Re: modular-xorg...my latest

[Swift Griggs]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2019, Bob Bernstein wrote:

Included is my latest 'make' in modular-xorg.


Thank you for your hard work, Bob. I have been an on-again off-again user 
of the modular build for years. I started back before Nouveau sorted out a 
lot of nvida issues because it worked better for me in that era.


If you have time, could you give a quick summary of why someone might 
consider using modular Xorg over the NetBSD Xorg dist with their release? 
For me, newer driver support is the big one. Are there other advantages, 
reasons, or notable options we should be aware of?


Thanks again for your years of hard work, Bob. It's definitely benefited 
myself and others.


Thanks,
  Swift

fs-uae and e-uae bork the mouse in X11

[Swift Griggs]

Either of these Amiga emulators will try to capture the mouse. Fine, 
good, that's normal. However, once you exit the emulator the mouse 
will no longer work in X11. I have to unplug and replug the mouse to get 
it to "wake up".


Anyone know why? Is this a bug or a feature I don't understand?

-Swift

USB & PCI Audio Device Problems

[Swift Griggs]

I have several NetBSD hosts running 7.1 that I use as workstations. Sound 
has been a big pain. USB sound never works (anywhere under any 
circumstances on any device). Anything that tries to play sound to a USB 
audio device says "Audio device got stuck!". I would think it's related to 
the USB side of things, but I've seen that same error on PCI devices too. 
On one machine I've tried four (supposedly supported) PCI sound cards 
without any luck. Each one either locks up the machine during boot, or 
says "Audio device got stuck!" when attempting to play audio. However, 
each one also works fine in Windows on the same hardware (swapping drives 
and booting Windows 7 works fine and sound works). So, I have hard time 
believing it's a hardware issue.


However, machines with an HD audio controller (Intel) tend to work fine.

Since I'm having across the board failure with anything other than Intel 
sound, is there something I'm likely overlooking or doing wrong? I've done 
things like compile custom kernels with only *one* sound card supported 
but it doesn't help (nor does full a full debug kernel et al).


Any ideas on what to do? Here are the specific devices that fail:

USB (broken in amd64 and i386):
  - Plantronics USB Headset
  - Sound Blaster Play! v2 USB
  - Sound BlasterAxx v1
  - Various cheap Crystal Sound USB 1.x dongles

PCI Sound Cards:
  - Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum PCI
  - ESS Maestro 3 PCI
  - Sound Blaster Live! PCI
  - Ensoniq AudioPCI


Anyone have one of those that works? Anyone have anything USB or PCI that 
works? My basic issue is that I've got two machines that won't produce 
sound out of anything besides the mobo onboard sound (Intel HD audio).


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: Pulseaudio & browsers - anyone got something ELSE working?

[Swift Griggs]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017, Chavdar Ivanov wrote:

My firefox-54.0 was build with the default 'oss' option, sound is working
well, I have never noticed any problems.


I'll try that. I didn't realize there was such a thing. That should work 
well for my purposes.


Thanks!

-Swift

question on tuning devices with usbhidctl

[Swift Griggs]

I fire up usbhidaction and it seems to work. Then as soon as I try to use 
the device, usbhidaction dies with this "device busy" error. What am I 
doing wrong? The actions will get executed (once) but then the whole thing 
collapses. I keep yelling "YEAH! It's BUSY! I'm the one using it!" but 
that doesn't seem to help, either. :-)


$ usbhidaction -d -c /home/aliver/griffin_powermate.conf -f 7
usbhidaction: /dev/uhid7: Device busy

I'm trying to get my Griffin Powermate knob working. Some extra 
information follows. This is what I see when I use: usbhidctl -d 7 -lva


Consumer:Consumer_Control.Button:Button_1=0
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Generic_Desktop:Rx=1
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Consumer:Consumer_Control=0
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Consumer:Consumer_Control=79
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Consumer:Consumer_Control=16
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Consumer:Consumer_Control=0

The top two values change when I manipulate the knob. The bottom four 
duplicate values don't. Here is what I've setup as a configuration file 
for usbhidaction:


Consumer:Consumer_Control.Generic_Desktop:Rx 1 mixerctl -n -w outputs.master++
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Generic_Desktop:Rx -1 mixerctl -n -w outputs.master--
Consumer:Consumer_Control.Button:Button_1 0 mixerctl -n -w outputs.mute++

I'm thinking that usbhidaction can't take the state changes as fast as the 
knob can pump them out. However, it's just a pure hunch.


-Swift

SDIO vs ATA vs SCSI

[Swift Griggs]

I've been trying to figure out the relationship of SDIO to ATA. The reason 
is to find more ATA compatible hardware for DEC Alpha machines. Lots of 
them had ATA interfaces for CDROMs or system drives. However, most appear 
to support IDE rather than EIDE. I'm basing that off the lack of a keyed 
connector with a missing pin.


Many SD2IDE devices adapt SD cards to an IDE bus. However, I've noticed 
that the systems with ACER M1543C controllers like the ones in the 
Alphastation DS10 will throw CAM errors and generally act-out, slow down, 
and misbehave (under Tru64, Linux, or BSD - I figure it's a hardware 
thing). However, systems with the CMD PCI0646 controller like the 
Alphastation 600a have no trouble whatsoever with SD2IDE devices.


So, can anyone speculate on what is going on? Here's my cockamamie theory. 
I think SDIO is only a subset of the ATA standard and that those little 
$10 gizmos are basically only changing the electrical interface. They 
aren't like a SCSI2SD that actually has to "translate" the SDIO into SCSI 
CDBs. My guess is that the ACER controller is asking the SD card ATA 
questions it doesn't know the answer to, so to speak.


Does anyone who has worked with SDIO know what the relationship to SDIO 
and ATA is? Is it the same for CF cards? I ask because CF2IDE devices work 
even worse - they show up (wrong) as WORM or CDROM drives on my Alpha's. 
I've skimmed over this document:


https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/sdio/sdio_spec/Simplified_SDIO_Card_Spec.pdf

However, it's difficult to get a "summary" or intuit why some SD2IDE & 
CF2IDE devices work or don't work. My fundamental question is this:


Is SDIO a superset of ATA or is ATA a superset of SDIO? Something else?

I'm also scratching my head wondering if CAM handles SDIO directly or 
deals with it via ATA (ie.. in kernel land) ?


-Swift

Re: pcmcia scsi

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2017, Bj?rn Johannesson wrote:

pcmcia1: CIS version PCMCIA 2.0 or 2.1
pcmcia1: CIS info: Adaptec, Inc., APA-1460 SCSI Host Adapter, Version 0.01


I have one of these, too. I got it to use with my Amiga 1200. I wonder if 
NetBSD supports it on that platform.


If someone has experience, let me know. I'll probably just try and find 
out!


-Swift

Re: bnx(4) thread consumes 100%+ of CPU.

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017, John D. Baker wrote:
Driver issue?  Hardware failing?  I could switch to its second 
interface, "bnx1" and see if it does the same thing.


I may be mis-remembering, but I think I've seen these kind of 
kernel-threads-going-nuts with a Broadcom interface before. I hate 
Broadcom NICs (old war wounds) and I immediately blamed the NIC and 
switched it out with a Intel server NIC. However, perhaps I should have 
filed a PR.


-Swift

Re: distcc for pkgsrc issue

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2017, John Halfpenny wrote:

Just an update for posterity that I resolved this issue.


Interesting. The wrapper script idea reminds me of another question about 
distcc and friends. I've noticed that some packages complain with great 
aggrevation about my use of "make -jX" where X=CPUs.


The question is, since folks make heavy use of distcc, does it have the 
same limitations and when you hit a compilation error related to a 
parallel compiler run, is that how the "dont-use-parallel-make" warnings 
get there, or are the mechanics of 'make -j8' and distcc so different that 
errors in one doesn't mean problems with the other?


The reason I'm asking is occasionally I'd use distcc to get a few of my 
faster NetBSD boxes compiling things like QT or Firefox in something less 
than 60 minutes. It's just that I've never set it up because of the many 
failures I've had trying to use make -j ...


