more network driver updates

I just completed my codereviews of eri, and got approval from the owners of the code to commit the changes. I expect that as a result the eri conversion to GLDv3 (plus major cleanups in the code) will be putback next week ... probably on Wednesday afternoon.

Why Wednesday? Well, I also need to commit PSARC 2007/298 and 2007/296, which the eri driver depends on. 2007/298 was the source of much debate lately, but I think a consensus has been achieved, and the changes should go in once I get the final blessing from PSARC (which at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion.) Code reviews and testing have already been done.

I've also sent an mxfe card to Alan DuBoff, so he can run it through the NICDRV battery of tests. Hopefully as a result mxfe will be integrated soon. I'm anxious for Alan to commit afe (he has asked that I not take this over from him), so that I can quickly convert it to GLDv3 as well.

For some of the other legacy NICs (iprb, rtls, etc.) I've been asked to provide information about GLDv2 to v3 conversions, because apparently she wants to try her hand at converting at least one of them. Since these NICs are still common on PC motherboards, I applaud this effort.

As far as hme/qfe/ce go, more on that in a follow up.

GLDv2->GLDv3 conversion notes

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 VLANs. It helps if you have a switch where you can test VLAN frames.

With GLDv3, there is no reset function, so you have to figure out how to put that in attach (for both DDI_ATTACH and DDI_RESUME!), or in the mac_start() function.

With GLDv3 the stats are quite different. Pay attention, and look at the headers to figure it out.

Many GLDv2 drivers don't do the mac_link_update() call. You should add those for NWAM, IPMP, and correct kstat reporting.

You should rip out any attempt to log to the console on link up, down, or carrier errors. See PSARC 2007/298 for details.

GLDv3 wants to operate on mblk_t's that are chained by b_next. Often you can use the old functions from a new function that just walks down, or builds up the list (depending on whether its receive or transmit.)

Pay careful attention to locking. Try not to call GLDv3 functions with locks held. (I have been pressing to allow mac_tx_update and mac_link_update be called with driver locks held. Right now its safe, but I can't seem to get a promise from the Nemo group yet.)

You see all those cyclics in some drivers? Try not to use 'em if you don't have to. What I usually do is cheat and use the on-chip timer if I need some kind of time driven functionality.

GLDv3 never explicitly initializes the physical addresses on the NIC. GLDv2 used to always call gldm_set_mac_addr()... so some drivers expect this. You may need to do that yourself in the mac_start() routine.

Anyway, maybe those notes will save someone somewhere else some effort. Or inspire someone to pick up another driver and convert it.

All these nics...

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 habit of collecting NICs.

Now, the Linksys boards are going to soon be supported by afe, if Alan ever gets his putback of my driver done. The Macronix board will be supported by mxfe later this week, once I get it reviewed and putback.

At one point I had a driver (pnic) sort of working for the LC82C169 (Lite-On PNIC), but I abandoned it because the PNIC was such a piece of crap, that I figured anyone with one of these was better off throwing it away and replacing it with another NIC (as long as it wasn't a Realtek 8139!) Maybe I'll revive that project one day. Probably not, since Lite-On didn't sell too many of them, I think. (The PNIC has some horrible hardware bugs, and the two major revisions, the 82C169 and 82C168, have quite different methods of handling 802.3u autonegotiation.)

I also started a driver for the Nat-Semi chip (nsfe), but abandoned it. I think this chip is also found in motherboards, where it is called an SiS part. I think Muryama also has a driver available for it.

I'd really like to see support for the others expanded upon. Maybe I need to look at dmfe, some more, because there really shouldn't be any reason it couldn't support x86 platforms. (D-Link sold a lot of DFE-530TX boads, IIRC.)

This also suggests that the elxl driver, which has been slated for EOF, really shouldn't be. One of the reasons I've kept that old NIC around was just because it was one of the few that was supported by Solaris 8 and earlier. I suspect I'm not the only one to have done this. I think the problem is that this driver is not open source. But open source variants exist... maybe someone should look at replacing elxl in Solaris Nevada with a FOSS replacment.

Some of these Muryama has already written drivers for. I would dearly like to see his vel in Solaris Nevada, along with conversion to GLDv3.

IP Instances, GLDv3, and mxfe

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 rules for making performant NIC drivers. But they work pretty well, for all that.)

Why Side Effects Are Bad

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 != 0. Next time.)

/me throws brick at whoever wrote and edited the man page.
/me throws pallet of bricks at whoever designed mcopymsg with this side effect in the first place

Arrgh. Well, this will probably help me figure out several problems I've run into lately.

