In the light of the recent bench­mark dis­cus­sion, a vol­un­teer imported the tun­ing man-page into the wiki. Some com­ments at some places for pos­si­ble improve­ments are already made. Please go over there, have a look, and par­tic­i­pate please (testing/verification/discussion/improvements/…).

As always, feel free to reg­is­ter with First­name­Last­name and tell a FreeBSD com­mit­ter to add you to the con­trib­u­tors group for write access (you also get the ben­e­fit to be able to reg­is­ter for an email noti­fi­ca­tion for spe­cific pages).

Stephen Montgomery-Smith posted some patches for bsd.port.mk to the ports mail­inglist to speed up the pack­age depen­dency list cre­ation. He did cut down the time from about 2min30sec (pack­age depen­dency list of gnome2, tested on my sys­tem) to about 15-18sec. I enhanced this and now the time is down to about 12sec and a lot less pro­grams to exe­cute in the call (may be impor­tant on slow systems).

The patch for bsd.port.mk in my ports-patches direc­tory con­tains more than only those improve­ments, the other part is not sub­ject to sub­mis­sion yet.

If nobody finds some prob­lems with the patch I will send it to GNATS and assign it to port­mgr for inclu­sion into one of the next exper­i­men­tal ports builds.

Ariffs changes two months ago to reduce the latency in the soundsys­tem also pre­pared the way for mul­ti­chan­nel sup­port and Yuriy added mul­ti­chan­nel record­ing to the emu10kx dri­ver (there are some bugs ATM and it is only a proof of con­cept to play around with it until we get real mul­ti­chan­nel sup­port in the generic sound code). Ryan tries to get some time (let’s cross fin­gers!) to con­vert a dri­ver (prob­a­bly the emu10kx dri­ver) to use the new mixer infra­struc­ture before he has to con­cen­trate on his stud­ies again.

This looks like we could get some very nice stuff this year.

Drag­on­Fly synced with a not so cur­rent ver­sion of our soundsys­tem. I had a lit­tle dis­cus­sion with them and pointed out some recent improve­ments and some dri­vers they missed to sync. They don’t have the man power to par­tic­i­pate in large improve­ments, but I hope for some small ben­e­fits like bug­fixes or addi­tional PCI IDs. I also pointed out the wiki page, maybe we can get some addi­tional sen­tences (we are lack­ing con­tent there, feel free to help out with a sen­tence or more!) there from them. It doesn’t make sense to split the effort, so I offered to share the page with DFly.