-Swift

Re: Can NetBSD cgd be used for encrypted backup?

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2017, Mayuresh wrote:
Just curious. How does iscsi compare with NFS? Guess even NFS has a 
notion of block size, that would help optimize io.


Sorry for butting in, but I'd point out that NFS is file-based and layers 
on top of an existing filesystem. So, the block size of the underlying 
file system is going to determine the block size. There is also the 
consideration of the network parameters such as send and receive buffer 
sizes and several others that matter quite a bit (depending on the 
layer-4 protocol in use and the version of NFS).


iSCSI only provides block devices, it can't do file-based I/O natively 
without a filesystem on top of it. My experience with iSCSI has overall 
been quite poor. I once did a long whitepaper on iSCSI vs AoE. Being a big 
fan of SCSI (and not a huge fan of ATA) I was hoping & expecting iSCSI was 
going to be better than it turned out. However, the experience turned out 
completely opposite. Not only did AoE stomp it in every performance test I 
tried, it also scaled better, recovered from failures better, and so 
forth. iSCSI also has a million dials and settings for mostly useless crap 
few are going to fiddle with. It feels like some kind of top-heavy 
machination designed by some committee somewhere that never has to use 
network block storage in-real-life.


I've also seen large scale iSCSI deployments be fraught with pain and 
peril simply because network engineers can't be trusted to leave the VLANs 
it runs on alone and can't be bothered to put it on discrete switches.


Of course AoE runs on top of layer-2 and iSCSI is a layer-5 protocol. The 
extra layers underneath iSCSI make it routable, but destroy performance. 
With AoE you don't have to tune TCP/IP (but it's non-routable).


I also remember hearing about HyperSCSI which is supposed to be hybrid 
strategy that uses SCSI CDB's over Ethernet frames like AoE does. My guess 
is, based on AoE's good-showing, that approach would rock if they got it 
off the ground.


I guess I should also point out that iSCSI is widely supported across a 
larger number of operating systems than AoE and has much more vendor 
acceptance since AoE is seen as the domain of the CORAID (or whatever they 
are called now) folks.


Anyhow, based on my bad experience, I wouldn't recommend iSCSI for anyone 
unless they simply had no other choice. I have seen it be workable, 
especially with dedicated hardware (Equallogic gear seems to work okay, 
and it's got NetBSD bits in there too!), but overall, I'd run screaming 
away.


iSCSI does give a block device to use with CGD, though. I bet it would 
work fine with CGD, despite being kind of a poor idea in general (iSCSI 
not CGD).


-Swift

Just my opinions here. If you use iSCSI and love it, YMMV, and more power 
to you.

Re: Problems with wsconsole

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2017, co...@sdf.org wrote:

[...] the new graphical acceleration drivers.


Ohh, shiny! Is there any information about these new or newly improved 
drivers? Where did this code come from; is it a port from Linux or a 
NetBSD specific enhancement?


I'm just curious.

-Swift

Re: old i386 3.1 packages or upgrading with KVM

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2017, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

Does anyone know where I can find old 3.1 packages for i386?


Damn, that could be tough. I just looked and my oldest go back to 4.x 
only. I burn a DVD or write a tape with the pkg_tarup versions of all my 
packages before I upgrade. However, I didn't have my ***t together back 
then, I guess.


I am working on an old system that the hosting provider only has a 
Windows-based KVM.  I am concerned upgrading it headless.


Whoa. Yeah, that would make me nervous, too. Hopefully you at least have 
console access (I mean to the guest's console via KVM).


I know our upgrade docs have tips of upgrade issues, and I could attempt 
upgrading 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7. But I'd rather not spend days 
on this. Anyone have any suggestions?


Uhhh, yeah, if I had to put my own money down, I wouldn't bet on that 
being successful. Also, as you say, it's going to be slow. It's going to 
be REALLY slow on an unaccelerated KVM instance (IIRC, Windows has no 
acceleration).


Maybe easiest is to just install a new system and migrate data and 
configs over to it.


If it were me, I'd try that first. You could use a copy/snapshot to do it 
and thus if it went horribly wrong/ugly, you could always start over. I 
guess for me it'd all depend on how hairy the applications were. If it was 
just static apache or a BAMP stack, then no sweat. I'd upgrade. If it's a 
situation where I'd have to keep library linkages to ancient libs because 
of dynamic binaries in the app, I'd sit down and have a good cry, then 
cross my fingers and try a clobber-install of 7.x. If that didn't work, 
I'd do the upgrade-script shuffle you are trying to avoid.


-Swift

Re: x86_64 hardware recommendations/warnings?

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2017, John D. Baker wrote:
I find myself in the position of recommending components for a friend to 
build a more up-to-date machine on which to run NetBSD.


I wish you luck. I've been using NetBSD since 1996 and, though I'm a huge 
fan, I have never found a great method to find "known good" *systems* with 
NetBSD. You can easily find known-good components by looking at various 
man pages for the drivers. Ie.. I look up the mobo then look at each 
problematic chipset and go digging to see if drivers are there. When I say 
problematic, I mean network, usb, and sound chipsets.


The other method I use is component based. I'll check pcidevs, usbdevs, 
etc... and then lookup the PCI IDs and find out if they are supported that 
way. This is sometimes tough because you don't always know what a given 
bit of kit will show up as (PCI ID). It's also easy to get it wrong when 
they release a "v2" of the same card.


BeOS used to have this site (way way back in the day) called BeOS Hardware 
Compatilibity Matrix. Folks would contribute short reviews for working 
hardware. I found it invaluable.


It's wierd, you get *great* hardware info from all the non-x86 ports, but 
then again, they have a lot smaller surface area to cover. So, it's no 
surprise.



 Intel or AMD Radeon graphics


Lately my experience has been that if your Intel graphics are supported in 
Linux KMS 1.3 code they will work great in NetBSD 7.x. I have a number of 
Radeon cards (newest is R9 Nano) and most do work, also. However, I care 
mostly about 2D performance and they can't beat my onboard video in 
gtkperf, so I only use those in gaming machines now. My i7 with built-in 
Intel graphics does all tests in 1.8 seconds. Drop the Radeon R9 Nano in 
and it goes up to 4.5 seconds.


At this stage Intel vs. AMD is not so important as knowing what is 
supported and will work.


I avoid motherboards with AMD chipsets. It's mostly just superstition, 
though. I had a helluva time with USB on those under NetBSD 6. They 
basically never worked well enough for everyday on my AMD hardware. After 
having the same experience on every other AMD mobo after that point, I 
basically gave up since the Intel boards would "just work".



In the back of my mind always is the problem:  "new but not TOO new".


That's spot on.

As UEFI support is only now taking shape in -current, is anyone aware of 
boards which don't support "Legacy Boot" or "Compatibility Support 
Mode"?


Well, once they do it on HP DL & Dell servers, you can bet it'll start 
happening everywhere. So far, they still support "Legacy" mode in their 
latest generations (G9 etc..).


What is known about whether the intel DRM/KMS support in Netbsd-7.1 will 
work with these?  The associated driver for Xorg?


The KMS driver version is what you are looking for. NetBSD 7 uses KMS 1.3, 
unless I'm mistaken.



 If they work at all, how do they fare when playing video?


Fantastic. XVideo support seems fully baked and works quite well. On the 
flipside getting things like vdpau to work may be more challenging. I 
dunno.


What is known about the radeondrmkms support for these parts?  The 
associated driver for Xorg?


It's the same. It's all tied to the KMS version.

If it turns out that the on-board video options are not suitable, the 
obvious solution is some sort of Radeon-based add-in video card.


That or an nVidia card. Some of those work with the Nouveau driver. I have 
an old GT9800 I got used that works with that driver even under NetBSD 
6.x. The Radeon 9800 is also another can't miss card but it's old, has 
slow 3D, fairly low memory, etc... However, that card works with the 
regular old X11 drivers we've had for eons. It really depends on if you 
want to get good 3D performance.


Given the above, are there recommendations for things that are new 
(available) but not TOO new (unsupported)?