ZFS to the rescue!

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. :-)

Favorite things in OpenSolaris not in Solaris 10

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.)

Learning to hate SMF

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 run screaming from the process, and just leave in.tnamed alone.

In my opinion, removing the tname.xml should have been sufficient. But thanks to SMF's binary databases, it creates a major headache. Can someone from the SMF team please unravel this maze?

LSI MegaRaid SAS driver (Thanks dlg!)

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.

hme gldv3 status report

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 (as reported by modinfo): old = 63384, new 47184

PSARC 2007/243 approved

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?

In the Bay Area this week

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.

doing my part

I just committed a change to move 7 previously closed drivers in Nevada to the open source tree under usr/src. This change involved nothing more than Makefile and copyright block editing, so it was pretty much a no-brainer. (Though the heavy lifting of the legal review had already been done.)

The drivers moved were: bscv, bscbus, i2bsc, gptwo_cpu, gptwocfg, todstarcat, and todm5819p_rmc.

Admittedly, none of these are likely to exist on your hardware, but it does help to have more bits open. Hopefully someday /usr/closed will either cease to exist or become its own consolidation separate from Nevada.

eri conversion update

Hmm... it looks like I never posted the webrev... well here it is, the webrev for the eri(7d) conversion to Nemo.

Now, the second bit of good news here is that the PSARC case for this as been submitted as PSARC 2007/243. Note that the case isn't published publicly at the time of writing, but it should be soon.

afe and dmfe cases approved

FYI, the afe and dmfe cases I had at PSARC (2007/229 and 2007/221 respectively) were approved. I've already put back the dmfe code. The afe code will be committed by Alan DuBoff. I've got pre-approval to do a follow-up putback to convert afe to GLDv3 afterwards.

Note that as a result of Crossbow, there are some changes coming in GLDv3, so it is still inappropriate to use GLDv3 for unbundled drivers. (The biggest of these changes is support for "polling", where the network stack can disable interrupts on the NIC and run a separate thread to poll the device for inbound packets. On extremely high traffic systems, this can have a big impact on overall system throughput by avoiding the extra context switches.)

afe PSARC case number

The PSARC fasttrack to integrate afe into Nevada was assigned case number PSARC 2007/229. Notably, this case was not submitted by me (I'm not even on the interest list!), and is being done as a result of the BSD license terms for afe. It will probably be reviewed at next week's PSARC meeting.

Death to IEN-116

Finally, over 20 years since the late Jon Postel said Death To IEN-116, we have finally removed it from OpenSolaris. Who says changes in Solaris take too long?

eri tests look good.. call for more testers

As predicted, the area of biggest risk in my conversion of eri to GLDv3 was in fact the kstat handling. However, I appear to have that all worked out now, and the binary is working flawlessly on my SunBlade 100. Even suspend/resume works fine. However, I've not yet integrated this code properly into a workspace to generate a webrev, but I will do so soon. (Probably tomorrow... I'd like to get my two other RTIs put back first.)

One of the biggest concerns about this effort was the added risk that doing this conversion might bring to the "stable" eri driver. So, I'm asking the community for help. If you want to help out with testing, especially if you have higher end systems or want to do some benchmark comparisons, please let me know.

(I don't have specific test suites to give out that this time... its of more value frankly to have people using their own tests right now, that way we get broader test coverage than perhaps we might with a single test suite.)

Please let me know. Thanks! (Oh yeah, if you have an eri you want to try with new GLDv3-based 802.3ad link aggregation features, I'd be game for that, too!)

(PS. An obvious consequence of this effort is that it will be easy to do the work to convert hme, gem, and qfe, which share a lot common heritage with the eri driver. So, maybe there is yet hope for those, as well.)

GLDv3 experiences

I've just finished (still testing!) my port of eri to GLDv3. Between that and eri, and looking at existing GLDv3 drivers (bge, rge, e1000g), I think I have gathered some operational experience that I hope we can use to improve Nemo. (So, anyone who says my time spent on converting eri was wasted is wrong... because if nothing else it gained some more operational experience with GLDv3.)

Executive summary of the takeaways I have gotten so far, that I think are worth noting:

• There is still a lot of code duplicated across even GLDv3 drivers (more below)
• Lock management is so much simplified
• GLDv3 kstats need "work"
• we really, really need Brussels... it can't come soon enough.
• some drivers can probably be changed internally to work even better with GLDv3 than a naive port

So here's the detailed stuff.

