Older blog entries for lgerbarg (starting at number 26)

Still trying to catch up with everything that happened while I was away at BSDcon. I am almost caught up which means I can get back to working on useful things. Here are things that I intend to get some work on in the near future, in no particular order:

• Port Soft Updates to Darwin
• Redo the random code using either FreeBSDs or zeroknowledge's Yarrow implementation
• Look into porting ipfilter to Darwin
• Get Darwin x86 running on one one of my local machines
• Migrate to FreeBSD-current on another
• Migrate my systems to rackmount enclosures

Not sure about the last one, it is one of those things I always claim I am going to do, but never seem to get around to. Some of things on that list are definately not going to happen in the near future. Hopefully while I am doing work on some of them other people will do the some of them (well, if someone paid for everything to move my systems to rackmount I might be able to make the time to do everything else on my list ;-)

Got back from BSDCon on saturday. I would have updated from there, but I had some issues openning up a reasonably secure connection.

Did some work on Darwin, fixed a cosmetic bug in the Ethernet driver for my laptop, ported some optimizations from FreeBSD for /dev/null and /dev/zero, went back and forth some on /dev/random, and got myself into the position of porting softupdates ;-)

I met a bunch of cool people there, and generally just had a great time. I am still a little out of it (stupid time difference), otherwise I would probably write more.

Went to the SIG-BSD meeting last night. We have a lot of technicly competent people this year. We decided we should consolidate our work and try to do a major project. A couple of ideas were suggested. In the short term people are going to work on a custom FreeBSD install for rescue situations that could be used to make a bootable buisness card, and working on Jon Chen's cardbus code. Seems like a good time to get involved with that, since Jon told us last night it no longer panicked on insertion of a 16bit card 8-)

Longer term I am certain people are interested in working on the Open Packages project, it just seems a little to early to get involved with it.

I said I would be more then willing to help out on anything, but that my time was mostly consumed by Darwin. I suppose I have a funny definition of priorities, since I am primarily working on Darwin, but all I have been doing is working on Linux code recently. I think that is because my main machine is gone. Incidetnally, I love Apple's Repair Status page. So much better then waiting on the phone for an hour for the same info. When it comes home I will get my priorities back in line.

Thanx to Andrew Morton who figured out some more info about what is going on with the 3c556B. Gave the info to Jon and Dave, with an appropriate patch to the BSD driver. The card mostly resets correctly now, and probably is just fine for the casual user, but it is pretty clear we are not doing things quite right. I think we should have both the Linux and FreeBSD drivers done RSN.

Spent a good portion of this weekend fiddling with the 3c556B code, seemed like the reasonable thing to do since my Powerbook is not in working order.

The upside is that I now have tracked down the reset bug, and I ported the patch to 2.2.17, and 2.4.0-test8, and sent it to the vortex mailing list for people to tear apart. Hopefully it should make it into major release streams fairly soon.

I have to concede when my name was used in the same sentence as Donald Becker's on a post to the vortex mailing list I was a little taken aback 8-)

Jeff Carr from LinuxPPC emailed me and offered me a LinuxPPC CD. Having lurked on their mailing lists for a while (2 years or so) I happen to think most people involved with it really cool. Too bad I just don't really have the time for it right now.

Now I should go to bed, too bad I won't...

I was akmost caught up with thngs, time for karma to catch up with me, so my laptop is dying.

More exactly I think the fan is dead, and that all the other problems are overheating... well I know that things are overheating, whetheer it is the fan or a temparture sesnor (though I though CPU temp was measured through the ICTC on G3s), it is not happy.

Makes sense, I amwaiting for OS X PB, and my machine goes up in smoke, typical, typical

You know, I really should have hit enter yesterday, when I wrote this

Ugh, today was just one of those days.

I caught something last week. It has finally started to go away. Things were looking up. I had some things I wanted to do today, and a few things that I needed to do. It looked like I was going to get a chnace to do some optional stuff (Darwin work, some work on the 3c556B Linux driver, etc), now it looks doubtful and I am pulling an all nighter to boot...

I was about to go out to dinner with some friends, and I was brushing my hair in the bathroom. A bit of hair was caught in the brush, so I was pulling it out. All of the sudden this little black spec came flying out of the brush (probably one of those round things at the tip of a bristle). It got caught my eye.

I spent over 2 hours in the emergency room, the vast majority of it waiting. Fortunately the doctor got it out without a problem, and there were no scratches on my eye. Also, the anasthetic they used on my eye is not interfering with my vision, which means I can get my work done, even if I do need to pull an all nighter...