Man, it really depends on the type of things they will be doing with the 
machine. What I do before I buy a new rig is to load NetBSD onto a USB 
drive (as in, do a full install with X11). Then I go to my local computer 
store (Microcenter is the best in my area, unfortunately) and I tell the 
sales guy exactly what I want to do and why and explain it won't hurt his 
machines. Then I start testing all the machines I'm interested. I just 
boot them up, check the sound device (make sure it's not one of those 
PoS's that want to route all the sound down the HDMI interface by default) 
then make sure it plays clean. Then check the NIC, wifi, and finally give 
the graphics a try with an intrepid "startx" to see what happens. Then 
you'll know for sure the hardware works before you even go through the 
trouble of buying & returning gear.



Or conversely, warnings of what to avoid?


I avoid Ralink wifi (they always die/offline on me), Realtek NICs (due to 
crap iperf performance and occasional hardware flaws), and anything as you 
put it "too new" on the graphics front.


YMMV.

-Swift

Re: NetBSD installer failure

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2017, Al Zick wrote:
http://datazap.net/sites/14/hang.jpg Does anyone have any ideas as to 
why?


It's hard to say, but it looks like it's failing right before the real 
root file system is mounted. Did you have them try without SMP and ACPI ? 
You can disable those from the bootloader.


Sometimes it's useful to setup NetBSD on a USB drive (ie.. do a full 
installation etc..). Then I put some alternate kernels on the file system 
and one of them I'll have a full debug kernel built that I can boot up on 
and (hopefully) get an idea of why/where-exactly the failure is occurring. 
You could probably do that and create a 2G or 4G image for your data 
center hands & eyes folks to rawrite to a USB drive and boot up the server 
on. Then FTP / dropbox it to them etc...


-Swift

udoo amd64 sbcs

[Swift Griggs]

http://shop.udoo.org

Can anyone confirm using one of these with NetBSD? At @ $100 bones these 
are a lot of firepower vis-a-vis an RPi 3 (at $35, though, dayum)..


"It looks like it'd probably work fine" -famous last words

-Swift

Re: Status of RPi 3 (b) ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 6 Jan 2017, Christian Baer wrote:

Good mornin'!


:-)


Why would you do such a thing?


Just for fun. I knew I was going to make multiple mistakes, use multiple 
SD cards, and basically just screw around.


However, I have several other machines running it - primarily because of 
ZFS. ZFS is a memory hog - and a big fat one at that. This is no big 
deal on a server or workstation with lots of RAM, but unfortunately, the 
Raspi doesn't really fit into that category.


I totally agree. Most optimizations for ZFS don't even kick in unless you 
have 4GB of RAM or more. The OpenZFS tuning guide states that 1GB of RAM 
is sufficient, but more is recommended. ZFS ARC sizes with 1GB are too 
small for any kind of decent prefetch performance, though.


Although I haven't really measured it, I'm pretty sure that ZFS is also 
pretty heavy on the CPU (compared to FFS).


My experience with it on Solaris is that it depends on how you deploy the 
compression, deduplication, encryption, and built-in file sharing options. 
Load up on those, start using it heavily, and you can turn the machine 
into slag. That's also not to mention the checksums ZFS is constantly 
calculating. I can't prove it either, but I'd bet money you are right 
vis-a-vis FFS.


UFS/FFS with soft updates is probably a better choice for a machine like 
a Raspi.


Yeah, probably. That and I don't even know if they have a boot sector 
that'd let you put your root disk on ZFS on the ARM platform. I kinda 
doubt that. However, I wouldn't bet on UFS+softdeps being better than a 
*well tuned* ZFS rig. One could disable prefetch, lower the arc_max, and 
then override the TXG write_limit to force it to flush & sync a bit more 
and you'd probably be just fine and maybe match or beat UFS. It'd be an 
interesting test, actually.


This "multicolor test pattern" is the Raspi's way of telling you that it 
can't load the OS.


I figured it was something like that. That's better than a black screen, I 
guess. At least the monitor power save doesn't kick in and you can tell 
what happened.


You have stated the reason quite well: The Raspi3 only works with NetBSD 
current.


Thanks for the confirmation. My RPi v2 comes today in the mail, so either 
way, I'll be playing with NetBSD on some kind of Pi in the near future.


That depends. IIRC everything works fine apart from the wireless-stuff 
(Wifi and Bluetooth).


I heard some rumor that the OpenBSD guys have eschew Pis and focus on 
BeagleBones because of some binary blobs they don't want to distribute. 
It's always a mess with wifi and bluetooth. That and I can't keep up with 
who distributes what and who refuses. I think the deal with the OpenBSD 
crew is they don't want to be on the hook for redistributing blobs, but 
they'll cope with them if the machine uses them "internally". However, 
that whole topic gets ranty and endless once it starts. I mostly can't be 
bothered to care about it. I get a little "consumerish" and I figure folks 
like Stallman, Theo, and ESR can fight that fight elsewhere without me. 
I'll just plug in USB dongles as-needed.


However, I have always found using any -current OS to be extremely 
ball-busting.


Heh, true. However, I've had okay luck with picking a -current image for 
whatever weird kit I'm messing with at the time then just not updating 
once I find an image that works. Now *tracking* -current, oh man, yeah, 
that's a challenge. I don't yet have all the chops I need to track down 
bugs and regressions that crop up. I can code in C, but I'm not well 
practiced enough to find bugs before others do.


I'll grant you that NetBSD is a lot more conservative (even in -current) 
than FreeBSD and especially most Linux distros (which are completely 
bleeding edge). But even with NetBSD it can happen that after an update 
(which you installed because some feature was a little flaky), the 
system won't work anymore or you just have a bug-change. Basically, not 
the best choice for a production-system.


I'm just playing around, so no big deal, though I agree on the finer 
points you make. If I had a "production" application using Pi's I'd 
probably just buy two of them and keep known-good SD card images laying 
around. Plus, I tend to test & harden using very common hardware 
extensively before I put them in a position to lose money. Still, Pis are 
fun and definitely powerful enough for "real work" under the righ 
circumstances.


-Swift

Re: Status of RPi 3 (b) ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2017, Brad Spencer wrote:
You will need to use something -currentish.  I mostly run a 7.99.42 
kernel with some local mods.


Thanks for the tip.

I have 3 RPI3b v1.2 boards.  Two of them will not boot NetBSD 9 out of 
10 times.  They will hang between these two lines:


That sounds like a bummer. I'll watch for the same issue.

Raspbian works fine on those boards [at least it does on one of them, I 
don't remember if I tried both] and 1 time in 10 NetBSD will get past 
that point and run fine.  The third RPI3 board appears to boot NetBSD 
just fine, as does my RPI2.  I hope you have one that works out for you.


Weird. I wonder if it's firmware related... There are some warnings about 
upgrading firmware on the RPi Wiki page.


The two RPI3s that hang were purchased at different times from different 
places, but as far as I can tell are all the same board.


Yeah, that definitely seems like it'd be firmware related. It's the same 
SoC and other bits.



Right now the RPI3 runs like a RPI2, more or less, in terms of devices.


I've got an RPi v2 on the way, also. If I have to fight the v3 too much 
I'll just downgrade. The downside is the RPi is supposed to be about 2x 
the speed of the RPi2. Of course, I'm not building a compute cluster with 
them in any case (yet! hehe).


-Swift

Re: Status of RPi 3 (b) ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2017, Brian Buhrow wrote:
I'm using NetBSD-current on an RPI3, using the RPI2 images. Everything 
seems to work except for the wireless and bluetooth modules.


Right on. I was trying a 7.x release, I think. I can't remember. Anyhow, 
I'll just use a -current image and try again. At least now I know it's 
worth trying, so thanks for that.


The dmesg for this is below. Note that this is -current from the end of 
November 2016. -Brian


Hmm, well, unless something has been broken between now and then, that 
should be okay. As far as wireless & BT, they are "nice to have". Since 
the RPi3 has 4 USB ports, I can just use one of those if I need Bluetooth 
or Wifi to hork up my privacy.  :-)


-Swift

Status of RPi 3 (b) ?

