light to grow. Most systems use metal halide lighting, which is extremely bright, and extremely hot. On my aquarium I've used three 250 watt MH lights, supplemented by a pair of 150 watt MH lights. (The 150s have been out for a while due to a bad ballast.) Yes, that's over a kilowatt in lighting. And MH lights have historically been considered some of the most efficient lighting -- i.e. most lumens or PAR per watt. One alternative that has been up and coming has been LED based lighting. High power LED systems offer a lot of potential capabilities (although due to a patent problem that has put at least one company out of business and probably set the industry back at least five years, software based control of LEDs is only available on extremely expensive lighting systems -- systems costing...

Its been pointed out to me that if you use Virtual Box and Solaris guests with recent builds (say newer than 124), that you might get a bad sound in the Solaris guest. Turns out that the problem is that the Boomer stack has increased its timing accuracy to a higher limit, beyond what Virtual Box can provide. We're going to fix this properly soon... but in the meantime, you can just edit /kernel/drv/audio810.conf and change the play-interrupts to 30 in the guest. This is CR 6901849 in case anyone is tracking it closely.

While I probably say this about other things (C++, perl), I think I've found something else it applies to -- the OpenSolaris Live CD. The Live CD attempts to offer both a "Live Use" environment, and a "full" (for some value of full) installable copy of OpenSolaris. The problem with this is that we have way, way too many things duplicated on the Live CD. For example, two copies of Mozilla, two copies of Evolution, and two copies of Thunderbird. (One copy each to run in the live environment, and one copy in packaged form for installation.) This is crazy . People who want to play around with an operating system don't need two different mailer packages. In fact, one could argue that if I'm going to use a Live environment, the CD is not going to be my method of choice. I'm going to want eithe a DVD, or (more likely) USB media where I can get faster performance and have more options. Trying to keep a live demonstration environment in the confines of ...

In the process of trying to "clean house", one of the hiccups we've run into is "sag", which is used to generate graphical output from "sar" data. (If you don't use "sar" or "sag", you can stop reading now.) sag generates Tek 4014 mode output, which can (through some contortions) be viewed either in xterm, or converted (using "posttek") to PostScript. The results are actually fairly unpleasant to work with, and rather ugly, as the results are generated through some rather ugly abuse of "graph" and "plot". I'd like to eliminate sag altogether, because I believe far superior alternatives exist. One example is kSar , which is a Java application which generates a variety of graphs and has both interactive and scripted operation. (It can also process sar output from the Sysstat package used on Linux, or AIX which is a plus.) It can generate output in a variety of useful formats as well, making ...

Working together with James McPherson, I've been able to get a driver for a really nifty device from DDRdrive -- see here -- working with OpenSolaris. The device itself has interesting applications -- but I suspect the real killer application for it is in use as a "Logzilla" ( ZIL ) to accelerate synchronous write loads with ZFS . The only limitation on performance is the software and the single PCIe lane. (We're really right up against the PCIe single lane limit.) From the driver perspective, its really interesting because it works with only modest changes to blk2scsa (which I'll be integrating into Nevada soon). The driver itself is tiny -- only about 950 lines of code. Its proven to be a great validation of the concept of blk2scsa -- while I never intended blk2scsa for use with high performance devices, I'm ecstatic that its as performant as it is. (Sorry, I can't post performance numbers here -- at least not yet.) If you already have one of th...

I just pushed the audioemu10k driver into Solaris -- it will be in builds 128 and higher. Here's what the flag day message said: The push of CR 6539690 introduces support for audio for Creative Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy devices based on the EMU 10K1 and 10K2 devices. If you have such a device, you can now enjoy audio playback and record support using your audio device. Devices supported are identifiable by the PCI ids pci1102,2, pci1102,4, and pci1102,8. This should be the full set of Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy PCI devices not already supported by the audiols or audiop16x drivers. It does not include support for any X-Fi devices. This driver includes 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound support, and SPDIF support, for devices that are capable of it. It also includes support for the various break out boxes (Live! Drive and Platinum products), although it does not include support for MIDI or the infrared remote control found on such boxes. I still would enjoy receiving test feed...

I'm tired of seeing bounce messages each time I reply to some thread on laptop-discuss@. The draconian list management policy is set such that when I reply to a message delivered to me, it always results in a bounce. This happens a couple of times a week when I try to reply to a message where I think I might have helpful information. (The bounces might have been due to a bogus attempt on my part to use a vanity opensolaris.org address in my subscription, I don't know. To be honest, I don't really care -- it should not matter. This has become a matter of principle to me.) I think there is a way I can cobble my list subscription address to work, and there are solutions where I can subscribe multiple times to the list, but I refuse to go to ridiculous contortions because the list manager for this list still refuses to actually moderate the list. (Mailman has both support for manual moderation of addresses that are not subscribed to it and the moderator can also whitelis...