It has been a while since updated so here goes:

The installfest was a pretty big success. I organzied some big iron server hardware (well, pretty big comapred to what I usually deal with), Jon and Dave built a custom bsd install, and they finished debugging the FreeBSD driver update to support the 3c556B

I have been looking at porting Darwin to the 6500 class powermac. In trying to find info on its northbridge I have basicly concluded that the PSX/PSX+ northbridge is a scaled back version of the apple bandit northbridge. If that is the case this seems pretty reasonable.

I just got the 3c556B working under linux. My patch is against the Donald Becker driver, and only tested on a laptop with a very nastily botched eeprom. I will test it on a pristine laptop later tonight, and will port my patch to the stock 2.2.17, as 2.4.0, and whatever redhat includes with 6.2 (which is what I really technically need to support...)

I wonder if that means I should somehoe link myself to the linux project on advogato... I mean it really isn't much code, though it does get a NIC working. I did it as a favor, I don't even own the hardware, and I don't really use linux. Interesting question to ponder. Oh well.

Well, I have made most of the plans, I am almost certainly going to BSDcon 8-) That should be a lot of fun. Just some details to workout but all the important things are arranged.

Was reading kernel traffic, and noticed someone mentioned the PCI-id of the MiniPCI were using. I have contactedc some people involved with the vortex driver. Oddly enough someone else from RPI had also contacted them. We may be able to get this thing working in atimely fashion after all...

Rooneg Seeing as I am probably going to be de facto head of SIG- Macintosh, I would like to propose a joint discussion on Darwin for both of the SIGs. It should definately not be the first thing we do, but I think it could be really interesting. There are a whole bunch of ways we could go about it, I will hunt you down and discuss it later

Woke up late, spent two hours fighting with an Airport basestation. I drove to Philadelphia to visit my parents. When I got in a set my machine to airport, and it worked great. The next morning the airport was not bridging, though I could ping it from both sides. I needed to reload the firmware, twice. My mother thinks it is karma, as soon as I enter the house something (computer related) breaks...

I miss my TiVo. It is odd, but being somewhere where I cannot pause the television seems strange now. I guess I have become acclimated to it. Silly technology...

Some people on avsforum figured out how to get scheduling updates via a network connection 8-) I suppose I will have to fiddle with that soon, afterall I have a LAN in my house, but only one phoneline. I hope someone actually puts in the time to figure out how to interface the lan chip they have support for in their kernel to the motherboard. I am up for the soldering, and would prefer that to a ppp ethernet bridge. The edge connecter on the board seems to lead directly from the processor, and the chip appears to be interfaces that way, so it should be reltively simple to connect, if anyone figures out which addressline goes where, etc.

Well, the discussion about SystemStarter seems to have died down, I am not sure if anything was exactly resolved, but I think everyone has managed to think about it a bit, and probably has realized there is some margin on all sides. I think that I am going to look at the code I have written, decide if any of it is at all useful in anything resembling the scheme on the table, and if so isolate that and make a patch. I am not optimistic about that, but this was kind of a side project anyway, I just wanted to get it working for / dev/random. I was doing this for a few days while I was thinking about the best way to implement some of the entropy gathering, I think I will go back to that.

I tried to get FAQ-O-Matic to build on any of the machines I have CGI access on, it did not seem to like them. Maybe I should just get a sourceforge project, they probably have machines that are better setup for things like this. Or I could setup another maachine, but RPI seems to have completely revised some of the firewall rules, and it might be a real pain to get a new IP through it.

I spent a few hours playing with Larry's T20 tring to get its ethernet card (3com MiniPCI) up and running under linux. This makes no real sense to me, since I barely use intel hardware, I don't use any 3com hardware, and have not used linux in a year or so. I had no luck. A friend had a written a patch for FreeBSD. He told me I would have to map the rom and add the card id to the linux driver. I definately did the later correctly, not so sure about the former. He told me I should just look at the docs for the 905B otherwise. That does me very little good, since the driver I was patching already works with the 905B ;-) He also was supposed to submit-pr his driver, but I don't think he did... So I have two lines of notes consisting of addresses, and a linux driver that works for similar cards. I am not about to go poking around, since:

• I don't know how to twiddle pci from userspace under linux
• I probably would make assumptions about how things work based on my experience in the big-endian world
• I know that accessing the eeprom wrong can make the card unusable (though it can be fixed if you know what you are doing)
• The person who go tthe FreeBSD driver working has been writing 3com driver code for the last year, and was very familiar with 3com chips, I am not, and this card has no documentation

Oh well, I gave it my best shot. Given good documentation and a little while I could do it, given a few days and documentation, it is probably best left to someone who has some familiarity with it.