controller. These controllers are also known as L1C(AR8131) and
L2C(AR8132) respectively. These controllers resembles the first
generation controller L1 but usage of different descriptor format
and new register mappings over L1 register space requires a new
driver. There are a couple of registers I still don't understand
but the driver seems to have no critical issues for performance and
stability. Currently alc(4) supports the following hardware
features.
o MSI
o TCP Segmentation offload
o Hardware VLAN tag insertion/stripping
o Tx/Rx interrupt moderation
o Hardware statistics counters(dev.alc.%d.stats)
o Jumbo frame
o WOL
AR8131/AR8132 also supports Tx checksum offloading but I disabled
it due to stability issues. I'm not sure this comes from broken
sample boards or hardware bugs. If you know your controller works
without problems you can still enable it. The controller has a
silicon bug for Rx checksum offloading, so the feature was not
implemented.
I'd like to say big thanks to Atheros. Atheros kindly sent sample
boards to me and answered several questions I had.
HW donated by: Atheros Communications, Inc.
goal of shipping 8.0 with MAC support in the default kernel. No policies
will be compiled in or enabled by default, but it will now be possible to
load them at boot or runtime without a kernel recompile.
While the framework is not believed to impose measurable overhead when no
policies are loaded (a result of optimization over the past few months in
HEAD), we'll continue to benchmark and optimize as the release approaches.
Please keep an eye out for performance or functionality regressions that
could be a result of this change.
Approved by: re (kensmith)
Obtained from: TrustedBSD Project
- Remove vga0 and the disabled uart2/uart3 hints from both platforms.
- Remove hints for ISA adv0, bt0, aha0, aic0, ed0, cs0, sn0, ie0, fe0, and
le0 from i386. All these hints were marked 'disabled' and thus already
did not work "out of the box".
Discussed with: imp
as well as providing stateful load balancing when used with RADIX_MPATH.
- Currently compiled in to i386 and amd64 but disabled by default, it can be enabled at
runtime with 'sysctl net.inet.flowtable.enable=1'.
- Embedded users can remove it entirely from the kernel by adding 'nooption FLOWTABLE' to
their kernel config files.
- A minimal hookup will be added to ip_output in a subsequent commit. I would like to see
more review before bringing in changes that require more churn.
Supported by: Bitgravity Inc.
naming of the partitions (GEOM_PART_EBR_COMPAT). When
compatibility is enabled, changes to the partitioning are
disallowed.
Remove the device name aliasing added previously to provide
backward compatibility, but which in practice doesn't give
us anything.
Enable compatibility on amd64 and i386.
driver in Linux 2.6. uscanner was just a simple wrapper around a fifo and
contained no logic, the default interface is now libusb (supported by sane).
Reviewed by: HPS
- remove misleading nve/nfe comments, which make it hard to
distinguish those two at a first glance
- bring pbio documentation to the block comment together with
other drivers
I also brought commented out line responsible for si(4), since it
seems to compile and already has respective comment in this file.
need to explicitly list it here once again. This removes:
WARNING: duplicate option `DEV_URAL' encountered.
WARNING: duplicate device `ural' encountered.
Warnings when compiling LINT on amd64.
- correct format strings
- fill opt_agp.h if AGP_DEBUG is defined
- bring AGP_DEBUG to LINT by mentioning it in NOTES
This should hopefully fix a warning that was...
Found by: Coverity Prevent(tm)
CID: 3676
Tested on: amd64, i386
- add a reference to the config(5) manpage;
- hopefully clarify the format of the 'env FILENAME' directive.
I am putting these notes in sys/${arch}/conf/GENERIC and not
in sys/conf/NOTES because:
1. i386/GENERIC already had reference to a similar option (hints..)
and to documentation (handbook)
2. GENERIC is what most users look at when they have to modify or
create a new kernel config, so having the suggestion there is
more effective.
I am only touching i386 and amd64 because the other GENERIC files
are already out of sync, and I am not sure what is the overall plan.
MFC after: 3 days
to GENERIC configuration files. This brings what's in 8.x in sync
with what is in 7.x, but does not change any current defaults.
Possibly they should now be enabled in head by default?
Sgtty is a programming interface that has been replaced by termios over
the years. In June we already removed <sgtty.h>, which exposes the
ioctl()'s that are implemented by this interface. The importance of this
flag is overrated right now.
module; the ath module now brings in the hal support. Kernel
config files are almost backwards compatible; supplying
device ath_hal
gives you the same chip support that the binary hal did but you
must also include
options AH_SUPPORT_AR5416
to enable the extended format descriptors used by 11n parts.
It is now possible to control the chip support included in a
build by specifying exactly which chips are to be supported
in the config file; consult ath_hal(4) for information.
controller. The controller is also known as L1E(AR8121) and
L2E(AR8113/AR8114). Unlike its predecessor Attansic L1,
AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 uses completely different Rx logic such that
it requires separate driver. Datasheet for AR81xx is not available
to open source driver writers but it shares large part of Tx and
PHY logic of L1. I still don't understand some part of register
meaning and some MAC statistics counters but the driver seems to
have no critical issues for performance and stability.