I've gotten this question a few times. "Would SDcards make a good ZIL device?" "Would SDcards make good ZFS devices?" The answer to both is resoundingly no . The reason for this is simple, and is the same reason you should never reformat SDcard media using your computer. It boils down to the fact that you need to do some very "SDcard" specific optimizations when you layout your filesystems in order to get good performance. (The details for this are only available after signing an NDA with the SDcard trade association, btw.) Of course, general purpose computers use general purpose filesystem code, which is targetted for hard disks. So the optimizations, if there are any, are all wrong for SDcard media. (Note that this only matters when doing the initial filesystem layout .... i.e. when you are formatting the media.) You can reclaim at least some of the performance you might have lost if you've made this mistake, by reformatting the media in ...

So I have three kids, and they are all in elementary school. And right now all three of them are still trying to memorize their multiplication tables. Apparently the schools these days teach the kids to start by "counting up" (3, 6, 9, 12 ... etc for 3's) rather than going straight towards memorization as I recall we were taught. So now they're still counting up, and have not memorized these basic facts. So I had the idea that we need to give them sheets with practice problems, like the timed ones they do in school. I figure if they have to do this a lot, then eventually the facts will just "sink in". This is when the wife pipes up: "hey can you write a program to do that?" (If only I had a nickel for every time the wife asked "can you write a program to do that?"...) Well, this one was easy, took me about 20 minutes in perl. I wrote a script, "problems.pl" that dumps text file of some 144 problems suitable for sending t...

The OpenSolaris project team has elected to leave my favorite shell (/bin/tcsh) out of the default installation media. There is " bug " on this, but I don't think it is getting any traction. I'm feeling marginalized... it means that when folks first upgrade a system on SWAN to OpenSolaris, I won't be able to login unless they also remember to "pkg install SUNWtcsh". (This also creates a PITA for me on my network, but I've added a secondary user account ... "gdamoreb" with bash as its login shell to my NIS passwd file just so I can work around this.) Anyway, compared to other decisions that this team has made, I definitely feel "marginalized". Look at some other stuff on the LiveCD: Not one, but two different e-mail packages (T-bird and Evolution) A number of "gnome" games that simply don't work at all. Two different versions of "vi" (/usr/bin/vi != /usr/xpg4/bin/vi) Unuseful "esd" (enlightenm...

I've just posted another update to the audioemu10k package . This update completely redesigned the underlying timing and interrupt support, and as a result it should work better with Suspend/Resume (without getting engine underruns.) I've posted a webrev as well, and would really appreciate help with codereview. Additionally, I've fixed the mixer a bit, to the point that I'm confident that a number of devices work perfectly. But some don't. Here's my test results so far: CT4670 -- (Sound Blaster Live!) verified 100% functional, including 4.0 surround. SB0100 -- (Sound Blaster Live! 5.1) SPDIF works, 4.0 surround works, no center/lfe output in 5.1 mode. Can't figure out why. (Would love to hear advice on this one.) SB0400 (Audigy 2 Value) -- works perfectly . Including full 5.1 surround, SPDIF output. I've not tested the side 7.1 channels because I don't have the necessary cable to do so. SB0350 (Audigy 2 ZS Platinum) -- surround sound on re...

I've posted a test package containing the "audioemu10k" driver. (x86/amd64 platforms only). There is also a webrev with the code. This driver supports (in theory) a large number of cards from Creative. (Devices identified in prtconf -vp as "pci1102,2", "pci1102,4", and "pci1102,8".) I've not tested many of them though -- only the SB0100, CT4670, SB0310, and SB0360 have been tested, and I've been unable to verify SPDIF or expansion box functionality, but it should work. To test, you'll need Boomer, which means build 115 of OpenSolaris or newer. I've only tested with build 124, and I recommend using 124 or newer if possible. If you test it, I'd like to see the output from "cat /dev/sndstat", and as much testing of inputs and outputs (try different mixer controls, as well!) as you can. I'm hoping to integrate this code into Nevada in the next week or so.

I just removed about 40% of the code from "hme", by converting it to use the common MII layer. It also makes it use Brussels, and fixes an old bug relating to 10 Mbps functionality. Another net negative lines of code integration for me. I wonder if this confuses ohloh.net's accounting?

I've bitten the bullet, and finally installed "OpenSolaris" over my SXCE install, upgrading from build 105 to build 124 in the process. I thought I'd share some things I've noticed: Gnome's volume control Just Works, and doesn't show the legacy Sun device anymore. (Yay!) There is a 12 MB Core file on the CD ... er... too big... DVD ... image. (Oops!) Maybe someone was hoping the community would jointly debug the program that generated the core file. (gtk-update-icon). Still no /bin/tcsh installed by default. Fortunately easy to get off the network for this machine. (For other systems, not so easy. This really ought to be fixed.) AudioHD has a really, really annoying beep on this system. The beep volume control doesn't take effect until you lower it to 33%. (And then it gets really quiet.) This is a bug that I'll have to investigate further, there's probably some codec tweaking needed. Regular SunOS vi has been replaced with vim , w...

