Adventurist.me: Letters into the void
I learned about December Adventure in the middle of December last year, which is probably quite typical. I don't think most people get the words out in sync with the hacking and so there is a delay. Obviously that didn't exclude me, it wasn't the spirit of the event after all, but I didn't have the capacity. I thought I would make an attempt at December Adventure this year. I've been trying hard…
All the information on using uefi with qemu seems to aged out as projects have been abandoned. On FreeBSD (around 15-beta2) we need to get the uefi edk2 firmware, which is packaged: # pkg install qemu edk2-qemu-x64 This will provide three images, one of which we need to give to qemu with the bios option. $ pkg info -l edk2-qemu-x64 edk2-qemu-x64-g202308_5:…
I am trying so hard to not acquire more computers, but the need to test a ton of stuff and have a good reference platform forced my hand. Rather than do any research I took trasz@'s recommended Dell laptop as test target and picked one up from eBay, a Dell Latitude 7280. It was 65 quid with about a fiver in postage and there are a ton of them. So many that I wasn't super discerning when reading…
Here we are 8% of the way through the year and the end of January. Perfect time to check in with what is going on in FreeBSD. Goings on BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 I'm writing today above the North Sea on my flight to AMS on the way to Brussels for FOSDEM. The BSD Devroom is running tomorrow (Saturday the 1st of Feb) and there is a great line up of talks. If you are within a reasonable travel…
My favourite terrible computer has been locking up after a VM panics and I need to panic a VM a lot to find a firmware crash. The hard power cycle reboot loop is taking too long and I'm done with it. More annoyingly is is also hard locking up copying the VM off the machine. Thisb forced a trip to the attic, a reinstall of my large memory host (which for reasons had a 128GB NVMe, which is silly on…
Goings on FOSDEM 2025 is next weekend and we are fortunate this year to once again be running the BSD Devroom. The program is on the schedule I need help staffing the Project/Foundation table at FOSDEM, if you want to help send me an email (thj@freebsd.org). 13.5 code slush in effect The schedule currently looks like this: ports quarterly branch: January 1, 2025 reminder email: January 13, 2025…
Years ago for for EMF 2022 I got some badger badged for me and Phine as a surprise and promptly forgot to take them with me. After 38c3 (for which much writing is waiting to leave my head) it was really obvious to me that things are easier for strangers if they get a clue about who you are. As I will be at FOSDEM this year I thought I'd try and set up the badger with a contact card to make things…
Happy New Year and welcome back to FreeBSD Network Status Reports. I hope you had a great time over the Winter Pause (if you did pause) and are ready for another great year of improvements to FreeBSD. I have opted to do a mega report, there have been 705 commits to FreeBSD main since my last update so we should get going before any more sneak in. Goings on BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 The Devroom…
Sometimes you need to get packets from somewhere awkward, but you want to be able to stream them and do live analysis. Rather than dump to a file and ship that around Wireshark supports a bunch of modes to get remote captures, they are detailed on the Pipes Wireshark Wiki Page . I want to be able to get Air packets (WIFI!) from OpenWRT, but think about them on my FreeBSD desktop. I bought the…
The universe has conspired and I have had to leave the house or my 2024 travel development setup. The last month or so my office at home has been getting very cold and I have been pushing off my Wife's comments of "work in the warm bit" with the response that "I need the cables from my laptop to the computer to do development". Having been made to leave the house this excuse is going to fall apart…
I’m not great about backups, I’m probably very good at backups compared to most, but not compared to the zfs experts I know. They are an outlier and shouldn't have been counted. I am confused at why so few machines offer dual NVMe, I guess I understand laptops, but everything has space and power. If one is none then everyone should want their base storage to be a mirror. Ideally there would be…
I guess my winter pause project involves some software defined radio and it has been a long time since I've tried this. I borrowed the rad1o badge from a friend and have done some work to get it working as a hackrf . Thankfully hackrf ships a firmware for the rad1o badge and it is just an update to get it in sync with libhackrf, though you do lose the portapak features. In the intervening 8 or so…
