audiovia97 pushed

I've pushed the audiovia97 device driver. Those of you with Via 82C686 south bridges will be able to make use of your on-board audio in OpenSolaris builds 121 and beyond. Enjoy.

Boomer Paper at KCA

I presented a paper covering Boomer at Kernel Conference Australia 2009. I've made the paper and slides available for your enjoyment.

Off to Brisbane, Austrialia

I'm headed to Brisbane for the week -- I'm presenting at Kernel Conference Australia 2009. I hope to meet other like minded UNIX kernel nerds there. Maybe do some snorkeling as well, although its the off-season there. (But it can hardly be colder than the water in California...)

STREAMS and non-STREAMS in the same driver

Some of you kernel hackers may be interested to know about my case (PSARC 2009/380) that eliminates one of the ancient limitations of Solaris -- having STREAMS and non-STREAMS entry points in the same device driver. I've also implemented it and am waiting for the case to time out before I submit the RTI.

As part of this, I also implemented a set of changes to the audio stack -- the austr(7D) "speecial" node and driver goes away, and the Sun audio personality sheds about 1,000 lines of complexity. I'll be pushing those changes later, once I've gotten code review feedback. (If you review the changes, please let me know!)

mii related fallout

So there was some fallout from my mii push. Elxl devices had a nasty panic, which I fixed in time for build 119. Some older i82557 (iprb) devices had problems as well. The push for this fix went into build 120. To everyone affected, please accept my apologies. Build 120 should be stable for these devices.

Common MII/GMII layer integrated

Folks working with 802.3 (Ethernet) hardware (10/100/1000) can rejoice, as I've now integrated PSARC 2009/319, which provides a common MII and GMII layer for Ethernet device drivers. The first batch of drivers (iprb, dmfe, and afe) have been converted. This brings support for SunVTS netlbtest, dladm based link management, and even (for some devices) 802.3 flow control (aka Pause Frames) to these drivers.

I'll encourage folks working with other drivers to update their drivers to support the new framework. On average it cuts about 1500 lines from most drivers, and generally improves device functionality.

And yes, it works with Ethernet, even 1000Base-X should work (although only 1000Base-T has been tested.)

Any device that supports Clause 22 of 802.3 should work. Clause 45 (typically 10Gb) is not supported, however.

audiovia97 webrev posted

I've posted the webrev for audiovia97. This was covered by PSARC 2009/321. This is a driver for older Via 82C686 south bridges, used with 32-bit Via C3 and Pentium-III class processors.

The driver was written by 4Front (apparently building upon other Boomer work I've done). All I've done for this is simple packaging, cstyle fixes, and integration.

Let me know if you want early access to binaries! (You'll need Boomer or build 115 or later installed to use it.)