Tag: 2.1

Tritech Service System 2.1 progress

So far, only a few bugs remain in TSS 2.1, which is currently at  version 2.1-alpha5.  There are some problems currently being worked out with KMS support, which is the biggest issue so far.  The entire “init” system has been rewritten to replace traditional “init” with the runit-init tools provided by BusyBox.  The move to a partially modular kernel has been done, and we’re testing that out on machines to make sure it behaves as expected.  (Modular support is necessary for drivers that must load firmware, like most wireless network adapters and some of the KMS video drivers in the kernel).

We haven’t set up the “beacon server” features yet, mainly because some security issues need to be addressed.  Persistent home support has been thrown out for now, since we will be replacing it with something more robust in the future.  We’re not too far from the 2.1 release.  It’s going to be pretty sweet!  Stay tuned!

Update (2011-04-08): Up to -alpha7b2, trying to help the Linux kernel developers with some serious framebuffer issues.  It seems that Intel i915 framebuffers (inteldrmfb) like to cause a completely black screen at boot time on plenty of computers (and that’s even using today’s most recent git pull of the kernel code).  Radeon and nVidia once in a while has the same issue.  In the meantime I’ve built a second kernel that has all the graphics stuff stripped out so that we can use console-only mode.