/dev/dump

Using my new framework changes (which have not integrated yet), along with changes in the framework designed to simplify drivers by providing certain ordering guarantees, I've been able to shrink a lot of the audio drivers (and in the process have also found a number of small bugs that I think ultimately were responsible for jitter and corruption). Ths simplest driver so far -- audiovia97, which is about as simple an AC'97 driver that can be, is only 686 lines. Several others are now less than 800 lines, and no longer need any locking primitives. As far as device drivers go, this is minuscule. In fact, I challenge anyone to identify a driver that fully services any "real" piece of hardware, fully supporting said hardware, in fewer lines of space. (And in case you are wondering, a significant fraction of those 686 lines of audiovia97 is still comments and whitespace and even the 30+ lines of boilerplate -- the driver is written to be as readable as reasonably poss...

I was looking, and one of the legacy device drivers we still support is the Enterprise 10000 Inter-Domain Network. This is a memory based interconnect network that emulates an ethernet. It occurs to me that we could update this driver to use the GLDv3, which would potentially have a significant performance boost for it. (Really, a better solution would be to create a new low level MAC type for it Nemo, but clearly that's probably too much pain for a product that is no longer shipping). Anyway, I'd be interested to hear of any sites which use IDN on E10K class systems, and would like to see this (already high performance) network get another boost. The other legacy SPARC drivers which are not GLDv3 compliant are: cassini (ce) (probably never going to be GLDv3, but that's another matter) gem (ge) -- this one could be easily converted *if* I had fiber cards to test it with, although there are political concerns as well. (It uses the same MAC controller as "eri",...

I integrated a replacement for mixerctl (and also removed mixerctl) back in build 130. Well, build 130 is coming out really soon (I believe it is available internally in SXCE form now.) I think therefore that it is time to provide more detail here about the new audioctl syntax: NAME audioctl - audio mixer control command line application SYNOPSIS audioctl list-devices audioctl show-device [-v] [-d device ] audioctl show-control [-v] [-d device] [control ...] audioctl set-control [-v] [-d device] control value audioctl save-controls [-d device] [-f] file audioctl load-controls [-d device] file DESCRIPTION The audioctl command is used to control various features of the audio mixer and to get information about the audio mixer and the audio device. The audioctl command operates on the following data types: device An audio device, such as "audiohd#0". The subcommands that accept this do so as an argument to an option -d. ...

I am frequently needing to know "which system am I using". (I have trouble keeping track of which ones are which) -- i.e. is this the laptop, the Ultra 20, the whitebox, etc. I had been using smbios a lot, but that's a bit awkward and non-portable to SPARC or systems that don't support smbios. Here's a quick script that can quickly tell me what model I'm working on. It works on SPARC and x86 alike. I have it stored in ~/bin/system -- it only works on Solaris of course. Feel free to borrow, reuse, whatever -- I hereby donate it to the public domain: #!/usr/bin/ksh sysconf=`/usr/sbin/prtdiag | head -1` biosconf=`/usr/sbin/prtdiag | head -2 | tail -1` sysconf=${sysconf#*:} biosconf=${biosconf#*:} sysconf=`echo ${sysconf} | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^ //g'` biosconf=`echo ${biosconf} | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^ //g'` if [ -z "$sysconf" ] then printf "BIOS: %s\n" "$biosconf" else printf "%s\n" "$sysconf...

Some of you may know that I keep a salt water reef aquarium (210 gallon). Well, one of the challenges with such aquariums is lighting -- most corals need a large amount of high quality light to grow. Most systems use metal halide lighting, which is extremely bright, and extremely hot. On my aquarium I've used three 250 watt MH lights, supplemented by a pair of 150 watt MH lights. (The 150s have been out for a while due to a bad ballast.) Yes, that's over a kilowatt in lighting. And MH lights have historically been considered some of the most efficient lighting -- i.e. most lumens or PAR per watt. One alternative that has been up and coming has been LED based lighting. High power LED systems offer a lot of potential capabilities (although due to a patent problem that has put at least one company out of business and probably set the industry back at least five years, software based control of LEDs is only available on extremely expensive lighting systems -- systems costing...

Its been pointed out to me that if you use Virtual Box and Solaris guests with recent builds (say newer than 124), that you might get a bad sound in the Solaris guest. Turns out that the problem is that the Boomer stack has increased its timing accuracy to a higher limit, beyond what Virtual Box can provide. We're going to fix this properly soon... but in the meantime, you can just edit /kernel/drv/audio810.conf and change the play-interrupts to 30 in the guest. This is CR 6901849 in case anyone is tracking it closely.

While I probably say this about other things (C++, perl), I think I've found something else it applies to -- the OpenSolaris Live CD. The Live CD attempts to offer both a "Live Use" environment, and a "full" (for some value of full) installable copy of OpenSolaris. The problem with this is that we have way, way too many things duplicated on the Live CD. For example, two copies of Mozilla, two copies of Evolution, and two copies of Thunderbird. (One copy each to run in the live environment, and one copy in packaged form for installation.) This is crazy . People who want to play around with an operating system don't need two different mailer packages. In fact, one could argue that if I'm going to use a Live environment, the CD is not going to be my method of choice. I'm going to want eithe a DVD, or (more likely) USB media where I can get faster performance and have more options. Trying to keep a live demonstration environment in the confines of ...