FreeBSD

ohloh seems to be unable to grind FreeBSD’s svn repo. I’ve been watching for its efforts for several days now and commits progress meter resets from time to time: https://www.ohloh.net/p/freebsd/enlistments

http://people.freebsd.org/~gonzo/mips/routerstation.log Some issues still pending though. Cache management is major one. Things seemed to work fine in emulation but backfired into face with real hardware. I ran into several “random” bugs that were narrowed down to caches. More to go :( Also ethernet driver performance is low but it’s easier then hunting down ethereal cache matters. Or so I think. This weekend will be dedicated to making openocd work with routerstation, learning debugging and profiling techniques for MIPS hardware and improving FreeBSD/MIPS pieces of DDB.

As it was mentioned earlier now I have new cool toy to play with. Flyswatter JTAG with MIPS14 adapter. Though Tin Can Tools kindly warned me that OpenOCD did not support EJTAG/MIPS I decided to order it and it turned to be a good deal. Why? Because there is EJTAG/MIPS support for OpenOCD as of 0.1.0. Moreover it works really nice with FreeBSD port of libftdi. So all I had to do was to make devel/openocd port and tweak some configs. And that’s it. Stock gdb for MIPS is not ready yet, but one can attach, examine registers, single step using telnet interface to daemon: ...

My SCM of choice for FreeBSD-related projects is SVK (it’s much faster then subversion and provides offline access to repo history, easy branching/merging and so on). And my editor of choice is vim. And it turns out vim doesn’t highlight svk commit files. What a shame. No bright colors for happy hacker who is about to commit clean and robust code (or break buildworld, whatever). So I spent 20 minutes of tweaking svn.vim and produced this. ...

So it has been a month since last post about this device and I think it’s time to announce current state of affairs. At the moment further progress was blocked with something that looks like memory corruption. It’s hard to trace with ktr(4) and printf(9) so I ordered Flyswatter JTAG adapter and MIPS14 adapter from Tin Can Tools. I was warned that Flyswatter/MIPS combination is not supported by OpenOCD but I’d better spend some time making it work then tracing obscure memory corruptions in the wild.

Finally I got my hands on new and shiny Lenovo Thinkpad T400. What can I say? It’s cool. My only complaint about T60 was its somewhat dim display (yes, I tried to save some money on this vital part and got punished). This time I ordered model with LED backlight and it’s worth every dime spent :) My configuration also included Atheros wifi, built-in bluetooth, Intel GMA X4500 graphics (I’m not in games, really). Unfortunately 7.1 was able to run wifi. Newer HAL did the trick though and here I am: eating my own dog food - running -CURRENT on a workhorse. ...

While waiting for MIPS toolchain import to happen I entertain myself with bugbusting. You should try it sometime. GNATS jungle, small and large bugs are sneaking around, scent of rotten emails in the air. I don’t feel like hunting down large bugs. They’re dangerous beasts. It’s much better to deal with small ones. Pick a (one|two|three|up-to-twenty)-liner and fix it. Then you can bring it home, varnish it and eventually MFC it. Nice outdoor activity for developers :) ...

Long time no blog. Many things have happened during last 6 months: I got a commit bit, FreeBSD/MIPS reached multiuser and started migration from P4 to CVS. Right now we’re waiting for toolchain patches to be imported to contrib/binutils properly. So let’s prepare to celebrate buildable FreeBSD/MIPS world in a couple of weeks! Meanwhile I’m busy with getting latest zaptel (they changed name to DAHDI, actually) drivers to FreeBSD and a couple of side aсtivities like digging into aio code from OpenSolaris/Linux/FreeBSD. Hope to blog more regularly now. Stay tuned.

Juniper released FreeBSD/MIPS port to public. There are no references to JNPR-specific hardware pieces but a lot of mature code for generic MIPS devices that mips2 tree lacks: VM/pmap, libc, FPU support. Nice gift, thanks JNPR!

This weekend I spent writing driver for IDT RC32434 on-board Ethernet adapter. Weird hobby, isn’t it? Writing NIC drivers is new to me so I shared my time between reading if_XX sources, reading IDT specs and writing my own code. Task turned out easier then it appeared and 15 minutes ago I managed to mount root over NFS using kr0 interface. Time to get some beer and celebrate!