April 2015 Archives
Thu Apr 30 01:59:00 CEST 2015
J names/locatives/locales and how they evolved
Wrote http://juggle.gaertner.de/bnp/locale-history.html, an overview how J identifiers/names and name scopes evolved since the beginnings 25 years ago.
Thu Apr 23 20:24:05 CEST 2015
second test with new old ral(4) fails
Visited my Dad's network with my new ral(4) driver and had no luck to associate with the access point. So, what different from my home AP? Both are running mixed 802.11b+g mixed mode and using WEP (yes, I know) for encryption. The only obviously different is the key length: 40 vs 104 bits.
Anyway: there's certainly more work needed, such as integrating all those 60+ patches made by the OpenBSD guys.
Tue Apr 21 19:02:19 CEST 2015
nguyen back on air
Finally done: updated /usr/src/sys
on
nguyen.marshlabs.gaertner.de
on its netbsd-6 stable
branch and adopted the old ral(4)
code as used with
netbsd-5 to the changed BPF interface of netbsd-6.
This work turned out to be rather easy:
/usr/src/sys/dev/ic/rt26{61,80}.c
have so much
identical code that I could essentially transfer what happened on
the NetBSD-maintained rt2661.c
to the OpenBSD source
rt2680.c
. Likewise for rt2680var.h
.
Generating a new kernel with the changes based on
config NGYUEN
cd ../compile/NGUYEN
make depend; make
wouldn't succeed though. The updated kernel also required a new
userland for a newer ACPI compiler. D'uh, 15 hours of serious work
for nguyen
but in the end:
ral0 at pci3 dev 0 function 0: vendor 0x1814 product 0x0781 (rev. 0x00)
ral0: MAC/BBP RT2872 (rev 0x0200), RF RT2720 (1T2R)
Those 15 hours are disgraceful. Two things which still bug me:
-
Even though I use
build.sh
with-u
, i.e. in upgrade mode, the entire toolchain and entire world get rebuilt. This doesn't feel right. MaybeUSETOOLS=never
in/etc/mk.conf
would help? -
The only reason for having X11 sources at all is that I like my
xterm(1)
compiled with theDABBREV
feature enabled. MaybeMKX11=no
would help? One would think so but hey surprise, that's the default setting anyway according tomk.conf(5)
.
Summary:
The interactions of mk.conf
and
build.sh
are still a mystery to me, but I can do WLAN
again now with netbsd on the netbook.
Sun Apr 19 03:52:16 CEST 2015
Recapulating old {Net,Open}BSD stuff
Much work for properly integrating the OpenBSD
ral(4)
extensions into NetBSD-6/-7:
-
Read basics about 802.11 and PCI on Wikipedia.
-
Read
ral(4)
device driver sources (essentially two C files) en detail in order to understand how the device gets initialized and how the interface hooks into the packetfilter. -
Understood the seperation into PCI frontend and actual device driver.
-
Finally understood the removal of / replacements for the
#if NBPFILTER > 0
conditionals between NetBSD-5 and -6; should be able to apply the patches now properly. -
Checked the evolution of the
ral
driver across old, current, and upcoming versions of both NetBSD and OpenBSD. (Lots ofcvs diff
andcvs log
.) Looks like I'll have to compile separate patchkits for both NetBSD-6 and -7, even though I can use the latestral(4)
version from OpenBSD in both cases.
Not really related:
I decided to give my PPC-MacMini another spin, booting it into the OpenBSD system I had installed along with the OSX-10.5.8 upgrade four years ago. It took me an hour to figure out the magic incantations required to boot into OpenBSD. So, before I forget them again:
-
While powering on, keep the 4 keys Option-Command-O-F (that's letters Oh-Eff as in "Open Firmware") pressed until the
OK
prompt appears. -
boot hd:,ofwboot /bsd
This turned out to be OpenBSD version 4.9. It needed an update to its interface configuration for the network I am now using since... three years now. Unfortunately, it has to share name and address with its OSX cousin; my /26 is already fully used again.
(There is another 2G partition reserved, suitable for, say, a NetBSD installation.)
Sat Apr 18 17:02:30 CEST 2015
If he only had known...
Back in the 90s I had a gray-scale printout of a PostScript picture hanging in my office which was slightly doctored. (The picture, not the office. Nor me.)
When I left academia, I took that picture with me, eventually framed it, and it still decorates my desk at home.