1. code duplication
   
   The duplicated code falls into three major areas. ioctls (mostly ndd(1M) and loopback handling for SunVTS), kstats, and MII. For now I want to focus on the MII bit. It turns out that pretty much every Ethernet device on the planet talks to a transceiver (whether integrated into the same chip as the MAC controller or not) using MII/GMII. We have tons of logic surrounding MII and GMII replicated across each driver, and frequently the decisions made by one driver are different than those in another.
   
   There exists an old i386 driver called mii, which was an abortive attempt to create a common module/framework for MII and PHY handling. (Only used by the obsolete dnet driver at present.) I think this should be revived. Its been shown to work well for BSD Unix (at least NetBSD, but I'm pretty sure all of them), and it would really help simplify a lot of code. The eri driver, for example, probably has a couple thousand lines of MII related auto-negotiation logic in it.
   
   And of course, each of these negotiation frameworks takes a slightly different set of tunables and configuration parameters, exports different statistics, etc.
   


2. Lock management is so much simplified
   
   It's reallyeasy to write a GLDv3 driver that doesn't hold locks across GLDv3 routines. I suspect a lot of deadlocks/hangs/panics are going to be solved by moving drivers to GLDv3. (Of course, we've seen locking problems higher in the stack as a result... see recent deadlocks in dls, etc. But we only need to solve those once with GLDv3. Yay.)
   


3. The kstat framework for GLDv3 is just plain broken.
   
   There are several problems here.
   
   
   • All kstats for a media type are included, regardless of whether or not they make sense for a specific device. For example, the cap_rem_fault is not supported by most of the drivers yet, but yet, when the driver doesn't have support in mac_stat(), the statistic is included in kstat output as 0. However, pretty much any system with an 802.3u compliant MII does in fact support the rem_fault MII field. So in this case, just because the driver isn't exporting the stat, the framework is creating an outright lie. This is probably true of other stats as well. For example, if hardware isn't prepared to report runt_errors, then it doesn't make sense to claim that value as "zero".... because you might be flooding the device with bad packets, which just get dropped on the floor (perhaps getting accounted in some other, less granular "BadPackets" counter or somesuch.) Better to say nothing than to tell a lie, IMO.
     
   
   
   • kstat's are normally "snapshotted", so that you can take a snapshot of all stats in time at once. This is common with some hardware devices, too. Getting these stats may be expensive though. (For example reclaiming transmit buffers, so you can collect transmit status, etc. Acquiring locks. With some devices you might even have to do an expensive collection effort that would normally cv_wait for an interrupt.) Having to go through this several times (once for each stat collected) for a single snapshot is ... inefficient. It would be nice to add a mac_stat_update() entry point, which is separate from the mac_stat() entry point. (Even better, also add a mac_stat_done() to release any resources acquired by the first call.) The good news, I think, is that hopefully we aren't going to have to support DLPI DL_GET_STATISTICS_REQ, so it should be safe to cv_wait in mac_stat() related calls now (unlike with older GLDv2.) We aren't supporting the DLPI statistics calls, are we? Please say we aren't....
     
   
   
   • If the driver wants to export any additional driver-specific statistics, it has to do the whole kstat dance itself, in addition to the nemo mac_stat() entry point. Lets try to find a way for drivers to export/register additional driver specific kstats within the existing nemo framework, please?
     
   
   
   • Duplication. E.g. for bge, there is a "bge0" kstat, created by dls, as well as a "mac" kstat created by the mac module. Both of these will have some common counters, like ipackets64, brdcstxmt, etc. What's worse, one stat in particular, "unknowns" is counted by the dls framework in the "bge0" stat, but is not counted by the "mac" stat. This can lead to confusion. The duplication also makes worse the snapshot problem already mentioned, since it appears that most of the stats are generated just by calling the mac_stat() a second time for the same values already recorded in the "mac" kstat.
     
   
   
   • Inadequate list of kstats in the default set. I found several kstat which were missing. We got several of them getting fixed as a result of PSARC 2007/220, but I've since found a few others. E.g. Ethernet devices commonly can detect "jabber timeouts". These should be reported somehow. Also, stats about network related interrupts are really important, and aren't included by default. I consider this a significant shortcoming. I guess devices should register a KSTAT_TYPE_INTR kstat, but approximately none of them do today.
     
   
   
   • Stat cleanups in drivers. This is mostly a driver-specific problem, but look at the kstat output on bge and e1000g, and see what I'm talking about. There is a total lack of consistency here.
     
   
   
4. We really need Brussels.
   
   From the above, you see the problems with kstats. There are similar problems with NDD. The amount of code scattered around different drivers trying to figure out NIC tuning is boggling. And most of it isn't what you'd call "sterling examples of quality". The eri driver was full of some really, really fragile code in this. (Deleting one tunable ... the instance ndd parameter... required updating no fewer than 4 different locations in the driver. And they weren't conveniently co-located.
   