10 years after my first visit I’m returning to the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC), run by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) for some time Chilling Chatting and Cdrinking (CCC). It’s been a long time since I last attended a congress, it was the final one in Hamburg and a lot has changed since. Returning to Congress I wanted to make a list of things I could do to make the event more special. I’m…
Pretty quiet week, driver changes normally come as large series and there aren't a lot this week. This week isn't an outlier. Goings on BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 The schedule for the FOSDEM is online . The BSD Devroom is only a half day with the following sessions: How FreeBSD security audits have improved our security culture Wake up, FreeBSD! Implementing Modern Standby with S0ix Tracking bulk…
Building on my earlier blog post on setting up PCIe pass through with bhyve , I've found a little time to move things around in my test bed and try something stupid. Bitcoin is certainly a terrible thing, but it has made some useful components super cheap (though they are getting rare again). One feature of bitcoin mining is that it is super low usage on the PCIe bus, you feed your GPU something…
Goings on BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 The CFP for the BSD Devroom at FOSDEM closed over the weekend, submitters have been told to expect responses on the 15th of December. I'll provide a run down of upcomming talks in the first status update of 2025. FreeBSD 14.2 was released Congratulations to everyone involved and a big thanks to the RE team for getting FreeBSD 14.2 out. The release notes are…
For the last little while I have been working on porting a WiFi driver. I initially planned to use one of my testbed machines, but the card I had wasn't supported by the original driver and locked up the system. While waiting for another card I spun up development on the Morefine M6 which had failed complete at its proposed role as a desktop mirrored storage array. The Morefine M6 has an Intel…
Goings on 14.2 Release Builds should have started today (or be starting?). If all goes to schedule the release will be out the door and announced on Monday the 3th of December 2024. BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 The BSD Devroom is back again at FOSDEM this year. The CFP closes on Sunday so this is your last chance to submit something. I hear The FreeBSD Foundation has a stand again this year, so if…
A cold snap has hit my part of Europe hard and it is feeling very seasonal. The rate of commits seems down this week, that is probably partially the 14.2 release and if I project a bit the weather. Some nice changes coming in the WiFi stack and to other tools. In other stuff that I'm not covering here there is some good progress on risc-v support. Goings on Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit The videos from…
The meta discussion is moving to the end of the report, meta meta discussion will hopefully be rare. Goings on Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit The Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit was last week. There were some great presentations which are recorded on the FreeBSD YouTube Channel . I don't know if or when the sessions will be broken up, you can scroll through the recorded live streams to find talks of interest.…
The thing I'm working on has gotten to the point of looking at pcaps. I love a good ol' hexdump (shout out to FreeBSD's in kernel hexdump and honourable mention to printf(9) offering bitfield and byte dump function. More than a hexdump I love a packet capture. When asked I'll say -xx is my favourite tcpdump flag narrowly beating out -ttttt . Wireshark expressions can get a bit cumbersome if you…
No stream this week, doing the streams in the morning means that if there is any pressure from elsewhere in my life that makes me later they become quite stressful. They also take a big exertion, running a stream and writing at the same time is hard work, even when no one speaks to me. I am torn about scheduling, things put off tend to get squeezed out, this was a motivator for doing them at the…
The report was streamed again this week, I have tried to advertise streaming in all the expected places (discord, irc, BSDNow Telegram). If I missed somewhere let me know. Goings on We seem to be back to a much more normal events calendar post-2020. There is a return of a BSD Devroom at FOSDEM and I am hearing about people attending many more events. It looks like the bugzilla tidy up is calming…
No stream this week, it would be an odd audio mixture of my keyboard, me coughing and blowing my nose, wondering what the cats are up to (we have a guest doubling the number of cats) and talking about compiler flags. I'll be back on next week if I can match the audio standard. Roughly 1000 UK time on Friday the 1st of November (whichever timezone that is next week). Goings on Quiet week on the…
Hey Folks, Here we are for the fourth Weekly Network Status Update. The big changes last week in the report were streaming of the writing process and sharing the reports on the freebsd-net and freebsd-current mailing lists. Thanks to everyone that sent me emails with positive feedback or corrections. All feedback is appreciated, it helps me know if anyone is reading these and it keeps me honest.…