However, I never had the PostScript file, and for the last twenty years, I have been looking through various old disks / systems and googling the Intarwebs for it. No dice.
But this morning, after an entire night of wading through files
and directories, I finally found it. On the old DECsystem
ips
I had saved from being scrapped in 2007, in a sub
sub sub directory of Bernd Witte, the UNIX admin who tought me
a lot when I was just a user, there it was:
/usr/users/infbsps0/witte.old/dsm/qms/psexec18/nurse.ps
.
This was a sample file coming with a QMS laser printer we had in the basement (you guessed it: gray-scale only), and is the untampered version, still advertising "The Adobe Illustrator might have saved him".
I installed the ghostview suite on my ARM board
alexis
, and with a little bit help from
sed(1)
, we are back to the not-so-original version. So
without further ado, here is a low-quality jpeg rendering:
(This is the first time I see this in color.)
I blatantly removed the Adobe copyright notice, too. Hey, I DON'T CARE! I'D RATHER SINK -- THAN CALL ADOBE FOR PERMISSION!.
Fri Apr 17 05:47:12 CEST 2015
Work on hackett (more than planned)
While I was busy reading all those packetfilter man pages,
hackett
was busy compiling itself (kernel + entire
userland). This went all smooth but I ended up with the 376M / root
partition being full.
After some emergency rm
s and back to 4% free space,
I identified /var
to be a good candidate to be
segrageted from /
. However, I had no extra LVM space
left and needed another 5GB virtual disk first. In the end:
# lvm pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/rld0f vg0 lvm2 a- 12.13g 0
/dev/rld1d vg0 lvm2 a- 4.88g 2.88g
# df -h / /var
Filesystem Size Used Avail %Cap Mounted on
/dev/ld0a 376M 54M 303M 15% /
/dev/mapper/vg0-var 2.0G 283M 1.6G 14% /var
In addition to the seldom used lvm commands, this was also a
good opportunity to exercise cpio(1)
.
Half of the /var
space was actually wasted on
/var/db/pkgin/cache
pkg files. Good riddance!:
# pkgin clean
# df -h /var
Filesystem Size Used Avail %Cap Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg0-var 2.0G 127M 1.7G 6% /var
NetBSD provides a nice /var/run/rc.log
about the
entire "init" stage /etc/rc
has some nifty trickery to
ensure that this file is written late enough, after
/var
has been mounted, too.
Fri Apr 17 00:57:07 CEST 2015
reading on packet filters, old and new
Read:
- intro(9), pfil(9), bpf(4) [NetBSD]
- packetfilter(4), pfstat(8), pfopen(3), pfconfig(8c) [ULTRIX]
Wed Apr 15 23:49:01 CEST 2015
nawk(1) fixed
The nawk(1)
man page on ips
terminated
early, right after the parting words:
String constants are quoted, as in "x". Escape sequences accepted in literal strings are:
Fix by switching from GROFF /usr/local/bin/gtbl
to
ULTRIX /usr/bin/tbl
as table formatter, and running
man -c nawk
to create a new, preformatted cat
page.
Tue Apr 14 22:49:20 CEST 2015
More i915drmkms work
another update of kernel sources (incl. changes to both drm and
acpi stuff), another kernel build, and finally the report to the
-current
list that things still don't work for the
EeePC.
Mon Apr 13 01:31:53 CEST 2015
eddie updates
Work on eddie:
LVM filesystems newfs'ed, /usr/src/sys
copied and
cvs -q upd -dPA
ed, new kernel built.
Boot attempt with i915drmkms
enabled, will still
blank the screen but now I can ssh into eddie and grab the error
messages from dmesg
. Patch for the kernel from the
mailing list didn't improve things. Also built a kernel with the
netbsd-6 i915drm
driver (now classified as "legacy").
Can run X11 but it won't figure out the size of the 1024x600
display; it uses 800x600 instead.
Starting from the wmieeepc0
device in the boot
messages, I found src/sys/dev/acpi/wmi/wmi_eeepc.c
and
think that it may be straight forward to add a few hotkeys which
are not recognized as of now. And, one day later, I found
/usr/src/sys/dev/acpi/asus_acpi.c
which holds those
key definitions, too. Both drivers are documented and part of the
generic kernel. An asus0
device doesn't show up in the
boot messages, though.
Looks like I should learn a few basics about this new-fangled ACPI stuff.