   Interpretation of values, handling, all of it is terribly replicated across so many drivers. I can't wait to eradicate this crufty, horrid code, and replace it with something nice and sane from Brussels.



5. Some drivers can change internally to work even better with GLDv3.
   
   In eri, for example, I think we can be smart on the transmit side, so that, for example, when a group of mblks comes down, we don't kick the hardware and resync the descriptor rings until all the packets are queued for transmit. This would help amortize some per-packet expenses across multiple packets.
   
   Other drivers can benefit from multiaddress support. dmfe falls into that category.
   
   That said, my approach so far has been the naive conversion. I'd like to revisit a few of them to enhance them to take advantage of the superior design in GLDv3, but first I want to get them put back.
   

dmfe crossbow conversion

In case you ever wondered what it takes to convert a "simple" GLDv2 driver to Nemo, have a look at the webrev I posted earlier today.

I'm hoping that this work will get integrated soon. As an upshot, dmfe with this change "just works" with dladm show-dev.

report from the battery team

I'm now a member of the "battery team". I had a very productive con-call with the folks involved, and I think we are going to soon have a better common framework for battery APIs in the kernel so that SPARC systems can also take advantage of the gnome battery applet. Watch this space!

afe integration web rev posted

For the curious, I've posted a webrev containing the changes required to integrate afe into Nevada.

The driver includes changes from the stock AFE driver for Solaris, including some lint fixes, and changes to use the stock Solaris sys/miireg.h.

I'd love to make more changes to this driver, but at the moment I don't want to cause a test reset. Once the driver is integrated, I have a bunch more improvements coming... Nemo, multiple mac address support, VLAN support, link notification support (needed for NWAM), as well as code reduction by using some features that are now part of stock Solaris (like the common MII framework!)

Tadpole SPARCLE support putback

Core support for SPARCLE was just putback! I'm getting ready to post an initial tadpmu for public review soon, as well. This should make you SPARCLE/Sun Ultra 3 owners out there happy.

Not All Broadcom GigE's are Equal

Recently, I posted a blog entry where I described that "Not All GigE Are Equal", strongly advocating the use of Broadcom GigE devices when faced with a choice.

However, after spending time in the code, I've discovered that there is quite a range of differences amongst Broadcom gigE devices.

I had considered listing a full table of them, but it seems that would be a bit onerous. Take a look at usr/src/uts/common/io/bge/bge_chip2.c if you want to find out the gory details. But in the mean time, here are my recommendations:

If you have PCI or PCI-X: Choose a bcm5704 if you can. It has pretty much full feature support, but you need to pick a recent revision (newer than A0.) Look for pci ids of pci14e4,1646, pci14e4,16a8, or pci14e4,1649. These chips alls support PCI-X, multiple rings, full checksum offload, and multiple hardware tx and rx rings.

If you have PCIe: As far as I can tell, all of the PCIe chips that are Solaris supported lack support for multiple hardware tx/rx rings. This is really unfortunate, as it will have a negative impact on Crossbow benefits. But apart from that, it looks like the 5714 and 5714 series are your best bet. They both support jumbo frames, and they both have full checksum offload support. Look for pci ids of pci14e4,1668, pci14e4,1669, pci14e4,1678, or pci14e4,1679.

What this really says, is if you have to choose between a PCI-X card and a PCIe card, surprisingly, choose the PCI-X card (if you can get a 5704). Save your PCIe for framebuffers or HBAs. (Or, better, 10G cards like Neptune.)

blogger Atom bugs

As part of setting up the Tadpole project, I tried to use a feed direct from Blogger, but the OpenSolaris tonic infrastructure doesn't like it. Apparently the feed has some problems, which you can see by looking at the output from feedvalidator. Anyway, I was able to work around by using feedburner to convert the blogger Atom feed into a clean RSS feed. Maybe at some point some Blogger staff will look at this and see what the problem is.

hackergotchi... thanks Gman!

Gman (Glynn) made a hackergotchi from a photo I sent him, which is used on planet.opensolaris.org. His gimp-fu is great. Thanks Gman!

Tadpole project live

The Tadpole project is now live!

First Tadpole code review posted

The first review for Tadpole platform support is online now. Please let me know your thoughts, after reading it. There will be more good stuff coming soon, I hope. (Also, if you have a Tadpole platform other than a SPARCLE or UltraBook IIi, and are willing to test, please let me know!)

Thanks!