neitzels irrelevant irregular intarweb notes

On Tuesday, the NetBSD source tree got tagged with netbsd-8-0-RELEASE. The announcement is not out yet, but that's no reason not to move from -RC2 to -RELEASE on eddie, the Asus EeePC 1000H dedicated to bleeding edge things. So the netbook was seriously burning CPU cycles in the last two days, and welcome, 8.0!

Small things learned:

1. It's not necessary to build.sh the kernel modules explicitly, this is implied in the standard (userland) build.sh build. The build.sh installmodules=/ step is required, though.
2. For the tweaked "EDDIE" kernel, I had stale dependency files lying around going back to 2015. It helps to occasionally rm compile/EDDIE -- a make clean or make cleandir won't do the job.

While eddie was busily chugging along on the systems sources, I used the time and updated the "beeper" blog notes from Sunday with further findings on the (now) 8.0 system.

Starting with NetBSD-6.0, my ASUS EeePc 1000H netbooks lost their sysbeep(4) console beeps, i.e. those simple speaker beeps you should get when you request an echo ^G on the shell, mistreat vi(1), or shutdown the system and have options BEEP_ONHALT in your kernel.

During the recent pkgsrcCon, I learned that I am not the only one missing the bell. Here are my current findings on this matter.

This bell problem is pretty specific to this platform. The EeePc has a pair of pretty decent speakers hooked to its Intel AC97 audio system. There is no seperate, classic piezo speaker for the beeps.

Here, sysbeep autoconfigures as follows:

pcppi1 at acpi0 (SPKR, PNP0800): io 0x61
sysbeep0 at pcppi1
spkr0 at pcppi1: PC Speaker

The spkr0 (speaker(4), /dev/speaker) allows for simple melodies. It stopped working likewise: echo 'ceg>c' > /dev/speaker will run for the appropriate time (3 seconds) but silently.

NetBSD-7 on an LX series IGEL-Terminal which has just a classic piezo speaker for the beeps and requires external speakers/headphones hooked to the audio0 at auvia0 at pci0 VIA Technologies VT8237 AC'97 Audio card. sysbeep is:

pcppi1 at acpi0 (SPKR, PNP0800): io 0x61
midi0 at pcppi1: PC speaker
sysbeep0 at pcppi1

(And yes, midi0 works, too, in its own charming way. Too bad that spkr0 is not part of the GENERIC kernel...)

If I remember things correctly, NetBSD-5.x on the EeePc would do both "the bell" and the soundcard correctly (e.g., play MP3 files on the audio(4) device).

TDOD-1: I should try to find an 5.x Install CDROM and see how sysbeep used to autoconfigure there.

NetBSD-6.x would operate the audio(4) device if present in the kernel, but that would silence the sysbeep. Without audio, the sysbeep would be OK. A tough decision to make. IIRC, there was the choice to use either azalia(4) or hdaudio(4) as the underlying device driver for audio(4) on the EeePC, and both worked for audio but silenced the sysbeep.

TODO-2: I should hookup a 7-release USB drive to the netbook to see how things work (or fail to work) for that NetBSD version.

NetBSD-8.0 (just tagged) comes with a revised the sound architecture. In particular, it is now possible to configure the speaker(4) to the audio system. From the speaker(4) man page:

options VAUDIOSPEAKER
spkr0   at audio?

The corresponding cvs log entries:

----------------------------
revision 1.1145
date: 2016-12-13 21:42:18 +0100;  author: christos;  state: Exp;  lines: +4 -5;
wildcard speaker attachments, now that we can handle many of them.
----------------------------
revision 1.1144
date: 2016-12-11 00:03:24 +0100;  author: christos;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -3;
remove VAUDIOSPEAKER for now, will be done differently.
----------------------------
revision 1.1143
date: 2016-12-09 03:24:17 +0100;  author: christos;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -3;
PCPPISPEAKER
----------------------------
revision 1.1142
date: 2016-12-08 12:31:10 +0100;  author: nat;  state: Exp;  lines: +6 -2;
Add a synthesized pc beeper and keyboard bell for platforms with an audio
device.
----------------------------

The NetBSD-8.0 Release GENERIC kernel config provides just commented spkr lines:

#spkr*  at pcppi?               # PC speaker
#spkr*  at audio?               # PC speaker (synthesized)

Nevertheless, spkr0 autoconfigures to audio0 (and thence to hdafg0 to hdaudio0) and works just great in 8.0, out of the box. I can now hear the echo 'ceg>c' > /dev/speaker C major chord loud and clear.

However, the beeper is still explicitly to pcppi? configured, so we get

sysbeep0 at pcppi1 at acpi0 (SPKR, PNP0800): io 0x61

and that is still silent. Using boot -c into userconf and disabling the pcppi1 at acpi0 gave a sysbeep0 at pcppi0 at isa0 as intended but no bell, either.

The revision 1.1142 commit message suggests a possible audio? attachment, an attempt with an sysbeep0 at audio? proved otherwise, though.

Summary: as of now, no beeps.

Our dual-stacked hosts in the comapny inherit their IPv6-IIDs from their public IPv4 address. So, kenny = 217.13.66.99 is given the IPv6 address 2a00:1030:0:42::217.13.66.99 in mixed v6-dotted-quad notation. Yes, that's a possible way to spec an IPv6 address, both "in the shell" and, very convenient, in DNS zone files.

The notation will be turned into 128 bits and returned to you in canocial hex format, though:

$ host kenny
kenny.gaertner.de has address 217.13.66.99
kenny.gaertner.de has IPv6 address 2a00:1030:0:42::d90d:4263

Today I learned: yes, hex numbers are a possible way to spec an IPv4 address:

$ ping 0xd90d4263
PING 0xd90d4263 (217.13.66.99): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 217.13.66.99: icmp_seq=0 ttl=61 time=1.982 ms
64 bytes from 217.13.66.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=61 time=1.129 ms
^C

I was mildly surprised.

Not too much, though, because I was well aware of shortened "quads". Since a few weeks, Cloudflare operates 1.0.0.1 as a public DNS server, and

$ ping 1.1
PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=9.51 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=9.41 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=9.38 ms
^C

is now perhaps the shortest way now to check for Intarweb connectivity.

Upgrade from FreeBSD-11.1 to 11.2 (released two weeks ago) on trey.marshlabs.gaertner.de, a lenovo X220 ThinkPad.

(Time needed to do the update: 1 hour with the fast Internet connection in the office and the SSD in the laptop. Beyond the commands

freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.2-RELEASE
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now
freebsd-update install

no manual interaction (e.g., for merging /etc config files) was needed. Everything went smoothly.

Initial testing looks OK. Next week, I should do the same upgrade on my desktop system in the office.

Returned from two days pkgsrcCon at Berlin (cbase). Met a handful already known developers/maintainers and many new faces (mostly just known by nick or mail address, if at all).

This is a very relaxed and pleasant community. Though being an absolute pkgsrc newbie myself, I felt well at home.

I finished the Sunday with making my own pkgsrc download/install and building the figlet pkg. This all along the pksrc guide.

Joerg Sonnenberger was so kind and patiently answered all my questions regarding the pkgsrc releases, their numbering, and update policies.

Just returned from canossb ("a fork from canossa"), a long weekend with friendly nerds (most from the early Internet days in the sense of "we built this city"), way too much food, and too little sleep.

Thanks to snej, princess, and everyone else!