Contributed by weerd on 2010-01-28 from the mips-r-us dept.

Bret Lambert (blambert@), your friendly OpenBSD hacker in Norway, writes in about some hardware requests that have been added to want.html recently.

The requests focus on (for now) unsupported or partially supported hardware that is under active development. Machines like the Lemote Yeelong, more SGI hardware and USB infrared dongles are being asked for and Bret asked some of his fellow developers why they requested this gear. Please read on for their replies.

Jasper Lievisse-Adriaanse (jasper@) would like a Lemote Yeelong:

The Lemote Yeelong is a netbook containing a 64-bit Loongson-2F MIPS processor. The OpenBSD port to this machine is still very new and more developers having access to this device will ensure it's maturing.

Otto Moerbeek (otto@) was also interested in getting one of these, but he already had his request fulfilled by a kind donor.

Gilles Chehade (gilles@) is interested in getting some IR dongles:

I have a few IR controlled devices and I figured it would be fun to play with them from my OpenBSD laptop. So I ordered this tiny USB IrDA adapter which is not recognized and attaches to ugen. After looking at the code from umodem(4) and uipaq(4), I decided to try to write a driver for my device, and after a few hours of work I managed to get something working. The driver makes device accessible through the ucom(4) driver which makes it behave like a tty(4). I would love it if people would send me a few different adapters so that I could improve (and learn more about) my driver.

Miod Vallat (miod@) would like access to some more SGI hardware:

Basically at the moment, we have support for all the high-end sgi hardware (including machines no other free operating system runs on), with the following things missing: SMP, except on Octane. SMP on other platforms coming soon (during the next release cycle, really).

frame buffers. jsing@ is working on this but slacking on his current code.

the serial ports on Origin 300 (hence the request for one), which prevent the machine to be supported at the moment (it's a headless machine). This is the kind of driver you can't really work on without having physical access to the machine.

the ATA part of the IOC4 chip on Origin 350 and Tezro (hence the request for one, since we know Origin 350 works). This is the kind of driver you can't really work on without having physical access to the machine, as well (the initial Origin 350 specific work was written blind in f2k9, and debugged remotely on Theo's machine, and it took about one week to fix the few bugs until interrupts got routed correctly, and I don't really want to live this again). As for what's been done, very roughly: by 4.6 we had a stabler-than-ever O2 support, and rough Octane, Origin 200 and Fuel support. The intent of the 4.6->4.7 release cycle was to get SMP working on one platform (Octane) and improve hardware support; and indeed, more mips-specific kernel bowels have been cleaned up, to pave the way for future work; hardware support has improved with support of the Origin 350 family, and more bugs have been fixed allowing most of the PCI devices, if not all, to work in these machines (this includes devices with PCI-PCI bridges, and Cardbus bridges, although the latter is not enabled by default). With this work over, the next release cycle (4.7->4.8) will focus more on SMP and the NUMA aspects of the high end systems: I intend to get SMP working on the remaining models (Origin family), and work on making the kernel aware of the memory physical location and connection, something which will benefit amd64 SMP systems as well. I also am working on extensive changes to the pmap code for these systems, allowing use of much more physical memory than the current limit of a few GB, and extending the userland address space beyond 2GB; the switch from 4KB kernel pages to 16KB on the high end systems, which occured during this release cycle, is one of the preliminary steps of this roadmap.

Helping out is easy - if you are interested in seeing support for the hardware that is needed or you have some suitable gear laying around that is not being used anymore, please contact the developers and help them out. Other hardware requests that can be found on want.html also need your attention, so if you'd like to support development but don't have a Lemote or a nice SGI box but do have some of the other hardware being requested there, simply send the requesting developer an e-mail.