Here's a message I sent to laptop-discuss-owner at opensolaris.org: Okay, I've tried *three* different addresses to post to laptop-discuss@... each time the message bounces. The addresses I tried: gdamore@sun.com garrett.damore@sun.com garrett@damore.org I give up. The list is *unusable* to community members, because of a draconian list policy that instead of just moderating reasonable attempts to post to the list just *bounces* them. This community (laptop-discuss@) will no longer be able to receive mail from me, despite the fact that I'm probably one of the more active contributors to the software that makes up core laptop platform support. If you think your membership ought to be able to hear from me, then please make it easier for me (and for other people) who have a legitimate need to post to the list. Simple moderation with white and blacklisting can be used to achieve this. - Garrett For the record, the message I tried to post was: I'm considering a case t...

SPDIF (and AC3) are the (now legacy) ways that home theater systems are supposed to use to transfer high end surround sound to the receiver for amplification and distribution to individual speakers. Many audio cards on the market can transport AC3 (aka Dolby Digital) or DTS compressed audio data over a digital cable (SPDIF). They can also transport 16-bit stereo PCM (uncompressed) to SPDIF. Boomer can't decode or encode, or transcode, any compressed audio at the moment. While it might be nice if we could do this, there are significant and non-trivial hurdles to making that happen. Some are technical (such as computational costs and lack of hardware offload), and others are more legal (such as trademark, licensing, and patent considerations.) So, Boomer could transport uncompressed 16-bit stereo over SPDIF. (That's all SPDIF has bandwidth for!) Which we support today in audiohd. And in the future we might extend this to other devices. However some operating systems also...

Okay, I've got some audio drivers that are basically ready to go, but which I'm trying to decide whether to integrate or not. Part of the problem is that integration of new drivers is a somewhat expensive process, and if there is no demand for some some of these, then I'd rather go do other things. So, another straw poll. If you have one of these devices and you want a driver to test with, please let me know. Cirrus-Logic/Crystal CS 4281 -- driver is ready to go, stereo only FM-801 -- I think the driver will work, but don't have hardware at the moment to prove it. C-Media 8738/8768 surround sound support (stereo already supported in OpenSolaris) -- this will probably be integrated at some point, but I can share binaries now if someone wants them. Other drivers I can supply with just a modicum of effort, if there is demand: Yamaha YMF-7 series -- driver not yet ready, but now I have hardware to work on it, if there is demand C-Media 8788 - driver mostly ready, but no ...

I notice that OpenSolaris has very few "users" listed on ohloh.net. Lets bump it up. If you use OpenSolaris, why not go ahead and create an account on ohloh.net, and indicate "I use this" for OpenSolaris. While you're there, if you're grateful, you could grant kudos to your favorite developers. And if you have any contributions of your own (pushes to ON), go ahead and claim those to (search for your name or login in the "people")... it bumps your rank, and makes your "kudos" worth more when you deign to give them out.

I just integrated audiosolo -- it should be in build 125. :-) I think this driver might have set a new record for integration into ON. I started work on it Sunday afternoon, and integrated into ON on Tuesday evening. Proof that not all integrations into ON have to take forever. (Granted if this were NetBSD it probably would have integrated on Monday morning instead of tonight...)

I got kind of bored on Sunday afternoon, and decided to do a port from FreeBSD of the driver for the ESS Solo-1 card. (I got one of these cards shipped to me by mistake from a vendor that didn't know the difference between different chips.) It was getting late on Sunday, but I was almost ready to test. I resolved that when the system panic()'d, I'd call it a night and go get some sleep. Amazingly, the system never panic()'d. I think this is the first time that I've brought up a new device driver (with a lot of new code!) without crashing the system at least once. (Usually its significantly more than that!) Hence, this may be the only device driver I know of that is both functional, and has never been the cause of a system crash. Well, I wound up continuing to hack during testing -- never did make it to bed, and now its pretty much done. I'll post test binaries if someone else wants them. I still have to test suspend/resume and quiesce. There is also ...

Just a quick note.... we've discovered a problem where NWAM may not function if you have certain devices which use the "mii" module in build 123 of OpenSolaris. Hopefully the fix for this problem will be integrated today into build 124. The problem is that NWAM won't see your wired "interfaces" as down, and as a result, won't default to using wireless. Affected devices are afe, iprb, atge, dmfe and the yge beta test. The CR on this is CR 6880492. A webrev of the fix is available for the curious.

From the HEADS UP message: The push of CR 6878663 (PSARC 2009/384) introduces support for audio for certain Creative Sound Blaster Live! devices. If you have such a device, you can now enjoy audio playback and record support using your audio device. This driver includes 5.1 surround sound support. Devices supported are identifiable by the PCI id pci1102,6, and are Sound Blaster Live! models SB0200 and SB0213. They have a chip labeled "EMU10K1X" (note the "X") on them. These were primarily marketed as Dell OEM versions of the Sound Blaster Live! family. Enjoy!