The AR81xx requires copy operation to pass received frames to upper
stack such that ale(4) consumes a lot of CPU cycles than that of
other controller. A couple of silicon bugs also adds more CPU
cycles to address the known hardware bug. However, if you have fast
CPU you can still saturate the link.
Currently ale(4) supports the following hardware features.
- MSI.
- TCP Segmentation offload.
- Hardware VLAN tag insertion/stripping with checksum offload.
- Tx TCP/UDP checksum offload and Rx IP/TCP/UDP checksum offload.
- Tx/Rx interrupt moderation.
- Hardware statistics counters.
- Jumbo frame.
- WOL.
AR81xx PCIe ethernet controllers are mainly found on ASUS EeePC or
P5Q series of ASUS motherboards. Special thanks to Jeremy Chadwick
who sent the hardware to me. Without his donation writing a driver
for AR81xx would never have been possible. Big thanks to all people
who reported feedback or tested patches.
HW donated by: koitsu
Tested by: bsam, Joao Barros <joao.barros <> gmail DOT com >
Jan Henrik Sylvester <me <> janh DOT de >
Ivan Brawley < ivan <> brawley DOT id DOT au >,
CURRENT ML
The last half year I've been working on a replacement TTY layer for the
FreeBSD kernel. The new TTY layer was designed to improve the following:
- Improved driver model:
The old TTY layer has a driver model that is not abstract enough to
make it friendly to use. A good example is the output path, where the
device drivers directly access the output buffers. This means that an
in-kernel PPP implementation must always convert network buffers into
TTY buffers.
If a PPP implementation would be built on top of the new TTY layer
(still needs a hooks layer, though), it would allow the PPP
implementation to directly hand the data to the TTY driver.
- Improved hotplugging:
With the old TTY layer, it isn't entirely safe to destroy TTY's from
the system. This implementation has a two-step destructing design,
where the driver first abandons the TTY. After all threads have left
the TTY, the TTY layer calls a routine in the driver, which can be
used to free resources (unit numbers, etc).
The pts(4) driver also implements this feature, which means
posix_openpt() will now return PTY's that are created on the fly.
- Improved performance:
One of the major improvements is the per-TTY mutex, which is expected
to improve scalability when compared to the old Giant locking.
Another change is the unbuffered copying to userspace, which is both
used on TTY device nodes and PTY masters.
Upgrading should be quite straightforward. Unlike previous versions,
existing kernel configuration files do not need to be changed, except
when they reference device drivers that are listed in UPDATING.
Obtained from: //depot/projects/mpsafetty/...
Approved by: philip (ex-mentor)
Discussed: on the lists, at BSDCan, at the DevSummit
Sponsored by: Snow B.V., the Netherlands
dcons(4) fixed by: kan
features of CPUs like reading/writing machine-specific registers,
retrieving cpuid data, and updating microcode.
- Add cpucontrol(8) utility, that provides userland access to
the features of cpuctl(4).
- Add subsequent manpages.
The cpuctl(4) device operates as follows. The pseudo-device node cpuctlX
is created for each cpu present in the systems. The pseudo-device minor
number corresponds to the cpu number in the system. The cpuctl(4) pseudo-
device allows a number of ioctl to be preformed, namely RDMSR/WRMSR/CPUID
and UPDATE. The first pair alows the caller to read/write machine-specific
registers from the correspondent CPU. cpuid data could be retrieved using
the CPUID call, and microcode updates are applied via UPDATE.
The permissions are inforced based on the pseudo-device file permissions.
RDMSR/CPUID will be allowed when the caller has read access to the device
node, while WRMSR/UPDATE will be granted only when the node is opened
for writing. There're also a number of priv(9) checks.
The cpucontrol(8) utility is intened to provide userland access to
the cpuctl(4) device features. The utility also allows one to apply
cpu microcode updates.
Currently only Intel and AMD cpus are supported and were tested.
Approved by: kib
Reviewed by: rpaulo, cokane, Peter Jeremy
MFC after: 1 month
As clearly mentioned on the mailing lists, there is a list of drivers
that have not been ported to the MPSAFE TTY layer yet. Remove them from
the kernel configuration files. This means people can now still use
these drivers if they explicitly put them in their kernel configuration
file, which is good.
People should keep in mind that after August 10, these drivers will not
work anymore. Even though owners of the hardware are capable of getting
these drivers working again, I will see if I can at least get them to a
compilable state (if time permits).
The uart(4) driver has the advantage of supporting a wider variety of
hardware on a greater amount of platforms. This driver has already been
the standard on platforms such as ia64, powerpc and sparc64.
I've decided not to change anything on pc98. I'd rather let people from
the pc98 team look at this.
Approved by: philip (mentor), marcel
