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.

Has just received two books from Amazon. The first one is Beautiful Architecture by fellow FreeBSD developer Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios. I bought it because software design is not my strongest skill and there is a lot of place for improvement. And learning from real life examples is always better then reading pure theory. The other one is The Productive Programmer by David Bock. Productivity is my sweet spot (well, it’s more about cool tips then real productivity boost). This had nice reviews so I decided to give it a try.

In last two months I’ve got two new toys: WGT634U from bms@ and Ubiquity Networks’ Router Station 2 provided by manufacturer. The first one is Broadcom’s Sentry5 based and the second one is built on Atheros’ AR7100 chip. As AR7100 is more advanced technology (and has less obscure design, at least it seams less obscure to me) I decided to pick up this low hanging fruit. So far so good: kernel boots, PCI bridge detects Atheros miniPCI wireless card. GigE driver is on its way.

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. ...

And again long pause in blogging. In this 4 months several things happened to me: I relocated to Vancouver, was interviewed and rejected by Microsoft (don’t know why they contacted me in the first place), met new people (philip@ and thompa@ among them), saw new places and even got some free time and learned to cook (it turned out to be fun!). Being close(geographically) to PMC-Sierra, major MIPS vendor, I tried to contact them and ask for a donation for FreeBSD/MIPS project. Got no reply, though. Predictable result, but it’s better to try and fail then have never try at all. ...

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!

Today I managed to get shell prompt on Mikrotik’s Routerboard 532. So now we have 3 platforms with single user mode for FreeBSD/mips, not very useful :) The last problem was getting high-level console interface working. I always fell lost when it comes to resource allocation and uart stuff. I should write a couple of posts on these subjects to memorize all details better.