[Swift Griggs]

I just picked up an RPI3. I guess I should have waited. A few congenitally 
systemd-infected distros work on it, but not much else. FreeBSD was a 
notable exception. It seems to work, but I managed to hork up the SD card 
jacking around with ZFS before I could test X11 and other stuff. No big 
deal.


However, before I start over, how about NetBSD? When I tried to boot the 
gzimg on the SD card it just came up with what looked like a multicolor 
test pattern, but no boot etc... That was just a quick and dirty test. I 
could have been doing any number of things wrong. For one, I wasn't using 
-current.


My real question is: Does NetBSD work well enough on the RPi3 to make it 
worth trying ? Also, could one of the anointed ones update the RPI wiki 
for the RPi3 ? There is only a brief mention of the RPi3 in the firmware 
section (nothing that helpful) and another user in the comment section is 
seeing the exact same thing as me.


-Swift

The $0.5M donation to FreeBSD Foundation

[Swift Griggs]

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-foundation-announces-new-uranium-level-donation/

Folks, we need to make friends with this Mr. Anonymous, guy. He's loaded 
and generous.


I won't forget that the FreeBSD guys are our allies and friends, too. 
Their rising tide can also help to lift our boat.



Some other food for thought just before the New Year:

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
-Seneca

"I am a slow walker, but I never walk back."
-Abraham Lincoln

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would 
still plant my apple tree."

-Martin Luther


Chins up folks, we hang tough and work in the wilderness off less than @ 
1/100th of the resources. Just blood, sweat, and MajorDomo mailing lists, 
baby.


Hang tough, and here's a big "thanks" from a longtime NetBSD user to the The
NetBSD Foundation, the NetBSD coders, the pkgsrc guys, and anyone else who
helps!

-Swift

Re: Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, Michael wrote:

NetBSD is just about the only OS still using xorg as setuid root.
Pretty much everyone else did away with it.


We only really need it for /dev/pci*, because that lets you mmap()
arbitrary PCI space - things like wsfb or sbus graphics work without it.


I'm curious. If you have time, can you explain why those work without it? 
I'm assuming wsfb because it's in the kernel already and sbus because it 
has some kind of smarter & more magical method versus PCI ?


We could easily do away with it by going back to using ttyE*, ttyF* etc. 
- that would only allow using graphics hardware with kernel drivers 
though. I did that back in the xf86 days,


As a user, I had zero problem with that.

that way every graphics device shows up as its own PCI domain, device 
0:0:0, complete with its own IO space, which can be quite confusing 
since it doesn't correspond to the actual bus layout at all.


That makese sense. As a developer, I always hate big lookup tables and 
TLB-like abstractions. They are helpful, but usually a bit obtuse to work 
with.


-Swift

Re: Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, Jonathan A. Kollasch wrote:

Is NetBSD going to play with Wayland? 'Cause X.org seems to be in a
bit shaky and captured by Linux-droids.

What makes you think Wayland isn't also captured by the Penguins?


Perhaps I wasn't direct enough. I do think that. I think even worse, 
actually, it's pretty well taken over by Fedora (Wayland) and Ubuntu (MIR) 
folks.


It looks totally Linuxsy and I was hoping one of the wizards on the lists 
would come out and say "Oh no Swift, you have it all wrong, let me explain 
how KMS is wonderful and we have no problems at all with Wayland. There's 
going to be a new nifty add-on that will do proper remote X. Nothing to 
worry about. It's just like what we'd have done ourselves."


That didn't exactly happen, but it's what I expected anyway.

-Swift

Re: Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, David Holland wrote:

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 03:41:44PM -0700, Swift Griggs wrote:
> Is NetBSD going to play with Wayland? 'Cause X.org seems to be in a bit
> shaky and captured by Linux-droids.
I don't know. But all that stuff is shaky and linuxish.


Good. I'm glad I'm not the only one who got that impression.

...you use XDMCP? Anyone uses XDMCP, other than to run some vintage X 
terminals they found in a skip? Or do you mean "remote X display 
access"?


I do not use an X chooser or a display manager (much). I do have a fully 
functioning SGI box setup to both, but I rarely use it for anything. I set 
that up years ago for some NCD X terminals and it's still kicking around 
in my home lab. Maybe my nomenclature is a bit off and I shouldn't refer 
to remote X-apps that way. However, I do use remote X displays, and that 
is specifically what will not be supported (I assume along with display 
managers and choosers, too) with Wayland.


KMS is best thought of as "the linux world finally figures out what 
everyone else knew by around 1990", that is, you should have device 
drivers for graphics same as for other hardware, and framebuffer devices 
exposed to userland that don't require reimplementing drivers in every 
application (read: X server) wanting to use the framebuffer.


What you say makes technical sense. However, from a logistics standpoint, 
doesn't that also mean that the drivers become specific to choices made in 
kernel-land for whatever OS implements them? I remember the whole Xfree86 
-> Xorg transition and the eventual emergence of KMS. My big fear back 
them was that Linux would just focus on KMS, the X projects would wither, 
and any OS's that didn't have a million monkeys to work on graphics 
drivers would be out in the cold. It turned out that I was pretty much 
right. I used some pretty old hardware until NetBSD 7.x and FreeBSD 10 
came out and had updated their KMS implementations with new drivers. 
Suddenly 80% of my new hardware was viable again. I didn't have to 
continue to use AGP graphics cards and expensive funny mobos that allowed 
newer CPUs with an older graphics bus.


My point is that, though you are probably much more knowledgeable about 
what the "right" architecture is, I did see some advantages to 
centralizing the drivers in "an application" (X) because at least that 
creates a common fountain for FOSS to cooperate. Maybe my perception of 
that whole situation was off and Xfree86 just made it harder. I never 
coded on that project.


Except they apparently don't have it right yet, because the drmkms2 Xorg 
binary is still setuid root.


You are probably just making a point about the architecture from earlier. 
Point taken.


However, as an aside, I don't actually care about that particular bit, and 
I know others who would agree with me (not in the majority, I'm sure). X 
doesn't listen to TCP by default anymore and even if it did, it's easily 
firewalled. Most multi-user server systems don't run an X server. So, it 
doesn't really impact local security that much either.


Then again, I'm not a "security guy". If I was, I'd be all high on 
OpenBSD. More power to those guys, they seem to get a helluva lot done. 
However, to me, security is like handrails on a long flight of stairs. You 
absolutely need it, but don't confuse that fact with the point of building 
the stairs, which was to get to the top. You can also add handrails later. 
It's not the smartest or safest way to go, but it's possible.


IRIX was hella inscure and I still use it all the time in a version-locked 
environment behind my firewall. It still does things I can't find better 
anywhere else. I'll probably use them till I'm dead and I have zero fear 
of 37337 h0x0x0rs coming after me.


The point in this context is that I think Unix principles are more 
important and helpful than security principles. Small is beautiful. Simple 
programs that interoperate are good. "Modern X" as Mouse put it, doesn't 
seem hip to any of that, with or without needing SetUID binaries, which is 
an afterthought (though I think you were probably bringing up the point to 
illustrate your architectural critique). At least "crufty X" (my term) 
showed some awareness of that.


There were some historical reasons that XFree86 ended up using the 
MS-DOS model for hardware and drivers, but it was wrong then anyway and 
there just wasn't a critical mass of people who knew better.


Well, having lived through that time, I can tell you that I was a young 
guy who'd just come from MSDOS to UNIX in about 1992 or so. I think there 
were a lot of folks like me who, as you put it, were just too 
inexperienced to get it right. They were my peers. I had tons of respect 
and admiration for the accomplishments of the Unix folks, but they were 
"elite" and very few. It took years to get caught up, by then folks from 
my generation 

Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Swift Griggs]

Is NetBSD going to play with Wayland? 'Cause X.org seems to be in a bit 
shaky and captured by Linux-droids.


More questions if anyone feels like answering:

* It's obvious we already have KMS. However, is that all we need to
  support Wayland?

* What do the other BSD's do at this point? Is there any cohesion there?

