I've just submitted the RTI for hme. If the RTI advocate approves it in time, it will be in build 115, otherwise in build 116. This will allow you to use your old PCI qfe boards with OpenSolaris on x86 systems.
It also represents a significant simplifications of the code. Thanks to the folks who've helped with testing!
Monday, May 11, 2009
audio1575 driver for x86
This driver, with surround sound (5.1) support is pushed into Build 115. Stay tuned.
iprb suspend/resume and quiesce support in b115
I've just pushed an updated iprb with suspend/resume and quiesce support. Its still in the closed tree, but even so this improvement should help out folks who are stuck with one of these on their system board. Enjoy.
on the evils of auto-bounce/discard mailing lists
Some of you have already seen this rant from me. But I think its important enough to bring to the greater attention of the community.
Some mailing lists in OpenSolaris are configured to automatically bounce or discard messages sent from a mailing list that is not subscribed to that list. This is, IMO, a fairly toxic configuration.
At first glance, the idea seems good -- if your list only accepts member submissions, then you'll not have to deal with all the spam, and you don't have to moderate. The list can basically run from that point completely unadministered. Sounds good, doesn't it.
The problem is that this configuration is toxic to many discussions and to some users. As an example, I tend to get involved in many cross discipline conversations -- partly as a result of my membership on ARC.
And yet, my replies, often to important discussions about cases that might be interesting to certain communities, are often bounced back, because I simply am not subscribed to those lists. I don't want to subscribe to every list -- and I shouldn't have to in order to be an effective ARC member. A lot of times I just give up -- so communities are missing out on relevant conversation because of these configurations. This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
But it goes beyond that -- I'm also known by at least four different e-mail address -- one personal address, one @opensolaris.org, one first.last@sun.com, and one nickname@sun.com. People know me by all of those addresses -- so I'll be CC'd on conversations using any one of those addresses. When I reply, unless I am careful to remember to use the address I've subscribed to the list as, it will bounce on certain lists. Now its been pointed out that I can fix this by subscribing all of my addresses to the mailing lists I'm member of -- but who wants to subscribe to every list they're on 4 times? This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
The other situation is when someone has some new bit of information that they would like to bring to attention to a group of individuals, or ask a question, without having to be a member of the group. If I think I've found a bug in the TCP stack, should I have to be a member of networking-discuss@ in order to ask the group about it, or post the information? I suspect many such newbies hit the auto-bounce barrier for some of these groups, and just give up. The threshold for participation is simply too great. This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
So, all of these issues seem like they are negatively impacting collaboration. What is the solution?
Easy: moderate your lists properly. For heavily trafficked lists, it might take a few minutes a day to do this, but configure the lists to hold posts from non-members for moderation. If you identify a couple of volunteers to share the list password with, you can spread the chore, so that it is not too onerous for any one individual.
Those of you list owners with auto-discard/bounce set, please consider changing to a regular moderated list format. As attractive as the idea of a configuration where you don't have to do any work is, such configurations are actually hurting the group.
I'm done ranting about this for now. Thank you.
Some mailing lists in OpenSolaris are configured to automatically bounce or discard messages sent from a mailing list that is not subscribed to that list. This is, IMO, a fairly toxic configuration.
At first glance, the idea seems good -- if your list only accepts member submissions, then you'll not have to deal with all the spam, and you don't have to moderate. The list can basically run from that point completely unadministered. Sounds good, doesn't it.
The problem is that this configuration is toxic to many discussions and to some users. As an example, I tend to get involved in many cross discipline conversations -- partly as a result of my membership on ARC.
And yet, my replies, often to important discussions about cases that might be interesting to certain communities, are often bounced back, because I simply am not subscribed to those lists. I don't want to subscribe to every list -- and I shouldn't have to in order to be an effective ARC member. A lot of times I just give up -- so communities are missing out on relevant conversation because of these configurations. This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
But it goes beyond that -- I'm also known by at least four different e-mail address -- one personal address, one @opensolaris.org, one first.last@sun.com, and one nickname@sun.com. People know me by all of those addresses -- so I'll be CC'd on conversations using any one of those addresses. When I reply, unless I am careful to remember to use the address I've subscribed to the list as, it will bounce on certain lists. Now its been pointed out that I can fix this by subscribing all of my addresses to the mailing lists I'm member of -- but who wants to subscribe to every list they're on 4 times? This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
The other situation is when someone has some new bit of information that they would like to bring to attention to a group of individuals, or ask a question, without having to be a member of the group. If I think I've found a bug in the TCP stack, should I have to be a member of networking-discuss@ in order to ask the group about it, or post the information? I suspect many such newbies hit the auto-bounce barrier for some of these groups, and just give up. The threshold for participation is simply too great. This is a serious impediment to collaboration.
So, all of these issues seem like they are negatively impacting collaboration. What is the solution?
Easy: moderate your lists properly. For heavily trafficked lists, it might take a few minutes a day to do this, but configure the lists to hold posts from non-members for moderation. If you identify a couple of volunteers to share the list password with, you can spread the chore, so that it is not too onerous for any one individual.
Those of you list owners with auto-discard/bounce set, please consider changing to a regular moderated list format. As attractive as the idea of a configuration where you don't have to do any work is, such configurations are actually hurting the group.
I'm done ranting about this for now. Thank you.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, May 8, 2009
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. :-)
Nicely, though, 7zip had no trouble uncompressing the file. And, 7zip is stock on all recent builds of OpenSolaris. Very cool. :-)
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