Sun Opening up more...

So I recently was informed that Sr. management has directed my team to move some of the engineering work that we have been doing "internally" to the OpenSolaris web site. This is more than just moving internal web pages outside the firewall, though. This is about starting to do the actual engineering work in the open.

The first two projects that my group is going to be doing this with are the laptop suspend/resume effort and the SD card stack. (The SD card stack needs to go through some licensing approval first, as the SDA organization doesn't allow for redistribution without a license. The "open" specs are "Evaluation Only" apparently.

Anyway, this is a sign that the practices already being done elsewhere in the company (cf. the networking group) are starting to take hold elsewhere, even in demesnes that have historically been strongholds of the NDA.

Watch the laptop project page at os.o over the next week or so to see what we put up there... and there will be mailing lists for the project engineering as well!

Backyard gallery

I recently checked our pool contractor's website, and found my backyard in his gallery. It looks pretty cool on his website. Check it out here.

dmfe putback done

I just fixed a bunch of dmfe changes... most notably, the driver will now support add-in PCI cards. Look for it in snv76.

SecureDigital, and other memory formats

So I've been tasked with writing a driver for the SecureDigital controller found on certain laptops. As part of this effort, I'd like to take a straw poll. If you could e-mail or post a comment on this blog, indicating your response, I'd be grateful. Note that this is only for folks with card readers that are *not* USB connected. (USB readers are already covered by USB mass storage.)

a) how many SDcard slots do you have?
b) do you use older MMC media?
c) do you have any SDIO peripherals? (I.e. devices other than memory cards.)
d) do you have slots other than SDcard (such as xD or memstick) that are important to you? Which ones? (Again, not for USB connected media readers!)
e) I'm interested in prtconf -vp output for different readers. If you're game, send it to me, along with the make and model of your laptop.

Thanks!

dmfe for x86 and unbundled PCI nics on SPARC

I've got a dmfe driver working on both SPARC and x86, and it supports some unbundled PCI NICs. (The original driver only worked with onboard dm9102s on certain SPARC hardware.) The Davicom 9102 part is not terribly common, but some low end NICs sold by companies like C/Net and Buffalo use it.

Hopefully this will be putback into snv75.

oops, qfe is b74

I lied... (not intentionally, I got confused.) The qfe GLDv3 port is in b74, not b73. Sorry!

snv_73 goodness

Solaris Nevada b73, when it comes out, is going to have a lot of good NIC stuff in it.

* afe driver (putback yesterday)
* mxfe driver
* rtls on SPARC (including suspend/resume!)
* qfe GLDv3 support

Plus, there are a lot of good networking improvements; a lot of stale code was removed (defunct mobile IPv4 support, detangling NAT, etc.)

There's a bunch of carryover from snv_70-72 too...

I for one, can hardly wait.