* I don't think GTK + Broadway or RDP/VNC is a viable alternative to
  XDMCP. The Wayland guys really think that's good enough? XDMCP can do
  things those can't, like display a single application etc... I've never
  seen a non-hackish way to do that with VNC or RDP and Broadway is
  GTK3-only. If XDMCP goes... well damn. I like it and use it. I guess I'm
  screwed because the Wayland guys seem to see XDMCP and drawing
  operations as "the dumb way" to do things (from reading their
  interviews). I'd have a lot easier time accepting that if we had a
  viable XDMCP alternative. That doesn't seem to me to be the case. Since
  nobody cares what I will "accept" I guess I'll be doomed to old
  framebuffer hardware like we were before the last KMS update that came
  with 7.x Then again, I mostly don't care. I'm old and I like old
  hardware. However, I'd hate to see a systemd-like-event happen to X11.

* Anyone remember AtomBIOS? Wasn't stuff like that supposed to solve most
  of the we'll-never-share-squat-with-anyone problem for the vendors? They
  could all just make their special-monkey-magic hyperfast graphics calls
  from BIOS calls (which would suck for non x86 but at least provide some
  middle ground for development). I guess it never took off?

* Is KMS "just a hack" we support or is it a future X11 direction TNF
  embraces? Doesn't Linux do things in kernel-land that we either can't or
  won't do in NetBSD? I'm thinking of all the stuff provided by
  ./sys/miscfs/procfs/procfs_linux.c and sys/compat/linux*. Doesn't that
  mean we are forever going to be worried more about making sure we
  properly ape Linux rather than making anything novel ?

* How do weird X11 framebuffer code for off-the-wall platforms get built?
  I'm thinking of things like Amiga's with RetinaZ3 boards. How is it that
  these wizards-in-caves can be coaxed out for that, but for x86 we have
  to beg for a seat at the table with Linux and Microsoft? I'm just
  ignorant of these dynamics. I'm assuming it's because those older
  framebuffers are more simplistic or better documented.

For reference:

Xorg seems to be losing momentum (or not)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item=XServer-Git-2016
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item=X.Org-Foundation-Missteps

(I know, I know, two of those are Larabel links - but his facts are 
correct in this case.)


Some of my biases for Linux device drivers on BSD come from this:
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/freebsd/linux_bsd_kld.html

My only real technical knowledge of AtomBIOS comes from this post:
http://tinyurl.com/j2q87y8

Amigas have cool X11 drivers. So does SH3, MacPPC/68k, and others:
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.4.2/amiga/INSTALL.X11

-Swift

Re: Serial console setup

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2016, Greg Troxel wrote:

You are not really wrong in theory.


Heh, whew.

There, getty waiting for open to succeed until CD was asserted made 
sense, especially when the modem/line was shared with outgoing UUCP.


Oh, I get what you are saying. Even back in the day I rarely put the 
console on a modem. Rather, as in my case, we'd just setup a "secure" 
getty on the modem (usually with mgetty, if possible since it tended to 
handle modems quite well). The only time I'd stick a modem on the console 
was when I had to ship machines to IT deserts in BFE and I had tested the 
snot outta the rig and had scripts in place to periodically poke-or-reset 
the modem, as needed.


I also wouldn't accept anything less than a top-of-the-line US Robotics 
Courier because rarely did other vendors meet their level of quality and 
speed. I had Zoom and Atmel modems that could never be relied upon if they 
were left to sit for too long with no calls/reset. I'd have never trusted 
those on a must-be-available-or-I'm-screwed-800-miles-away-console port.



A modem console would be beyond bizarre these days.


Heh, very true, but as strange as it is, I've seen it now and again even 
to this day. The main place is on EMC storage arrays where they take 
incoming calls from support to do things like system checks and firmware 
updates. They tend to get a lot less hassle from security folks for 
whatever reason. I haven't seen it on the newer VMAX chassis, but the 
older Symmetrix "DMX" line used modems quite a bit and people still use 
them. There is an outfit on the East coast that still maintains them via 
dial-in, too. Of course, it's not exactly the same thing because I think 
those machines they are either DOS or Windows machines running some kind 
or remote access package (ie.. not gettys). I've also run into 
refrigeration controllers and digital signage systems that also still run 
on modems, but again these are embedded devices, not Unix boxen.


My point was really that if the cables are not wired up right and DCD 
ends up not asserted (there are a lot of wrong serial cables out there), 
then it seems better to just have the console work, rather than not 
work.


I get it now, and I get why you said it and it makes good sense. Ie.. In 
this case, folks can debate which pins to set high or not, but "working" 
is considerably more comfortable than "broken" no matter what "standard" 
is getting violated or who thinks that's not the ideal wiring scheme. 
Right on. :-)


Thanks for explaining.

-Swift

Re: Serial console setup

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2016, Greg Troxel wrote:
Are you saying that the console device itself will refrain from output 
if either DSR or CD is not asserted?  I can see the point of DSR but 
requiring CD for a console seems non-helpful.


Hmm, out of ignorance, ('cause I wouldn't gainsay you, Greg!) why? Carrier 
detect is pretty modem-ish, but my simple understanding is that when using 
a null modem, you want to connect DCD to DTR and the same for DSR. I've 
even built cables this way and they worked. It's all just non-magical 12V 
low/high.  That way you've got a "high" signal telling you "Yeah, it's 
cool to talk. We're connected." For a modem, that has the additional 
meaning "You've got a carrier signal" rather than just "The cable got 
plugged in.".


Straigten me out, guys. Am I wrong?

-Swift

Re: Serial console setup

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 22 Dec 2016, j...@sdf.org wrote:
I'm wanting to connect an actual serial terminal (Wyse 60; VT100 mode) 
to a small i386 PC running NetBSD 7.99.25 (snapshot w/ GENERIC kernel).


I used to have a Wyse 60, as well. I think mine was the "paper white" 
model. I used it for years as a terminal to watch my filtered log output 
from about 200 servers at once. I got it for $5 at a used gear auction.


The cable is a straight serial, DB9 (PC COM port) to DB9-DB25 (Wyse 
MODEM port).


Hopefully, you specifically remember using that port on your working SPARC 
rig and you've triple checked your settings on the terminal itself are 
matching.


I added a 'consdev auto' entry to /boot.cfg (see below) which seems to 
get the serial port address right and I'm able to get the dmesg stuff to 
display during bootup but no interaction via the keyboard.


Okay, I could be totally wrong here, but my understanding is that you flat 
out can *NOT* interact with the kernel while it's booting. Ie.. while you 
are seeing "green" text (ie.. the dmesg ring buffer stuff before any 
scripts run).


 I'm also not sure you'll be able to do things like ctrl-c out of startup 
scripts. Linux and other OS's already prevent that from the console 
(*sigh*), but it's nice that NetBSD doesn't. However, I don't remember 
being able to do that unless I'm on a "real" keyboard and watching the 
BIOS (VGA) console. However, I'm not sure exactly why, because I also 
specifically remember doing some netbsd kernel debugging (ie.. gathering 
backtraces and what-not) from a serial console that totally worked. 
However, I believe it was because, on that particular system, it didn't 
have a framebuffer and the BIOS console *was* the serial port.


 I tried various combinations of [Full|Half]Duplex and RCV Handshake 
[none|XON/XOFF|DTR|both] ; none enabled 2-way communication.


I always had the best luck with my Wyse using hardware flow control (DTR). 
IIRC, they will go up to 38,400 pretty reliably. You definitely want to 
keep it in full duplex, too.



Current settings are attached. Is there something more I need to do?


Not to be an ass, but you do know you've got to fire up a getty for the 
terminal in /etc/inittab once the system is booted, right? The console 
stuff you've done basically only enables the kernel displaying it's ring 
buffer output and what-not. To login et al, you'll need a getty.


-Swift

Semetic/fuzzy-logic code comparison tool ?

[Swift Griggs]

Let's say one wants to make general statement that "This code is 30% the 
same as that code!" Another example would be someone wants to make the 
statement that "XX% of this code really came from project X." In my case 
I'm only interested in "honest" code, not trying to catch someone 
stealing/permuting existing code. Oh, and everything I care about is in C.


My questions are:

* Are there tools that already do this?