I've integrated the audiols driver into build 124 (actually I think this might have been the first push into snv124 -- thanks to jmcp for approving it so quickly!) From my HEADS UP message: The push of CR 6875005 introduces support for audio for Creative Audigy LS devices. If you have such a device, you can now enjoy audio playback and record support using your audio device. Devices supported are identifiable by the PCI id pci1102,7. Known compatible devices include Creative Audigy LS, Creative Audigy SE, Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit, and Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio. This driver includes 5.1 surround sound support. Bugs for this driver should be filed in bugster using solaris/audio/driver-audiols.

4Front has provided some drivers for me, which are nearly complete, but which need some attention. However, I am lacking hardware for a number of these drivers, and have not had good success finding many of them on eBay. If you have access to spare cards to donate, or even sell, please let me know. Here's a short list of cards: CS4281 (I tried to purchase one of these, but they shipped me an ESS Solo-1 instead!) CS4280 FM-801 (ideally a 6-channel variant) CMI 8768 CMI 8738 (6-channel, or even 8-channel varient) CMI 8788 (these are high end cards, they can be purchased, but right now I'd have to fund this myself if I want to work on the driver -- its not a priority. This is typically the Asus Xonar card.) There are probably other interesting audio cards as well. It should be said that the recent work on some of these cards is occurring on my own time, since I have higher priorities (not soundcard related) during my day job, which is why its hard for me to ask Sun to provide f...

Just for giggles, I went ahead and tested it: audiols/fortyfive> pfexec audiotest -5 /dev/dsp1 Sound subsystem and version: SunOS Audio 4.0 (0x00040003) Platform: SunOS 5.11 snv_119 sun4u *** Scanning sound adapter #2 *** /dev/sound/audiols:0dsp (audio engine 1): audiols#0 - Performing audio playback test... <left> ................OK <right> ...............OK <stereo> ..............OK <left rear> ...........OK <right rear> ..........OK <center> ..............OK <lfe> .................SKIPPED <5.0 surround> ........OK <measured sample rate 47952.00 Hz (-0.10%)> *** All tests completed OK *** audiols/fortyfive> uname -a SunOS fortyfive 5.11 snv_119 sun4u sparc SUNW,A70 I'll go ahead and include SPARC support after all. Maybe someone with an Ultra 45 or 25 will like this.

I've posted test binaries for the AudigyLS driver for Boomer systems. There is also a webrev posted. These are test binaries only! Use at your OWN RISK! If you do use them, please let me know how it goes. Thanks!

I'm about ready to integrate the Audigy LS audio driver, which is a PCI add-in card that is capable of 5.1 surround sound. (I've been working on it in the "off" hours, as I currently have other higher priority projects that I'm working on while doing work on Sun's nickel; this explains why it has taken so long.) I have one quick question: does anyone really want to have this work on SPARC systems? The only tangible advantages I could see for this are: If your internal audio device is busted, there is another alternative. If you have some compelling reason to want surround sound support on your SPARC system. Right now because the effort to qualify and integrate takes a while, and because I hate the idea of integrating bloatware that nobody is going to use, I am not planning on integrating SPARC support for this driver. However, if at least one or two people speak up and tell me that this is something that they want, then I'm much more likely to take th...

I've recently (in the past week) integrated a small improvement from Roland ( so kernel code can use C99 booleans (supposedly there are performance gains for using this relative to boolean_t), and a major overhaul and conversion to GLDv3 for the legacy "dnet" driver from Steve Stallion. I would like to thank both contributors for their patience. Neither of these was a particularly trivial integration. Steve in particular worked on this integration for quite a long time, due largely to the high cost of getting such a crufty driver to pass through NICDRV.

Well, today I finally got a model rocket set ... been wanting one since I was about 8 years old. Now that my son is that old, I finally can justify it. :-) The kids and I went to a park and set up 4 launches (well really 3, more on that later) of a single stage Estes rocket (A3-4T engines, IIRC ... basically about the smallest engines typically sold.) Total cost was about $30. The kids really enjoyed it, and I can tell by the questions Timothy is asking that he's thinking about implementation -- he's definitely got the budding mind of an engineer. (How does the ejection charge work? What's the purpose of the recovery streamer? How do multistage rockets work? Etc.) We did have one minor mishap, on our first launch attempt. Turns out that the rocket had wedged against the small plastic keeper, creating just enough friction to turn our launch into a static test. The engine burned a small hole, about 50 mm in diameter, right through the aluminum guard plate on the lau...

I've posted a test version of my "yge" driver (Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet, but it also supports some 100Mbps devices) up on OpenSolaris.org. Get it here -- get the file called yge-test.tar.gz . There is a webrev posted too, if you want to beat your head against the wall. If you do test this, be aware that many possible PCI ids are not in the installer file. If you want to test more, please do so (at your own risk). If you find that other devices either do work, or do not, please let me know -- send mail to garrett.damore at sun dot com. Thanks, and enjoy! (I'm hoping to get this driver integrated into SNV 123.)

