DragonFly usability issues

[Andrew Thompson]

Hey all,

In my ongoing experiments to use dragonfly as my laptop's OS I've it several
snags which are seriously impacting how I can use this laptop. I'm not entirely
sure what's causing any one of them, so I'll lump them all together in one
thread and maybe I can get some ideas on what I can do to fix some of them. If I
can't resolve at least the really annoying issues I might have to find a
different OS for this machine (which I'd prefer not to do as I like dragonfly,
sedpite its warts).

The DCHP issue:
Thanks to sephe's help with the cardbus, ath and dc driver issues I can now get
online with this laptop. However, getting the atheros card to DHCP is a real
pain. Usually what I have to do is this: unplug the laptop's power cord (battery
is totally dead), boot the machine, switch the card to the other cardbus slot,
run `dhclient ath0`. If I omit any of these steps (with the occasional excpetion
of the first one) the card just times out trying to get a DCHP response. I'm
guessing the cardbus isn't initializing right and switching the slots makes
something happen which fixes something, but I have no proof. I also get
errors about 'bad vcc request' when I insert/remove either of my pcmcia cards in
the cardbus...

The temporary lockup issue:
Just doing common things (browsing the web, etc) after a while the machine will
lock yp for 5 seconds, the fan will come on and then the input will work again.
This happens repeatedly and the fan will come on and off a lot. This happens
whrn the system is not under any load and actually does NOT occur when the
system is heavily loaded (compiling, etc). It also doesn't happen until the
machine has been running for some time. I wonder if its some kinda misguided
power saving idling thing, but I really don't know.

The sound card:
I'd like to use the sound card on this machine, If I kldload the snd_csa driver
the sound card claims to be working, it makes noise if I cat junk to /dev/dsp
but I can't get mpd(pkgsrc/audio/musicpd) to work with it. In addition dmesg
spews lots of livelock errors like the following:

intr 3 at 50001 > 50000 hz, livelocked limit engaged!
sched_ithd: stray interrupt 7
iter 3 at 7921 < 20000 hz, livelock removed

I have no clue about this issue. I'd also like to note that the dragonfly
handbook seems to have ripped its sound part directly from fbsd 5.x and
therefore its's quite wrong (mentions of devfs and such).

Any help of any of these issues much appreciated. I am more than willing to do
any testing/patching that is required to help resolve any of these issues.

My hardware is an IBM thinkpad 570E with a PIII500 196 megs of ram and I believe
the soundcard is supported by the snd_csa module.

Andrew Thompson