OpenBSD Journal

Developer blog: marco

Contributed by marco on from the dept.

That's it for 3.9! tree locks are upon us so unless something critical breaks nothing will go in anymore. For me and Jordan this means stopping ACPI development until the tree is unlocked. So now it is of to test test test! That goes for you too, if you are reading this you should stop and install snapshots on as many machines and architectures as possible. We always appreciate test reports from folks in the field.

Looking back upon 3.9 we did a lot of different things. For me it was mostly sensor related (think IPMI & ESM among others). Theo, Mark, Alexander, Damien and I am sure I am forgetting some did some amazing work on i2c devices. Other noteworthy things are: brand new OpenSSH version, lots of C99 work, new driver for intel 10Gbe NICs and countless enhancements and additions to all parts of the tree. See a more complete list at: http://www.openbsd.com/plus.html. As a user of -current on a daily basis I am very pleased with the quality of this release. I am curious to see the artwork this time around :-)

So please test and make sure you purchase and ask others to purchase CDs! Purchase shirts and show the world that you are a supporter! Make donations as well, don't be shy. OpenBSD can always use the cash to keep operations going.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.248.227) on

    Will an AMD64 be able to pwerdown if I use halt -p?
    Otherwise the ACPI-Support (for me personaly) will be useless.
    I can test a Snapshot but what should I test on a TYAN S2882-D MB?
    I personaly don`t need to see the battery-status... (that`s the main impact of ACPI I noticed during reading your blogs).

    It`s sad that there`s no time left for the development (for 3.9) because I realy enjoyed to read about the latest succes/misstakes/fails of the ACPI-Stuff.

    But keep on hacking! You realy got a lot respect (in the userspace where all the "others" life..) because of your good blog!

    Hopefully other developers will start to post their development too sometimes. :)

  2. By SubAtomic Toad (24.80.113.124) subatomic_spam@yahoo.ca on

    Thanks to the developers. Finally the serial ATA devices I have a recognised on my Asus P4S8X. Good by Ubuntu.. hello OpenBSD! Ahh.. it's good to be back home.

    Comments
    1. By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad on

      Can you show a dmesg?

      Comments
      1. By SubAtomic Toad (142.231.50.1) subatomic_spam@yahoo.ca on

        Hi Brad,

        I'll post the dmesg when I get back to my home-office tonight. Needless to say the serial ata support that was in 3.8 did not find the hard drives that were attached, although it did detect the promise controller.

        As for FreeBSD, 5.2.1 was the last version that supported my serial ata drives without puking for some reason. None of the beta versions up to 6.1-BETA5 worked with them either.

        Now both Open and Free seem to be working without issue, no software / hardware changes.

      2. By SubAtomic Toad (70.68.170.15) subatomic_spam@yahoo.ca on

        dmesg available at

        http://reality.sgiweb.org/jpeltier/dmesg-no-pnp.txt

        and

        http://reality.sgiweb.org/jpeltier/dmesg-pnp-enabled.txt

    2. By Shane J Pearson (202.45.125.5) on

      Thanks to the developers. Finally the serial ATA devices I have a recognised on my Asus P4S8X. Good by Ubuntu.. hello OpenBSD! Ahh.. it's good to be back home.

      At what point did this happen for you? I ask because I am wondering if I should try another snapshot. I have a Sony VAIO VGN-A49GP which I originally purchased for some Windows work, but now that work is completed I wanted to put OpenBSD on it. Unfortunately OpenBSD does not see the HDD. FreeBSD 5.4 Rel works on that machine, detecting the disk as being PATA (on ad2 from memory) whereas FreeBSD 6.0 Rel detects the disk as being SATA, but crashes mid install with disk errors.

      I did submit to the dmesg request email. But since Sony are known to be a little quirky, I'm not holding my breath to get OpenBSD support and certainly would not expect OpenBSD to cover every crazy hardware implementation out there.