I just pushed the changes associated with PSARC 2005/425, which is basically the removal of the script wrappers /usr/ucb/cc, /usr/ucb/lint, and /usr/ucb/ld. The fix will be in b122 of ON. This is a good thing for people who build free software bits on OpenSolaris. For a long time, there have been complaints that /usr/ucb on your PATH was particularly toxic (some would say it was toxic anyway, but that's a different matter) -- autoconf scripts were frequently confounded by /usr/ucb/cc, which has done nothing more than generate a useless error message for most people. So, /usr/ucb/ on your path, while not recommended, is at least no longer particularly toxic.

So I was cleaning out my office.... (no jokes from the peanut gallery please!) I was completely surprised to find that out of 5 old machines I was about to retire to the recycler, no fewer than three of them -- from totally different manufacturers -- one of them was Compaq Presario -- had integrated Via82c686 audio (which is supported by audiovia97.) So if you've still got old Celeron's or PIII class systems around, there's a pretty good chance that you can get audio in OpenSolaris on them now.

When someone on facebook is confused and mixes up your H.S. graduation date with their birthday. People born back when I was graduating high school are now graduates themselves. Getting old sucks. But its better than the alternative.

I found an interesting site; it tracks commits by developer, and potentially ranks them, using a "kudos" system. There's also a way to give and to receive "kudos". It also has some source code analysis for projects, though I don't necessarily agree with all that it does. (A project that is 50% comments is not inherently better than a project that is 10% lines... you can't judge code quality or readability or structure based on comments.) Anyway, I just joined and made it aware of who I am... I have a "kudo" rank of 7. If anyone else here is using this service, I'd be curious to know about it. My account information is here .

I noticed that Sherry Moore just posted a blog entry about Fast Reboot. I wanted to take a few moments to mention a few things, that I think folks should understand. First off, the feature (fast reboot) is really useful -- for manually initiated reboots to perform administration (such as to reboot after installing new kernel bits or a critical patch), its wonderful to skip past the various hardware related initialization, and can really help with downtime costs associated with administrative maintenance tasks like patching. This is especially true for systems with lots of peripheral buses (SCSI, Infiniband, etc.) that take a long time for low-level BIOS to probe and test. In such situations, BIOS initialization can consume several minutes. Reducing this to a few seconds is a compelling idea. However, there are some gotchas that in my opinion people should be aware of when using the variant of this that gets used on panic (). During a panic situation, all bets are off about kernel or...

As some people know, the KCA 2009 was streamed live. The video of my talk on Boomer was archived (as well as other talks) and is available on line. You can watch it here . Note that I highly recommend advancing to about 6:30 in the stream, because the first 6+ minutes was me struggling with laptop/projector incompatibilities. (Would be nice if the folks that posted the video could crop that meaningless bit out.) Other thoughts I had from looking back and reviewing this (which I did for the first time yesterday): A live demo would make it more interesting. Test the equipment compatibility first when presenting. Turn off screen savers. Rehearse the talk before hand. Some points were repeated, which was unfortunate since I had to rush or skip other points. Practice talking more.. especially at the beginning it seems like I didn't know what to do with my hands. Don't be afraid to get out from behind the podium. The podium itself was poorly situated ... the exit sign above my head...

I've pushed the audiovia97 device driver. Those of you with Via 82C686 south bridges will be able to make use of your on-board audio in OpenSolaris builds 121 and beyond. Enjoy.

I presented a paper covering Boomer at Kernel Conference Australia 2009 . I've made the paper and slides available for your enjoyment.

I'm headed to Brisbane for the week -- I'm presenting at Kernel Conference Australia 2009 . I hope to meet other like minded UNIX kernel nerds there. Maybe do some snorkeling as well, although its the off-season there. (But it can hardly be colder than the water in California...)

Some of you kernel hackers may be interested to know about my case ( PSARC 2009/380 ) that eliminates one of the ancient limitations of Solaris -- having STREAMS and non-STREAMS entry points in the same device driver. I've also implemented it and am waiting for the case to time out before I submit the RTI. As part of this, I also implemented a set of changes to the audio stack -- the austr(7D) "speecial" node and driver goes away, and the Sun audio personality sheds about 1,000 lines of complexity. I'll be pushing those changes later, once I've gotten code review feedback. (If you review the changes, please let me know!)

So there was some fallout from my mii push. Elxl devices had a nasty panic, which I fixed in time for build 119. Some older i82557 (iprb) devices had problems as well. The push for this fix went into build 120. To everyone affected, please accept my apologies. Build 120 should be stable for these devices.

Folks working with 802.3 (Ethernet) hardware (10/100/1000) can rejoice, as I've now integrated PSARC 2009/319 , which provides a common MII and GMII layer for Ethernet device drivers. The first batch of drivers (iprb, dmfe, and afe) have been converted. This brings support for SunVTS netlbtest, dladm based link management, and even (for some devices) 802.3 flow control (aka Pause Frames) to these drivers. I'll encourage folks working with other drivers to update their drivers to support the new framework. On average it cuts about 1500 lines from most drivers, and generally improves device functionality. And yes, it works with Ethernet, even 1000Base-X should work (although only 1000Base-T has been tested.) Any device that supports Clause 22 of 802.3 should work. Clause 45 (typically 10Gb) is not supported, however.

