OpenBSD Journal

Developer Blog: marco

Contributed by marco on from the donations and stuff dept.

Over the last few weeks I have been very busy with the donation drive. That was quite a bit more work than I anticipated. Good news is that we are doing relatively well here. It's pretty nice to see the community step up and help us out. I'd like to extend a big thank you to all the folks and organizations that sent us money. What is also encouraging is that people are signing up for the monthly paypal subscriptions.

We still need more money so keep those donations coming! Other good news is that I finally found some time to do some code too. I started working on the mfi driver. That is the next generation RAID cards from LSI. MFI stands for MegaRAID Firmware Interface. It is an extremely clean and well written spec. The drivers that are currently out there are pretty minimal (FreeBSD and Linux). Not so good news is that there doesn't seem to be any open code for the RAID mgmt interface. That looks to be a reverse engineering job. Oh well, thats still pretty far away. Lets see if we can get some IO going first.

I created a skeleton driver and I am adding functions as I go; it'll be a few weeks before it gets anywhere useful. I am a little non-conventional when it comes to writing code. I prefer to do it in tree while other developers prefer to have it ready before they commit it. The reason for that is that I am pretty disorganized when it comes to keeping local trees in sync. Keeping it in the big tree enables me to work from just about anywhere. Also a few weeks ago I heard the magic *ploink* sound and lost my laptop drive. With it went a lot of ACPI and MPT patches.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (70.64.168.57) on

    Hehe. Good to see that even OpenBSD developers forget to make backups. :)

    I don't feel so bad now about the last time a drive died and took all my code with it.

    Comments

    1. By David Gwynne (220.245.180.133) loki@animata.net on

      http://www.blahonga.org/~art/rant.html. Have a look at the entry on 2005-12-29.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (70.162.91.58) on

        Lemons out of lemonade, eh?

  2. By gwyllion (213.119.12.110) on

    Why didn't you start from the FreeBSD driver if it exists?

    Comments

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

      Due to the differences in the operating systems the FreeBSD driver can be used as a reference only and that is what is being done.

    2. By tedu (71.139.182.193) on

      the freebsd scsi layer is more than a little different.

  3. By Poor but Willing (70.57.117.162) on

    Any chance of credit/debit card subscriptions? (I'd just forget to put the money in a PayPal account.)

    Or, failing that, I could set up an automatic check-writing service through my bank. Is there a minimum check size? (Not trying to be cheap... I'm trying to avoid annoying Theo on a recurring basis. :-)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (72.130.254.110) on

      I'm no PayPal expert, but whenever I have used it my card was charged for the amount.
      I don't know how things work with subscriptions.

    2. By morsello (201.37.131.28) morsello@gmail.com on

      I make a montly donation using a Paypal account charging my credit card.
      There are no misteries on that. Try it yourself.
      And remember 2 CDs per year = US$ 5 per month.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (67.64.89.177) on

        12 * 5 = 60
        2 CD = 2 * 45 = 90

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (70.162.91.58) on

          He's claiming that they clear $30 on each CD, so instead of buying CDs he just gives a few bucks every month (and likely uses the FTPs). I would argue that getting the CDs has a very large secondary advantage of reducing load on the ftps, and thus buying them is still the better move.

    3. By jared spiegel (67.139.90.84) jrrs@ice-nine.org on

      our paypal is tied initially to our checking account and uses a credit card for fallback. i hope people do sign up for the monthlies, but moreover i hope they don't try to bottom dollar it. if we're talking about trying to come up with a minimum reasonable amount, i think 20USD worth/month is an excellent floor. who among anyone who is considering it doesn't have $5/week they can't part with? that's ~ a single pack of smokes or mcdonalds run or sixpack of cheapass hooch, etcetc. i can remember where $5/week was something that definately had to be budgeted in, but it still could be budgeted... also it's (20USD) the default on that www form when i did it. 20USD/mo is less than the PRICE OF A CUP OF COFFEE PER DAY </sally struthers>

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.84.108.32) on

        "20USD/mo is less than the PRICE OF A CUP OF COFFEE PER DAY"

        So is supporting a starving child in Africa. Which would you rather I do? Give money to otherwise gainfully employed volunteers so they can build yet another operating system? Or feed a starving child?

        I say be happy with what people choose to donate.

  4. By Simon (84.57.71.206) on

    I'm from Europe and I don't own a CC. Should I do a monthly bank transfer to the Belgian bank account instead of monthly PayPal?
    Shouldn't make no difference, should it?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (67.64.89.177) on

      Yes. As far as I know all banks in Europe support "monthly payments" through their internet banking systems.

      Comments

      1. By Simon (84.57.71.206) on

        Ok, thank you. So i'll do that :)

      2. By Adriaan (80.100.68.193) on

        In Europe You can open a Paypal account and authorize Paypal to debit your bank account. From https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/ema/index-outside

        "Pay with your bank account, debit card, credit card or your PayPal balance. The choice is yours"

        So you don't need a credit card at all ;)

  5. By Dunceor (192.16.134.66) on

    I'm impressed how you get the time to devote yourself to the OpenBSD project. With work and some time with the girlfriend I hardly find any time to code on my own projects. Hats of for all the time you put into this on a voluntary basis.

  6. By Andreas Lundin (193.11.184.159) on http://dreamhosted.se/~lunde

    I thought LSI was one of the "good guys" when it came to docs and RAID management. Has this changed with these new controllers?

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