giving up on iprb

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.

audio1575 driver for x86

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.)

7zip saves the day

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/qfe x86 and SPARC binaries

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.)

Via Rhine driver integrated

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.

ALI 5451 southbridge AC'97 audio integrated

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.

kaBOOM!

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