I thought it would be a lot of fun to run Dwarf Fortress on the Pinebook Pro. Take this deceptively CPU intensive game, run it via a amd64->arm64 translation layer on a mediocre SOC. df has a native Linux build which is nice to avoid too much translation (WINE is never fun to configure), so this seem straight forward. I will save you the details, but this resulted in a Pinebook Pro with neither X…
Hey folks, here we are rounding out another week of development. This Network Status Report is an experiment I am making on documenting what has been happening in the FreeBSD network stack by generating reports with the help of some simple tooling. This is the third such report, but the first one I've really told anyone about. The previous reports are available here , some context and goals are…
Here we are for round 2, last weeks report can be and a little context found here: FreeBSD Network Status Week 39 2024 . All of the reports so far are available via the networkstatus tag on my blog. Goings on Since last week I haven't touched any of the tooling, I have been busy doing something else and it is a good exercise in making these reports "minimal touch". There are some manual edits in…
This is an experiment in creating tooling driven reports from the FreeBSD development ecosystem, git, code review and bug tracking. The goal is to provide an insight into what has happened in FreeBSD in the last little while, but with limited time to gather, assess and write up what is going on. I am only going to focus on "networking", which for this week was about a third of all commits to main…
Sometimes you need to play with ACPI tables, there are even rumours in the man pages of people patching up their ACPI tables to make them work better. This is not ground I have trod. FreeBSD has a tool in base called acpidump , but it is lacking in comparison to the full upstream tools you might use on Linux. The full Intel ACPI tools are available in the acpica-tools package on FreeBSD. With…
I'm not really sure if I want to own so many computers, but if you want to perform anything like science you need a lot of them. I have a small testbed which I like to say is an experiment in using gaming hardware for doing network science (I can report early that I wish I had enterprise motherboards with lights off management). Having more machines that I have monitors means that I need some way…
Ploopy: Ploop Ploopy Adept ploop plop ploop ploop, ploopy plop plop ploopy plop. Ploop ploop ploop ploop plop plop an excessive plop (ploopy ploopy plop plop plop 61 plop) ploopidy plop plop ploop ploop. Ploop the ploop ploop, ploop ploopidy ploop. Ploop plop ploop ploopy ploop, ploop ploop ploop ploopy ploop plop plop and plop plop adorable ploopy bearings ploopy plop plop. Ploop plop plop…
I have been poking around bhyve, seeing what is up and I came across this article about writing a Linux kvm driver from scratch . In the article is an example of minimal program to run as a first test in the kvm driver: ; Output to port 0x3f8 mov dx, 0x3f8 ; Store the address of the message in bx, so we can increment it mov bx, message loop: ; Load a byte from `bx` into the `al` register mov al,…
Debugging the FreeBSD kernel in QEMU is really straight forward. Get yourself some kernel symbols (either from the build dir or for /usr/lib/debug/kernel* ), load them into gdb, kick of QEMU with -s -S and connect. $ qemu-system-x86_64 ... -s -S ... The -S flag causes QEMU to wait for the gdbstub to start execution rather than letting CPUs free immediately. So we need to connect with gdb to get…
I haphazardly take notes while doing development, when real debugging is happening I fill folded pieces of paper with the names of functions and variables as they pop into notice and fade away again. I thought during the VPP port it might be nice to both have better notes, but to also share this process more. I constantly am on the edge with talking about what I am doing, I've internalised that…
I got an Atari Portfolio speaking to me yesterday, but actually doing anything with this machine will probably require buying expensive unreliable old accessories. This is what happened with the 68k Powerbook I acquired last year too. That is a cool computer, but it needs a new power supply and it could really do with some more RAM. RAM which of course is impossible to buy and impossible to make…
Last year my testbed machine got the luxury of 100Gbit Chelsio T6 network interfaces with a pair of T62100-LP-CR cards. I have been using these recently for VPP development on FreeBSD and while they work well I have been having a lot of trouble doing any packet generation with them. I got pretty miserable performance using netmaps pkt-gen on FreeBSD and trying Linux the comparative oddness of the…
