/dev/dump

Some people have been asking me about this driver. (Asus Xonar cards are fairly high-end high definition cards using the CMI 8788 chip.) I've finally gotten the code reasonably cleaned up, and converted to my interrupt free audio framework. I'll probably start a case to get this integrated into late b137, or b138. Mostly its just running a bunch of tests at this point. One problem I have is that I only have Xonar DX1 cards. (PCI.) If someone is able to help me qualify the driver with build 137 (or a nightly build) of ON, please let me know. The more I can get this driver tested, the sooner I can get it integrated into OpenSolaris.

Today I integrated "interrupt free audio". This set of changes, including some other changes, represents a substantial simplification in the DDI for audio drivers. The typical audio driver no longer needs to worry about interrupt handlers. On average, about 300 lines of code (or about 10-20% of complexity for typical drivers) was removed from each audio driver. Furthermore, many audio drivers (for example audio810) are able to run completely lock free, since the audio framework provides synchronization for certain operations. (Operations against each audio engine are synchronized, operations against audio controls are synchronized as a whole, and everything is synchronized against suspend/resume functions.) Even better, these changes enable some new advanced features that will be used for Sun Ray, virtualization, and hotplug support in the future. Oh yeah, and since the asynchronous processing now happens as part of the regular timer interrupt, it means that system CPUs c...

I normally have avoided using my blog as a soapbox for my political beliefs. However, I simply cannot remain silent on recent events in the House of Representatives (United States for foreign readers. No matter what your position is on the health care reforms under consideration, everyone should agree that the reforms are sweeping; perhaps some of the most significant legislation that will affect nearly every American we've seen in quite some time. House Democratic leadership, knowing that the measure is unpopular with many voters (and hence House Democrats may be unlikely to "vote the party line" to avoid a backlash in their constituencies) are planning a move that is even more offensive than "reconciliation". While I'm a Republican, and generally opposed to nationalization of 1/6th of our economy, I find far more offensive that the House leadership (particularly Ms. Pelosi) would consider a move that so boldly disenfranchises the people of this nation. T...

Space aficionados may be aware that President Obama has canceled the previous administration's "Vision for Space Exploration", which consisted of the Constellation program including Ares I, Ares V, and Orion. This has been fairly well covered in the mainstream media. Critics of the Constellation program raise some significant and relevant objections to the Constellation program. However, I strongly believe that as a nation, we need a national space program that includes human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit. The cancellation of Constellation, while perhaps with good cause, has left our national space program with a vacuum -- the lack of a heavy lift vehicle, and lack of any vision, would effectively constrain human exploration to LEO for a generation. Furthermore, it significantly constrains the kinds of activities that we can perform in LEO. Its my belief that this is short-sighted in the extreme. We need a space program that includes vehicles with the ability to ...

So I have an EOF RTI that was in queue when the ON IPS integration happened last night. Of course, this totally whacked my packaging changes, and I had to modify them. Making the changes was quite easy. Here's the old , and the new version of the changes. Its actually less files to update under IPS. I was dreading retesting. Dealing with distro construction sounded "painful". I needn't have worried. In the tools directory there is this neat tool called "onu" (on-update I guess?) I had to load a machine with b133 to set up a baseline, but we have a nice way to do that internally via our internal infrastructure and AI. It boils down to running one command on an install server than doing "boot net:dhcp - install" at the OBP prompt. (Yes, this is a SPARC system.) It took a little bit for it to install, but less than an hour. Then, after rebooting and getting the initial settings on the system, it was just a simple matter of "onu -d ${ws}/p...