HP to Sell Solaris

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

Boomer webrev posted, screenshots

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 that's a hardware limitation. Notice that you have some additional features on this particular device: an optional 20dB microphone boost, and the ability to select from one of two different microphone inputs. These are device specific options.





The Options tab has some other bits. First off, notice the slider that lets you control the keyboard beep volume. This is device specific (it requires the system to be designed to route the PC beeper through the audio codec -- a common choice on laptops), but it can be useful.

On this system, you also have some jack retasking options. You can use the input jacks (mic and line in) as Surround and Center/LFE functions, as I've shown here. With this option, you can achieve 5.1 audio even on the original Sun Ultra 20. The Loopback option is intended to take your recording source and loop the input directly to the DAC output, bypassing the mixer altogether. I doubt it will be often useful, but since the hardware can do it, there is no reason not to offer the choice here. Note that most of these advanced options are not displayed by default in the application, but require you to enable them in the Preferences Dialog.

SDcard Panics, Ricoh Controllers

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.

Boomer Updates

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.)

Boomer Status Update

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 20!)
  
• We also have full support for Solaris features like suspend/resume and quiesce.

The not-so-good news:

• There are some features that will be MIA. SPDIF (digital out) support is very limited, only working with audiohd at present.
• We don't have as many new drivers (yet) as we had hoped.
• Dolby Digital (AC3) support has been pushed out to Phase 2.
• Support for Sun Ray is Phase 2 as well.
• Support for "virtual audio" (where the /dev/audio and /dev/dsp are virtual devices that seamlessly choose the "correct" audio device, and redirect audio in response to hotplug events -- even for running applications) is looking questionable for Phase I, it may be a Phase 2 item as well.
• At the moment, all of our drivers run at 48kHz and use 16-bit audio. We can update (and probably will update) some of them to support codecs that have additional bit width or higher frequency options, but this can be done on an as needed basis. (So far the vast majority of devices out there support only 48 kHz/16-bit audio, anyway.)

Boomer Beta Source Code Posted

Boomer, aka PSARC 2008/318 -- the new audio subsystem for Solaris, and the project I've been working on for the last several months -- has released source code for our work in progress. A status update and link to the webrev is available here.

Floppy drive suspend/resume fixed

Earlier today I just pushed a fix for suspend/resume when the machine has a floppy disk drive. Surprisingly, a lot of modern machines still have floppy disk drives in them, and this fix enables those platforms to participate in the S3 suspend work.

The fix will be in b105.

One such machine is the Dell Precision M390. I imagine there are many other desktop class systems of this nature.

While suspend/resume has been focused largely on laptops (where battery life is a paramount concern), I suspect that enabling suspend-to-RAM for desktop class systems will ultimately have a larger environmental impact, since it is those systems that typically consume the most power. So, perhaps this small change will have a somewhat significant impact.

If you have a platform that this enabled suspend/resume to work on, tell me about it. Include smbios output in your message, too. :-)