I've posted the webrev for audiovia97. This was covered by PSARC 2009/321 . This is a driver for older Via 82C686 south bridges, used with 32-bit Via C3 and Pentium-III class processors. The driver was written by 4Front (apparently building upon other Boomer work I've done). All I've done for this is simple packaging, cstyle fixes, and integration. Let me know if you want early access to binaries! (You'll need Boomer or build 115 or later installed to use it.)

I just pushed the audiocmi driver. Users with C-Media 8738, 8768, and 8338 devices can now enjoy Boomer using 16-bit stereo audio on these devices. Note that while some of these devices can support multichannel surround, the Solaris driver for them does not support this kind of usage at present. If someone in the open source community would like to contribute support for this, please let me know.

Historically, subsystems (drivers, etc.) were supposed to deliver on both SPARC and x86 platforms (and now amd64 as well) unless a really good argument was supplied. While I've long been a supporter of this philosophy, I think a time is coming to consider making a specific policy exception. The problem I'm running into is with legacy PCI devices. Some of these legacy PCI devices can work SPARC. But devices that don't support 66 MHz frequently (but not always) have problems on SPARC workstations. The biggest problem is that many SPARC workstations have 32-bit 33 MHz slots that don't supply 3.3V. This affects quite a number of cards that require 3.3V power to operate. Some devices will operate with only 5V, but only marginally. I've seen a number of failures that I think can be traced to this problem, and now I don't recommend using PCI devices not specifically qualified for these platforms with SPARC systems. (Sun makes that same recommendation, btw.) Fur...

Some may have noticed in a few of my changes lately that I'm moving some header files around. This post explains the change (and encourages others to do the same). Header files that are only useful to one subsystem (a kernel module, or driver, for example) should, IMO, only be located in the subsystem for which they are used. For example, do we really need to ship a header file in /usr/include/sys/ that has all the register definitions for the DEC tulip ethernet (dnet.h)? Wouldn't it be sufficient to have those definitions just where they belong, alongside the source for the dnet driver itself? Locating the files for such subsystems in their own directory instead of a common directory (e.g. common/io/dnet/dnet.h instead of common/sys/dnet.h) has several positive ramifications: It makes it readily apparent that the header file has no content needed outside of the kernel or subsystem. So changes can be more freely made (no userland dependencies, for example.) The header file ...

Just a quick note on driver.conf files that some device drivers deliver. I believe that driver.conf files, and the tunables that are usually put in them, are for the most part, a byproduct of inadequate architecture The average driver should use no tunables in driver.conf properties. As a result, I've started going out of my way to remove driver.conf files from device drivers for which I'm responsible. I think that even the "advanced" tunables (such as the interrupt rate used for audio drivers) falls outside the scope of what users should normally tune, and that delivering a configuration file is actively harmful. One of Solaris' great strengths historically has been the approach to "self-tuning", so that lots of configuration is not necessary. I'd like to see that continue. The next time you think about adding a driver.conf property, consider carefully if there might not be a better solution. (Either self tuning, providing a default that works...

I've posted a webrev for the audiocmi driver. This driver supports CMI 8738 and similar parts. This is for Boomer, and I hope to get it integrated into build 117. If you want to test a binary, drop me an e-mail!

If you'd like the spwr driver to be open sourced and GLDv3 compliant (with VLAN support, link notification, dladm and ndd support, and the rest of the goodies), and have a few spare cards that you can give me, please feel free to contact me. I'm willing to do the work as a side project. I'm also interested in obtaining 100Base-X fiber cards, and fiber cables (VF45 format), especially if someone also has access to the 3M VOL-N100VF+TX card (which is theoretically supported by "afe", but which I'm not entirely convinced works properly because I've never actually had a card on hand that I could test!) I need cards and cable... at the moment I have neither. Note that this is not Sun commissioned work, but an interesting side project that caught my interest. If nobody replies with hardware, then its unlikely that I'll do any of the work.

Well, it appears that I'll be at CommunityOne (Monday only) after all! This is going to be a fairly big event -- the big event for OpenSolaris this year, I think. I'm looking forward to the chance to meet a bunch of folks that I didn't get the chance to meet previously. Hope to see you there!

I've just submitted the RTI for hme. If the RTI advocate approves it in time, it will be in build 115, otherwise in build 116. This will allow you to use your old PCI qfe boards with OpenSolaris on x86 systems. It also represents a significant simplifications of the code. Thanks to the folks who've helped with testing!

This driver, with surround sound (5.1) support is pushed into Build 115. Stay tuned.

I've just pushed an updated iprb with suspend/resume and quiesce support. Its still in the closed tree, but even so this improvement should help out folks who are stuck with one of these on their system board. Enjoy.