* What do you do about whitespace, simple variable permutation, and
  formatting issues? Ie.. times when a tiny thing changes the "checksum"
  of your content but it's essentially still the same code.

I know that this is essentially an AI problem and thus can get complex in 
a hurry. I was writing some scripts to take a swing at some kind of 
prototype (and I even made some early progress), but then I though "surely 
someone's already done this, genius."


Anyone know of any place to start, here? I know it's awfully arbitrary and 
subjective. However, as long as the algorithm isn't partisan and generates 
reproducible and at least somewhat defensible results, I can live with the 
subjectivity.


-Swift


Now for those that might be somewhat interested this is what I started 
with on tissue paper (just notes). Feel free to critique if you have ideas 
or know of preexisting stuff I should look at. I'd rather not invent this 
wheel.


* Substitute all whitespace for a single space, yeah, for sure. Forget
  about wrapping characters, too (CR, LF, etc..).

* Possibly use something like soundex on variables? Hmm, how to detect
  when the same variable is used under a new name? Leading/trailing
  characters?

* Count braces and nesting levels? Does this generate a unique enough
  pattern? Add it to an overall heuristic score ala Bayesian style?

* How to solve the problem of old code with a new location? Also when it's
  slightly permuted?

* What will I use for quanta/units to analyze. Going by lines is dumb
  since it implies whitespace (which is ignored). By function? By sets of
  braces or parens? By scope ? Multiple types of quanta? H

* I'll start with multiple scripts. Each one builds it's own score based
  on a different technique. Then we aggregate the scores and see which
  ones are most useful/accurate for my use cases. Then see if any track
  together or diverge in different cases.

* What about old K code that's simply been updated with a newer function
  declaration and C99 or C11 stuff? Should be able to regex to detect this ?

* Probably better to write the tool in script, too much string handling to
  dork with it in C.

* If one file is 100k and another 50k make sure that the tools never
  assert a difference of less than 50%? What if file B is just 2x a bunch
  of code still found in file A? Grrr... think...

Those were just rough notes with my ideas.

Re: NetBSD 7.02 on APU2 PcEngines

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2016, 76nem...@gmx.ch wrote:
 Finally I have switched between the speed of 9600bps and 115200bps 
to install NetBSD 7.02 on APU2 from PCEngines.


Hi, Alan, I also have one of these little systems from PCEngines. I've 
been following your thread. It's been a few years since I've messed around 
with my little 500Mhz AMD-based PCEngines board, but I think my method to 
solve the issue you are having was to hard set the console and baud rate 
in a custom kernel.



From the GENERIC conf file:

#optionsCONSDEVNAME="\"com\"",CONADDR=0x2f8,CONSPEED=57600

If you uncomment that line and nail the baud rate, then use that kernel 
you should be good to go.


This is uncomfortable but it works. What doesn't work however is the 
installation itself. The kernel boots for a while and stops on root 
device.


Can you do the install on another machine, install the custom kernel, then 
swap-a-roo the drive back to the PCengines host?


I can type what I want (wm0, wm1 etc.) but the installation hangs 
(sometimes after a curious message about NFS mount).


If you could post how far it got and what you see, that'd help.

Any ideas? Do you think that an network boot and install will solve 
these problems?


Why would netbooting help. I'm curious why that idea occurs to you? I 
thought the issue was the baud rate on the serial port ? I guess you could 
use a custom boot kernel via PXE/TFTP/BOOTP etc.. That might work/help.


I have tried to boot from an USB2 CDROM and booting the ISO image from 
syslinux system but this change nothing.


Are you passing any custom boot parameters? Can you summarize the specific 
issue you are having? I can try to help, since I have one of these 
machines myself and have used it for all kinds of BSD projects.


-Swift

Re: The old wiki.netbsd.se

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2016, matthew sporleder wrote:
I imported things I thought were useful into wiki.netbsd.org, mostly 
here: http://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/


Whoa there it is! I see lots of stuff I wrote way-back-when in there. 
Thanks a bunch! There is a ton of good stuff there.


-Swift

Re: The old wiki.netbsd.se

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2016, Jan Danielsson wrote:
There was a thread about this a long while back, I believe the argument 
was that it would be better for the community to have one authoritative 
wiki so all useful information could be centrally managed.


Ah, okay. I seem to remember some talk about it, but I think it was before 
I was on as many of the ML's as I am nowadays.


I also seem to recall that there were some voices saying that the 
official NetBSD wiki broke the spirit of a wiki


Well, like you, I can see both sides of that argument. Oh, and also, thank 
you for responding and taking the time to catch me up.


-- but in the end some consensus was reached.  If you search around in 
the mailing list archives I'm sure you'll be able to find the thread I'm 
referring to.


Yes, I think I did find it after some digging, thanks. I also found this 
page:


https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/asau/

"What happened to wiki.NetBSD.SE Simply put, it was shut down.
Stop complaining. Just stop. Better help saving useful information."

I guess there was a bit of drama around the discussion. He sounds a bit 
miffed. Sorry for going over old ground. I never got into the original 
discussion and I'm not going to get all butthurt about it.


The deal is that I have some infrastructure at home and a domain etc... 
Hosting anything useful for NetBSD sounds like something I'd like, but I 
don't want to get involved with TNF politics either by re-creating a site 
that some folks deemed harmful or by trying to rule-follow my way through 
contributing to the official wiki.


  I can see both sides of the argument (having a de facto standard 
unofficial wiki vs not having one); I had some experience with "the" 
Gentoo unofficial wiki which I think is illustrative:


That does indeed sound like a rough time. Sorry that happened to you. As a 
value-system thing, I guess it's a judgment call between the 
impact/danger of getting and using bad unofficial information versus the 
not having the useful bits available at all.



(couldn't get any gcc to run, which in Gentoo is bad..).


Heh, yeah, that would be. As in, "no new portage software for you - ever."

I asked on IRC if it was a known issues and was told that one should 
*never*, under any circumstances, "update world", and that following 
some random unofficial wiki was a recipe for disaster.


It's a rather extreme example, but valid nonetheless.

I'm thinking that's *exactly* the kind of scenario TNF wants to avoid by 
not having a de facto standard wiki which is unofficial.


Hmm, okay. Then I think the best way for me to proceed would be that if I 
do decide to create another NetBSD documentation resource, I'll be very 
clear that it's unofficial, completely detached and unrelated from TNF, 
and that all information is subject to being wrong as heck.


No you're not the only one, I liked it and I know others who did -- but 
it's a little more complicated than that.


Well, thanks again for your time and the explanation.

"... But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the 
horror was that he might also be wrong." George Orwell, 1984


-Swift

The old wiki.netbsd.se

[Swift Griggs]

https://web.archive.org/web/20100527034652/http://wiki.netbsd.se/Main_Page

"Dear Users, Thank you for your patience and your contributions over the 
last 4 years. The time has come to shut down this wiki. Please refer to 
the official NetBSD wiki in the future."


I'm just being nosy. Anyone remember what happened that made the site 
operator ditch the site? "The time has come" Why did it come ?


Personally, I found it far more useful and rewarding than the TNF wiki 
(not knocking TNF). Plus, I had an account and could edit pages etc..


I'm considering snarfing all my content back outta the wayback machine and 
resurrecting my own version of it. However, I'd first like to understand 
the original story if anyone knows it. Was it hackers beating on the site? 
Spammers take over the mail relay? Did the guy just get a divorce and his 
ex-wife's alimony take away the bandwidth fees?


The answer I'd dread to hear is "It was too open and not dryly clinical or 
academically pedantic enough. So, we shut it down. Too many people had 
access." Unfortunately, due to the meta-refresh to wiki.netbsd.org 
appearing right afterward, it's an open question in my mind. Thus, I don't 
want to end up fussing with TNF if I stood something like it back up. 
That's the main reason why I'm so curious.


Please don't take my speculation the wrong way, it's just guessing/fear.

Maybe I was the only one who liked it and I'm just wasting my time.

Thanks,
  Swift

Re: Fwd: pkg_add not working

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2016, Saurav Sachidanand wrote:

Does'nt work with http either. Also, I'm running NetBSD on VirtualBox
on OS X El Capitan, if that's relevant.