Sat Apr 11 11:37:14 CEST 2015
Let's do the time warp!
I finally figured out how to force arbitrary dates for my blog entries. (Read: fake them a few days/weeks later whenever I was too lazy to document what I did right then.)
Don't be too confused about some new entries made just now (with the fixed calendar layout) for old events which happened whithin the past few months.
Thu Apr 9 23:12:00 CEST 2015
space hacking
When doing the first things with eddie
it turned
out that its space bar was defective: hitting it on the left side
would seldomly make it into a key event. Very
annoying.
A first attempt at prying the keycap off and putting it back wasn't successful but --as so often-- low-tech approaches go a long mile. In this case, one of my adhesive color labels (bought around 1980) did the job:
Works great again!
Whenever doing such keyboard operations, be sure to wear protection against accidental input:
Time required to repair this:
- One entertaining hour researching YouTube how others tackled such keyboard issues.
- 15 minutes of actual fixing.
- One not so entertaining hour searching for my camera's USB cable to document this for you.
And speaking of cameras: eddie
has its own one:
Which begs the question:
Would it have been possible for eddie to make a selfie of its spacebar?
Enquiring minds want to know!
Wed Apr 8 10:26:49 CEST 2015
eddie initial setup
Initial setup work on eddie
:
group: =uid
in/etc/usermgmt.conf
- extra groups for my user (
operator
to do shutdowns, disk management, and tcpdumps (Ichgrp operator /dev/bpf*
)). - a few dot files and ssh key material.
- LVM PV/VG/LV setup with partitions for
/usr/local
,/usr/home
, and/usr/src
. Hey, I forgot about/scratch
! Nevermind, there's still plenty of LVM space left. Sizes are modelled from previous NetBSD setups. - A handful of extra packages, most notably:
screen
(not that I'm againsttmux
frombase
, but running tmux nested inside a frontend screen session is a bit awkward.)tcsh
(just because standard/bin/csh
uses ESC for filename expansion while my fingers got wired to TAB from too muchbash
usages).pkgin
(to be able to search for packages)
Next up: moving stuff into the LVM filesystems, updating syssrc.
Wed Apr 8 02:12:34 CEST 2015
Welcome, eddie!
New in da house: eddie.marshlabs.gaertner.de
This is one more ASUS Eeepc 1000H netbook (Atom N270, 1GB RAM,
160GB spinning harddisk), just like the old one bootable into
{ngyuen,robert,stanley,joni}.marshlabs.gaertner.de
.
Why yet another one? The new netbook will be used to (re-)port
OpenBSD's extensions for more chipsets in the Ralink wireless
ral(4)
driver into NetBSD-7 (aka -current
at the moment). Patches already existed (and worked!) for adding
the OpenBSD driver code into NetBSD-5.x but with NetBSD-6 too much
infrastructure changed to do that again.
I was able to install NetBSD-current last night after finally figuring out what made the video go blank during kernel loading.
userconf disable i915drmkms
got me going. (There had been reports on the
current-users
mailing list with trouble in the area
starting early March; now someone's dmesg
output
provided some clues about what drivers could be disabled.)
Thanks to sonnenschein
for letting go of her
hardware for really cheap instead of letting it rot in some
shelf.
Mon Apr 6 10:32:54 CEST 2015
Yippiee, wieder blogs!
FUZxxl fixed the blog software: The first days of the month are now properly indented.
Thanks FUZxxl!
Certainly related, here some messing around with J's box characters:
saved_boxchars=. 9!:6 ''
9!:7 'abcdefghijk'
3 4 $ <'FUZ',:'XXL'
akkkbkkkbkkkbkkkc
jFUZjFUZjFUZjFUZj
jXXLjXXLjXXLjXXLj
dkkkekkkekkkekkkf
jFUZjFUZjFUZjFUZj
jXXLjXXLjXXLjXXLj
dkkkekkkekkkekkkf
jFUZjFUZjFUZjFUZj
jXXLjXXLjXXLjXXLj
gkkkhkkkhkkkhkkki
9!:7 ] 11#' '
3 4 $ <'FUZ',:'XXL'
FUZ FUZ FUZ FUZ
XXL XXL XXL XXL
FUZ FUZ FUZ FUZ
XXL XXL XXL XXL
FUZ FUZ FUZ FUZ
XXL XXL XXL XXL
9!:7 saved_boxchars
NB. SEE ALSO: 9!:16 17