c2k15: krw@ on softraid on 4k disks, cardbus on Dell vs Synaptics and Thinkpads

Kenneth Westerback (krw@) just came back from c2k15 and filed his report:

I arrived with two goals: offload a problematic Dell L400 I had had donated to me, and get 4K softraid working. deraadt@ and beck@ immediately pointed out that I was banging my head on the wrong brick wall for the L400 problems.

With their help cardbus was quickly identified as the problem. I quickly hacked a diff that both avoided the problem and so offended kettenis@ that he fixed the root problem.

I then got jcs@ (who had made the mistake of sitting next to me) to fix the major part of the other L400 problem, a broken synaptics trackpad. The resulting diff fixed the Dell and broke Thinkpads. kspillner@ fixed the Thinkpad issue and so both now seem to work. And then as a bonus I got mpi@ to take the laptop for somebody who wants to really fix the pms/wscons/etc., tangle. Problem solved!

I then got a lot of the 4K diffs I had prepared cleaned up and committed, after testing various combinations of crypto, RAID N, rebuilding, installing and so forth. The end result being a diff soon to appear on tech@ that will allow building softraid volumes with 4K sector disk drives. It even supports mixing 4K and 512-byte devices in one volume!

The hackroom at SAIT was excellent, and the coffee provided by afresh1@ and friends was AMAZING!

Overall a productive and enjoyable hackathon.

Thanks for the great work and the report, Ken!

Dear readers, more c2k15 will follow.