I'm not sure why you are having the issue with pkg_add, but I can say I've 
had lots of intermittent problems along the same lines a long time ago. It 
worked occasionally, but was just too flakey and I just gave up started 
using 'pkgin' (pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgin) as soon as it came out.


The bonus is that you will be able to use 'pkgin' to search for packages 
after doing an update with it.


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: What is the "[system]" process representing ?

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2016, Michael van Elst wrote:
> [system] is all the kernel threads. In top you can switch to thread 
> display and get more details. Kernel threads are also displayd with 'ps 
> -s' and you can augment the display with the thread name using '-o 
> lname'.

Ah, I should have known there would be a switch for 'ps' since there is on 
several other OS's including Linux. However, IIRC, Linux will show all the 
threads by default. Thanks for the reminder. 

> 80% CPU for doing nothing however is bad. The top display probably tells 
> you which thread is misbehaving.

Next time it happens, I'll pay attention and expand the kernel threads to 
see which one is doing it. I guess there is no way to do a gdb 'attach' to 
the kernel thread to get a backtrace, though. I'm assuming one has to do 
this sort of thing with a specialized kernel debuggger/profiler.

> Saying this, if you run a kernel with LOCKDEBUG on a system with lots of 
> memory, this adds a ton of overhead to the ioflush function and then 
> it's not impossible to see a continous 80% CPU usage for '[system]'. But 
> that doesn't happen with normal kernels.

This is definitely abnormal in my experience. I have machines with less 
horsepower and they don't have the issue. It's got to be something 
specific to my configuration or hardware on that one machine. I'll run it 
to ground eventually, and especially now that I'll remember to drill down 
to the actual thread in question. I can then put in enough printf()'s or 
printk()'s that I can find the general problem area enough to report it. 

> top just can't display CPU usage correctly for processes that are active 
> for very short intervals, wether kernel threads or not.

Well sure, it's default refresh is 5 seconds, so by definition if it's 
shorter than that, it'll basically be invisible.

Thanks for the reply. 
-Swift

What is the "[system]" process representing ?

[Swift Griggs]

Folks, I recently installed NetBSD on a Lenovo M83 Tiny machine and from 
time to time, I notice the "[system]" (appears to be a kernel thread?) 
getting up to 80% of the CPU while the box is doing  nothing. No 
processes are active and a reboot clears the issue (except when it 
doesn't. I power-cycle *then* it's cleared). The only reason I noticed in 
the first place was because of the system-fan spinning up. FYI, this is 
just a standard NetBSD 7 install (not -current).

What is "[system]" really doing? Is there a way to get a more granular 
look at what is going on?

On another system, I have a question about a 1.8Ghz CoreDuo based 32-bit 
i386 laptop with 2GB of RAM. I noticed that '[system]' accumulates the 
most time on the host, but it's never "on the board" when I run top or 
other tools. It's overall usage is trivial. However, I notice that if I 
install debian 8.6 on this machine, I see that 'systemd' (yes, I know it's 
much different and not a kernel process and not apples to apples) is 
_always_ taking between 5-10% of the CPU and is nearly always the #1 
consumer. This is on a fresh installation! I just want to make sure I'm 
not missing some critical fact like perhaps the '[system]' process on 
NetBSD is masking it's CPU usage and is doing the same amount of work 
(doubtful, but possible). This is, after all, a pretty old machine.

So, the basic question is this. Is my x61 ThinkPad actually getting 
slapped around by systemd or is it that system just so slow it's just 
exaggerating an effect that would be hard to detect on a fast/new box? I'm 
trying to rule out some mistake or misconfiguration on my part that a 
systemd advocate (ie.. not me) would point out and say "You just didn't do 
it right."

The corollary is, does NetBSD do the same work but just mask the CPU 
usage? I really really doubt this but I wanted to ask to make sure before 
I make any kind of "linux vs netbsd" claim in this case. 

Man, if that's really the "new normal" for Linux, it's hard to believe. 
I'm tempted to install it on my 500Mhz AMD Geode system. It'd probably 
take up 50% of the CPU if the effect scales... Maybe they don't care 
because they've already eschewed both sysv-init and systemd for 
Busybox-init? Great news for embedded BSD developers, I'd think. :-P

Thanks,
  Swift

bozohttpd minor fixes to man page

[Swift Griggs]

I like NetBSD's httpd. I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies in the 
bozohttpd(8) manual page. Where should I report these?

* The -v option appears twice in the options summary. It's shown as both a 
  flag and a switch that takes options. They can't be both right. 

* The -V option is documented in the manual page, but does not appear in 
  the options summary block at the top of the manual page. It's also 
  unclear if "slashdir" is an option for -V or if the text refers to the 
  "slashdir" given as the document root.

* -V is also not documented in the usage when you get help directly from 
  the binary (ie.. just run /usr/libexec/httpd to see what I mean). 


-Swift

Re: Phoronix 8-way-BSD-install - NetBSD bombed

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2016, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> I always dd nulls to a disk that was used for another OS before starting 
> a new install.

Same here. 

> Specifically I have had issues installing NetBSD to a drive that had 
> Linux (Red Hat) on it.  It's been a while but I think that the behaviour 
> he saw is what I saw.  I ran dd to clean everything off the drive and 
> then it worked just fine.

Hmm. It's one of those ritual-motion things I do now, and I can't even 
remember what happens when you don't dd-wipe a FreeBSD disk and try to do 
a fresh install of NetBSD. 

> In any case I have my doubts about someone who claims to have written 
> 10,000 articles over the last twelve years.  For what it's worth:

Well, I'd question the guy's testing methods and his Linux-centric 
"Phoronix Test Suite". It looks akin to putting gas in a diesel engine and 
wondering why the engine is such a turd. If he's going to use that 
script-ware crap on *BSD he might want to do the same level of testing and 
customization. 

He writes a lot of one-sentence or one-paragraph articles. The site is 
more like an RSS feed than a news site. So, I don't doubt the 10,000 
number but using the term "article" to apply to all of them is a bit 
generous.

> http://jonimoose.net/2013/moronix-why-amd-wont-take-michael-larabel-seriously-and-you-shouldnt-either/

Well, I have to say, I find this blogger's criticism pretty well placed. 

-Swift

Phoronix 8-way-BSD-install - NetBSD bombed

[Swift Griggs]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article=trying-8-bsds=2

I wonder what happened in his case. I can tell he's re-using the same box 
and drive from his FreeBSD install, but I've done that many times and 
never had a problem (other than being annoyed at 'dk' devices showing up). 
I just wipe the disk and start over. 

In his case, the install locks up during the kernel initialization. From 
the looks of the dmesg/ring-buffer he's screenshotting, I'd say he's never 
getting to init. 

Phoronix is a pretty Linux-centric site. I have some suspicions is just a 
way for him to say "Aww, look, half the benchmarks I setup for 
specifically for Linux in the Phoronix testing suite don't work. BSD must 
really suck, I guess." Then it gives the kids on slashdot somewhere to 
link when they need to say "BSD is dead/sucks". 

I've *have* been noting that Linux's I/O performance edge in the last 
couple years seems to be really sliding in comparison to FreeBSD. It's 
still "kinda better" but it used to be "categorically WAY better". I'm not 
sure if that's more optimization happening in BSD land, or more suck 
leaking into Linux-land. I do a lot of testing using 'fio' and other 
benchmark tools and despite all the constant Linux hype of the 
Next-Great-IO-Scheduler, it's position in the high speed I/O peloton is, 
if anything, sliding (esp versus FreeBSD ZFS and DragonFly BSD + HAMMER). 
Of course, it's all relative to what and how you test. YMMV.

Nonetheless it pains me to see NetBSD shown in such a bad light.

