[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-05-12 16:54, ken mays wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Just so we can tack up a goal for the visionaries who like roadmaps and
> such...
>
> Proposed list of 'core' updates for oi_151a(8-9):
>
> *   Bump illumos to 19e11862653b
>          Implement accept4()
>          stack overflow due to zfs lz4 compression
>          Fast reboot support in ixgbe
>           Chelsio 10GbE driver support
>          Support LSI SAS2008 (Falcon) Skinny FW for mr_sas(7D)
>          Allow ixgbe to use unsupported SFP modules
>          detect socket type of newer AMD CPUs
> *   New JDS package updates (2013-04-09)
>             from: http://pkg.opensolaris.cz/osol/en/index.shtml
> *   Wifi Stack improvement patches (enrico)

I have some more suggested milestones, though not necessarily
holding back some imminent release (just something that would be
good to do soon, and likely requiring not much work to complete).
Maybe, this might make it into oi_151a9 (if a8 would be packing
up what we already have in JDS and illumos-gate today)?

If possible to RTI by then, or just post to some "testing" repo,
there has been some good work done about other networking drivers,
at least those that concern me - in particular, ndis 64-bit for
Broadcom WiFi by Jean-Pierre Andre, and I'm in touch with Masa
Murayama (The Free NIC Drivers project) regarding my rge/gani
NIC. It turned out to be a newer RTL8168 chip than was supported
by gani-2.6.9, so he sent me an updated version for testing,
which "just works" on my laptop. Now I have both wired and
wireless connectivity in OI, working and stable. This was a
good month! I've also set up failover with IPMP :) Earlier I've
had other computers where Masa's drivers were also invaluable.

Masa didn't reply yet whether he'd personally cooperate on RTI'ing
his works, but he didn't say "no" either, and they are BSD-licensed,
so... I don't know if there's any other upstream than occasionally
updated source+binary code tarballs (note that bins are GLDv2 default,
and should be easily recompiled for GLDv3) here on his site:
   http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

I hope that the extended sets of networking drivers can sooner or
later get into illumos-gate and/or directly into OI (including the
installer's Live environment) as the versatile distro that is set up
on very varied hardware (i.e. laptops made of whatever is available
du-jour and cheap to their designers).

HTH,
//Jim Klimov