Some of you have already seen this rant from me. But I think its important enough to bring to the greater attention of the community. Some mailing lists in OpenSolaris are configured to automatically bounce or discard messages sent from a mailing list that is not subscribed to that list. This is, IMO, a fairly toxic configuration. At first glance, the idea seems good -- if your list only accepts member submissions, then you'll not have to deal with all the spam, and you don't have to moderate. The list can basically run from that point completely unadministered. Sounds good, doesn't it. The problem is that this configuration is toxic to many discussions and to some users. As an example, I tend to get involved in many cross discipline conversations -- partly as a result of my membership on ARC. And yet, my replies, often to important discussions about cases that might be interesting to certain communities, are often bounced back, because I simply am not subscribed to th...

Due to snafus with the various legal departments involved, we seem to have hit another roadblock getting iprb open sourced. (Why is it that whenever lawyers get involved, everything seems to take five times longer than it otherwise would? Do corporate lawyers bill by the hour just like their normal "free-agent" counterparts?) Rather than continue to wait for this to get resolved, I've decided to move forward and get some of the important fixes into iprb even though it is still closed source. Most notably, my changes allow iprb to support suspend-to-ram, and fast reboot. I've submitted the RTI for these changes, so hopefully this will be in either build 115 or (more likely) build 116. As far as opening the actual source up -- even though there is nothing in the source that is not already made public by Intel -- I'm not holding my breath.

I'm getting ready to submit an RTI to add M1575 (Acer/Uli) support to OpenSolaris. As part of the work, I've taken the M1575 driver from OpenSolaris (which was used for the SPARC Ultra 25, and 45 workstations) and added quiesce() and multichannel surround support. I'm told it works nicely with 5.1 channel surround. If you have this chip (e.g. an ATI SB200 motherboard), let me know and I'll see if I can get a binary to you. (You'll need to have Boomer RC3 or build 115 installed, though.)

I recently received a document that was LHA archived. I was struggling to find a suitable decompressor, since Gnome archive-manager complained that the format was unsupported. Nicely, though, 7zip had no trouble uncompressing the file. And, 7zip is stock on all recent builds of OpenSolaris. Very cool. :-)

hme (and by extension qfe) cards can be used on x86 systems if you download the test driver that I've supplied. Just download, extract, and follow the directions in the README file. I'm also interested in verification that the driver performs properly on SPARC; binaries are in the same archive. The code was significantly simplified, and I need to know it works properly. Finally, I'm seriously in need of code reviewers. I can't integrate the changes without a proper review. If you can volunteer to help, check out the webrev that I have posted. Thanks! (Note: on x86 qfe cards will show up as "hme" devices... this is normal and expected. The "qfe" name is an artifact only found on SPARC systems for historical reasons... the actual qfe card consists of 4 hme devices behind a PCI bridge.)

Joost Mulders last night integrated his Via Rhine "vr" driver. While I don't personally have this hardware, I know it is very common. I did code review his driver, which I found to represent very tight and well-written code. Congratulations Joost! Saurabh Misra is working on a home-grown "bfe" (Broadcom Fast Ethernet) driver as well, which also looks very good and should be integrating soon.

I just integrated support for the ALi Southbridge AC'97 controller found on certain x86 motherboards The necessary driver (audiots from the SPARC world, actually) is available on x86 platforms starting with build 115. For the moment this driver only supports stereo, but if someone has a multichannel configuration that they want to have supported, they should contact me and I'll work with them to get the testing necessary to enable this done. Enjoy.

Boomer has integrated! Yay... this was a long road, and a lot of code -- one of the biggest projects I've worked on (and the hg push was far and away the single biggest push or putback I've ever done.) Anyway, we were the first integration into build 115 of ON. See the flag day message for more details. Enjoy! -- Garrett

I've got a preliminary driver working for the CMedia 8738, 8768, and 8338 series of devices. This driver works with Boomer (you'll need RC3 installed, or -- hopefully -- Nevada build 115 when it comes out, and it seems to be working except for some issues with the record gain being a bit faint. (Hopefully I'll resolve those soon.) The driver lacks support for advanced features like surround sound or jack retasking, mostly because I can't easily test them -- I have only an ancient 8738 -033 (stereo only) part available to me. (Also, it seems that CMedia has had some rather unusual changes with each revision of the chip, making proper support of advanced features such as SPDIF or surround sound a bit troublesome.) So, that said, I'd like to hear from folks who have this part and can use a driver for it. If you want to test, drop me a line. Thanks.

It looks like I'll be in Brisbane, Australia for the Kernel Conference Australia 2009 . The primary mission is to talk about Boomer -- the exact details aren't locked in yet. But I've been asked to chat about GLDv3 and driver porting in general as well. Anyway, for those of you down under, I look forward to the chance to meet you. This will be my first trip south of the equator, and I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully my wife will be able to join me there as well!

I've posted Boomer RC3 yesterday. It will be the last separate binary release of Boomer Phase I -- we're on track for integration into Nevada B115 -- C-Team Commitment review is on Monday. That said, we've found one problem, which is of a P3 nature, which affects the ability of certain applications (audacity is the only one found so far) to record -- the record process doesn't start properly when triggered. I've got a fix for this, and can offer a binary to anyone who needs it for RC3. We've still not yet figured out whether this problem will be fixed in Boomer Phase I prior to integration, or just after integration -- but in either case it will be build 115 as well. The other thing is that I've got a binary driver built for the audio controller found on the ALi 5451 southbridge. This is a somewhat older part, but folks might have them on certain motherboards. If you've got one, and you want a binary driver, let me know -- I'll be happy to sup...