In the Days before my fiancée and I explored Ottawa a bit, got stranded in a forest in Quebec and did our usual tour of coffee shops and book stores (got to make sure your bags are heavier on the way home somehow). The evening before BSDCan and the Devsummits is traditionally a meeting of the Editorial Board of the FreeBSD Journal and accomplices to discuss what we want to cover in the next year.…
The Ox64 (notice that is a letter 'O' not a 0) is a tiny microcontroller sized single board computer from Pine64. The Ox64 is built around the bl808 SOC from Bouffalo Lab. It has one application level 64 bit RISC-V core, a 32 bit RISC-V core and an extra little 32 bit RISC-V core for handling io. It is a computer in the form factor of a microcontroller and it is built around what seems to be an…
The VisionFive 2 is a RISC-V based single board computer from Starfive integrating their JH7110 SoC. The board is available from Waveshare on its own or with some handy components to get you started. The SoC is pitched to be a competitor to the RaspberryPi 4 in specs and along with oodles of interfaces it has a raspberrypi compatible 40 pin header exposing pins for io. The SoC is also in the…
I made it to and from the Electromagnetic Field . It was quite an experience to return to a hacker large event after so many years. A real review of the event will appear in the FreeBSD Journal this summer and I rambled a little at the end of BSDNow 459. I don't think I could have articulated before hand exactly how much I missed the massive influx of energy being around people doing things gives…
Castor and Pollux/samd21g18a.ld at main · wntrblm/Castor and Pollux Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? MIPS Assembly Programmming A Dual Processor VAX*11/780 Here are some links on lower level stuff. I have only read the linker script and the paper on the dual processor VAX. The other two are books that I want to get to one day and this blog is as good a place as…
The irony of writing a links post containing a bunch of links about productivity as a form of procrastination isn't lost on me. Mission Statement | Revue How To Not Suck At Writing | Defector Fifty Fizzbuzzes | Vi Hart Work with the Garage Door Up - Wild Rye Structure | The New Yorker The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan | WIRED part of the process means doing sub-par work…
Some Sunday evening reading about keeping old computers alive. A Continuous Integration Pipeline for the PDP-11 (2.11BSD) - Aaron S. Jackson Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network – Matt's Tech Pages Mac SE/30 odyssey Internet Access with System 6
Once a month for the podcast I read through about 20 articles so I know what to talk about on the show . This week when I was reading the article I thought 'this is really easy, maybe I can do this for all my browser tabs' This isn't really a fair comparison because the articles for the show are mostly short and the articles that fill out my tabs are the ones that were too long to read immediately…
My testbed has Nvidia/Mellanox/Chelsio 10GbE network cards which are quite old, but sit well in the price (super cheap) usability (they work great on FreeBSD ond Linux) spectrum. There is an issue on FreeBSD 14 -CURRENT where when you load the kernel module for the card (mlx4en) kldload hangs. If you hit control C the process will continue and the module will load properly. This is also an issue…
Tony needed his computers back, he is a great friend and so he offered me some replacements. This means that we get to make version 2 of the "The Bedroom by the bed testbed" . The first version of the testbed was built to answer questions of the form: "How does stock Ubuntu compare to FreeBSD?" Version 2 of the testbed continues this approach with an addition: How does stock Ubuntu compare to…
Current events have meant that my work place is now my home office, frustratingly this is also where I sleep. On one hand this has resulted in a very short commute, but on the other hand it does mean that I am living in close quarters with the computers I use for experiments, on the third hand (where did that come from?) it means that I get to have a testbed in the room where I keep my bed. Of…
On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 04:23:20PM -0400, ░▒▓░░ ░▐░▒ wrote: > Hi Tom. > I just not realized you've not have your inbox assaulted by our listener > feedback. Is there a specific address you'd like that routed to? > > Anyway, here is a choice one. > *sigh* ░▒▓░░ I don't know what we should do about Michael . I spoke to a priest about an exorcism and he said "I'm not going near that monster, not on…
It feels like work is just a constant stream of preparing, travelling for and giving presentations. Brief words and pictures is an excellent for conveying information between small groups of humans. All of these presentations I write in keynote , keynote manages to be light weight, powerful and not horrific to use. As a bonus, my boss feels at home in keynote and is happy to make edits there. The…