      I'd love to try another snapshot though if there is a chance I might be able to get comfortably back into my happy place. ; )

      Comments
      1. By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad at comstyle dot com on

        Support for the series of Promise SATA chipsets used on the Asus board in question was added just before the 3.8 release.

        There are known issues with some Intel SATA controllers depending on the hardware configuration. i.e. SATA drive or PATA drive with PATA to SATA bridge; also depending on how the BIOS is setup. Some BIOSes provide an option to switch between native or legacy mode, but the driver should be able to deal with a controller even if the option is not provided by the BIOS vendor.

        Comments
        1. By Shane J Pearson (202.45.125.5) on

          There are known issues with some Intel SATA controllers depending on the hardware configuration. i.e. SATA drive or PATA drive with PATA to SATA bridge; also depending on how the BIOS is setup. Some BIOSes provide an option to switch between native or legacy mode, but the driver should be able to deal with a controller even if the option is not provided by the BIOS vendor.

          Hi Brad, thanks for this info. The available options in my Sony's BIOS are very few unfortunately for me. I've even gone to the drastic extent of extracting the BIOS to a file and trying to modify it with the AMI BIOS tools which are available. Since it is supposed to be simple to switch BIOS menus and options on and off to make them available and then burn that BIOS image back to the machine. But the available AMI tools are too old for my new BIOS.

          From looking at the FreeBSD dmesgs, it looks like an Intel controller. I guess I'll continue trying to fix my BIOS (this will teach me for buying Sony) and hopefully one day I'll get lucky.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (208.252.48.163) on

    Would it be possible to add an identifier of some type to the article title? We've had a couple dozen "Developer blog: marco"s now and it's kinda tough to sort through, both manually and via the search.

  4. By aki (130.189.148.234) on

    Just upgraded my server (as always with mergeslave). 3.9 is another fantastic release. Subjectively mysql performance is better (?).

    Question: nForce 4 chipset supported? I have an amd64 system that needs an OS. If not, does OpenBSD run under virtual pc / qemu ?

    Comments
    1. By aki (130.189.148.234) on

      NForce 4 Add nviic(4), a driver for the NVIDIA nForce2/3/4 SMBus controllers Hmm, will have to five it a try

  5. By Anonymous Coward (204.9.40.20) on

    Has anyone else been successful in getting the 3.9 snapshots to run in VMWare Workstation? I get le device timeouts. I haven't had a chance to dig into this much further and submit a proper PR.

    Comments
    1. By Flynn (24.65.60.132) on

      Yup.. works fine on 5.5 Workstation.

      Comments
      1. By Flynn (24.65.60.132) on

        Just booted 3.9 latest snapshot and I get the same when using DHCP.

        Comments
        1. By Brad (204.101.180.70) brad at comstyle dot com on

          Are you booting with cd39.iso? Make sure to use the CD ISO. You should be using the pcn(4) driver and not le(4).

          Comments
          1. By Flynn (24.65.60.132) on

            I rechecked my old snapshot CD's and they were working fine on VMWare Workstation 5.5, booting pcn0 using the cdrom39.fs... the one I checked last night was built with the floppy38.fs and sure enough.. it doesn't work that great for VMware..

  6. By BSDDomi (85.116.203.230) dominique.werner@unix.net on

    I was hoping it would boot my new Acer 4100 series laptop but just like 3.8 it's stuck upon boot at pcibios.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (80.126.97.112) on

      I always had the same with my toshiba. BUT, some guy at the WTH OpenBSD booth took my lappy, got into the bios, disabled legacy USB, and rebooted. All is running smoothly ever since.

  7. By Simone Martelli (83.211.139.12) s.martelli@gmail.com on

    Hello Marco,

    openbsd still running on my AMILO now. SATA work very well but:

    Video drivers (ATI X700 with 128 MB) work in X only with DVI (with an external monitor)

    Audio Driver dont work (Azalia).
    Thanks

    Simone

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