I just pushed 6822752 rtls should be open source It will be in build 113. There are some possible projects contributors could do involving that code (such as conversion to Brussels). Contact me if you're interested.

Today something cool happened. Casper Dik asked me to review some changes he had to fix the Cardbus support in the pci nexus code. What's so cool about that? Well, its the first time I've ever reviewed anything from Casper. Casper, from back in the mid-90's, was kind of a folk hero of mine (and not just me, I think) back when I was doing system administration in my prior life at Qualcomm. I'd never have believed some 15 years ago that Casper would be asking me for code review. Cool. :-)

I've posted an updated release candidate 1b for Boomer today, and you can download it from the files area. The only remaining known P1-P3 issues in this release are a problem that affects users of TX (Trusted Extensions) and lack of BFU support. Obviously we're feeling pretty good about this release, and we're on track for integration in b115. As usual issues should be reported using the Bugster category development/audio-ng/software. Alternatively, you can send mail to opensound-discuss@sun.com.

I've posted a release candidate for Boomer today, and you can download it from the files area . This release candidate includes USB support, and fixes for some critical bugs, so if you installed the beta, please upgrade. There are still some known issues, but we believe we're quickly closing to being ready to integrate in Build 115. Bugs should be reported using the Bugster category development/audio-ng/software. Alternatively, you can send mail to opensound-discuss@sun.com. Enjoy!

I've posted a refresh of the Boomer beta bits. The location has moved to the more sensible project specific location as well. This refresh includes SPARC support, and fixes for a couple of bugs that folks ran into from the first beta.

Finally! The first public beta binaries for Boomer are now available! Details are available from the Open Sound Project webpage . Enjoy! -- Garrett (Update: the website update didn't take. OpenSolaris.org is really sick now, any updates seem to cause it to crash now. I've posted binaries here, temporarily. The webrev is in the same location as before.)

Its official , HP will start bundling Solaris on their x86 rack servers. Wow.

I've posted a webrev of the Boomer tree against onnv_109. While the review itself is probably daunting, and I'm not actively asking for folks to review it, you are welcome to do so anyway. Please send us your feedback if you have any. Here's a couple of snapshots of our updated gnome-volume-control running on an Ultra 20, as well. (Note that we've enabled display of all "tracks".) First the Playback tab, which shows individual slider support for each of the analog controls, as well as a single monophonic "master volume" slider. If we had an older system that didn't have independent volume control, we might have an option at the bottom of the screen to select playback sources. Its not required on this system. The Recording tab shows some improvements. Instead of having just a single monitor gain control, you can now independently control the monitor gain for each of several input sources. There is only a single "record gain", but ...

I figured I better post this publicly. If you have a Ricoh SD controller (pci1180,522) then you don't want to use SDcard in OpenSolaris with it. You'll probably get panics, memory corruption, etc. There is a known bug -- CR 6797937 that tracks this issue. I've filed an RTI for this issue, and hope to have it pushed later today. You can review the diffs for this on this webrev , if you're so inclined. This is known to affect Toshiba Tecra M10, IBM T61, and probably a bunch of others besides. Sorry to those folks affected, we're trying to drive the fix for this out as quickly as possible. It should be in 109. Update (Feb 5, 8:19pm PST): The fix for this problem was just pushed into ON. It will be in tonight's nightly build.

Just a quick note: no Boomer beta release this week. Due to a bug which we fixed in ON, but which we are dependent upon, there won't be any formal beta release until after SXCE b107 ships. And it will depend on SXCE b107. (And likewise, when the OpenSolaris package repos are updated to use b107, you'll be able to use OpenSolaris and Boomer together.) I probably will post an updated code review, and possibly BFU archives, for the folks that want to play with these bits earlier and are willing to deal with BFU. (Hmmm.. does BFU work correctly on OpenSolaris? I've only used it on SXCE.) That posting will probably occur on Monday or Tuesday of next week. Stay tuned. (Is there any interest in an external Mercurial repo for this stuff? I hadn't been planning on one, but if folks want one and will use it, I'll look into it.)

I've received a number of e-mails inquiring about Boomer, the next generation audio system for Solaris. I thought I'd take moment to snapshot where we're at. The good news: We're very nearly done with Phase I. There are still a couple of bugs to fix but its looking very promising that we'll have a strong public Beta release later this month, with integration into ON in February or March. The release will include multichannel surround across a fairly wide range of devices. All the existing Sun audio drivers are supported (except Sun Ray) All the drivers except usb are "native" Boomer drivers, with greatly reduced complexity and (hopefully) much better reliability We have much better support for adjusting different device settings, either from the CLI or from a GUI. This includes surround settings, special device features (such as 3D enhancements), and even jack retasking on certain codecs. (You can even use this to have 5.1 audio on an older Sun Ultra 2...