-Swift

Re: installing on a VPS

[Swift Griggs]

Al,
  I have a friend who recently worked at Rackspace. Here is what he said, 
just in case it helps (I forwarded your original question to him):

Swift's Pal Says: 
> I'm sure it's possible to get the netbsd kernel/basic userland running 
> echo 'hello world' to the console, seeing as the virtual machine gives 
> you direct access to a virtual block device. But Even then I'm not 100% 
> sure it'd work because Rackspace uses a lot of custom PV drivers in its 
> xen implementation. E.g. there's a "supervisor domain" on each xenserver 
> that notifies an API when a customer dom's 'nova-agent' has started. 
> They do this over the xenbus. NetBSD won't have that in a vanilla build, 
> so in the rackspace console you'd see a vm in 'unknown' status; you 
> can't even see the console when it's in this state.

> TL;DR: Rackspace makes sure that the linuxes they support can boot and 
> be controlled by all their special services - they didn't design wide,
> just deep."

Perhaps this doesn't apply to you if you are renting a "real" server at 
Rackspace instead of renting a virtualized guest. YMMV.

-Swift

Re: configuring remote headless servers

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2016, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> It took three days for an engineer with sufficiently developed skills to 
> become available: He solved the problem by switching the server on.

Having found no good way to truly address issues like this without some 
control of my own, I don't deal with an ISP that won't give me power 
control and console. HP ILO's are a good solution since they can be used 
for both a hard power cycle and give you a real remote console. If your 
console stays in text mode, you don't even have to license the iLO. Many 
server BIOSs' have a mode whereby they can provide console support via a 
dedicated serial port (Tyan comes to mind as one of these). If you combine 
that functionality with something than can do remote power control (like a 
Baytech RPC or APC network PDUs) then you've got the same features. 

> But this led me to wonder how I would cope if, for instance, a server 
> came up in single-user mode requiring an fsck.

If you have true console access it wouldn't matter. You'd do the fsck then 
keep truckin'.

> I can see from the man pages for shutdown(8) and fastboot(8) that there 
> is provision related to this kind of circumstance.

I'll just apologize because I doubt my response was what you were looking 
for. I'll simply say this, when it comes to hosted systems, the faster the 
system can bring up the network and ssh with the absolute minimum of 
dependencies, the better. AFAIK, I've never seen an OS that really "gets" 
this, as evidenced that even though OS's *could* use their 
ramdisk/miniroots to launch OpenSSH (and statically link it), they rarely 
do (and there are some reasons, but I usually disagree with their 
importance). For a server without a decent console, having Openssh started 
is a defacto the same thing as having a usable server, thus the strategy 
should place a categorically *premium value* on doing that as soon in the 
boot process as possible with the least number of dependencies.

Also, NetBSD has the ability to redirect the console to a serial port as 
soon as the kernel starts booting. However, you'd need a serial console in 
place first before you can take advantage of that. However, in your 
scenario of the system needing an fsck and stopping the boot process, it'd 
save you from having to call some data-center hands & eyes at your ISP.

-Swift

Re: still upgrading from 2.0 to 7.0

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> I can login as an ordinary user across the network, but I cannot su from 
> there, and on the console if I su to an ordinary account and then try to 
> su from there, I gent authentication failure.

You probably already know this, but make sure the users you are trying to 
'su' from are members of the 'wheel' group. Otherwise, they will not be 
allowed to 'su' to root. 

-Swift

Re: upgrading an old system

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2016, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> But the disk layout is sorely in need of revision.

I'm not trying to be trite, but have you simply considered using dump(8) 
to backup your filesystems, install your chosen revision, and then restore 
? I haven't been closely following the thread, so I apologize if this 
doesn't work for you for some reason. 

However, here's a case for backup/restore:

1. You won't have to worry about ABI issues (but NetBSD does well here, as 
   discussed). 

2. USB disks and network backup targets are very cheap these days. If you 
   lack good on-site access, a network backup still works if you have some 
   option for that (or simply FTP the compressed dump file somewhere).

3. Most applications keep localized data out of the OS file systems making 
   it pretty easy to move to a new revision. Using the dump(8) utility 
   will save your permissions etc..

> Is the disk layout configuration tool accessible other than through 
> running sysinst, or will I have to bite the bullet and edit the disk 
> label by hand?

I don't think the disklabel format has changed in a lng time. If it 
helps you, boot a newer revision of NetBSD and use the tool. Then you can 
reboot whatever version you want to install and Just Do It.

-Swift

Re: Proxy server, mode intercept on NetBSD 7.0.1

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 2 Aug 2016, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 01:06:41AM -0400, metalli...@fastmail.fm wrote:
> > Only a "troll" because I was disappointed.  Otherwise this would be
> > known as kern/50629.
> > Enabling IPv6 and ipfilter at the same time apparently leads to null
> > pointer dereference.
>
> I'm running ipfilter on ipv6-enabled hosts and I've never seen panics.

Same here. I have at least 2 machines that fit that description, run ALTQ 
also, and have fairly long ipf.conf configs and no panics.

-Swift

Re: Proxy server, mode intercept on NetBSD 7.0.1

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2016, metalli...@fastmail.fm wrote:
> I've been very disappointed with the quality of NetBSD 7.0.1 since I 
> upgraded from 6.1.5 a few weeks ago.

I'm not. I love 7 and I'm grateful to all the volunteers who made it 
possible for me to have for FREE. 6.x had much less support for newer 
display adapters (Radeon, Nvidia, Intel) for X11. When 7 came out and had 
pulled up the driver versions I found that NetBSD suddenly supported more 
display hardware than FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Boxes that previously were 
nearly worthless with any version of BSD became fully usable as 
workstations.

In other words, not all of us were "disappointed" as you put it. I for one 
don't like your disparaging tone, either.

> I've been running pretty much the same system config as my home 
> router/NAT/firewall/server since NetBSD 1.5.  I believe that's almost 15 
> years of ipfilter/ipnat.  It has always worked well for me... until I 
> moved to NetBSD 7.

So what? I've been running NetBSD longer than you have and I don't care 
(along with everyone else who care even less) because it isn't germane to 
squat. I've seen IPF blow up in lots of cases in the past, along with a 
few issues with ALTQ but that's probably because I do more than just run 
some basement server. Stuff happens. Darren and others over the years have 
fixed lots of bugs with IPF. It happens. Deal.

Just because one didn't hit you until now doesn't mean anything special. 
Just deal with it like anyone else does, articulate the issue, file a bug 
report, create a patch, etc... Crying about your "disappointment" doesn't 
help anyone.

> I've had several issues with various parts of the OS, but ipf is the one 
> that causes random kernel panics.

There are more choices now if you feel you are not getting your money's 
worth from NetBSD/IPF. There is always PF, for example.

> so the entire home network is offline until I go downstairs, plug 
> something into the rack, and manually refresh it.  Not cool, guys. Not 
> cool.

Here's me all concerned that you have to walk downstairs *yawn*. Not cool? 
Since when was it cool to rip a butthurt attitude to a group of developers 
and volunteers who've been helping you by your own admission for over 15 
years?

-Swift 

UFS fragments

[Swift Griggs]

I've been studying ffs_alloc.c in the kernel source. I was trying to 
understand how the logical block allocation in UFS works. I never actually 
knew about "fragments". I get why they are there, but I have some 
questions if anyone has time:

* I notice that fragments can be re-allocated. Could that create 
  fragmentation issues ? Is there a way to change allocations so that 
  they are physically contiguous? Not that this matters much anymore. I'm 
  just curious if it was ever an issue. 

* I see "cred" (type kauth_cred_t) being passed around a lot in the API 
  calls. What is that doing? Aren't all these calls already going to be 
  operating as root? I couldn't find the meaning of "NOCRED" in 
  /usr/include/*.h or significant info related to kauth_cred_t but I'm 
  probably just looking in the wrong places. I'm thinking this is puffs 
  related, but I didn't think puffs and UFS knew each other.

* I see some code that seem to be related to spinning rust. Like this 
  line: 
  " *   2) allocate a rotationally optimal block in the same cylinder."

  Are there many opportunities for optimizing for SSD, nowadays, or is it 
  just too much trouble for not enough payoff?

I'm not a kernel dev, so please bear with my ignorance. I'm just wandering 
through the code. 

-Swift

Re: slightly OT hardware question

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 26 May 2016, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>> FYI, I use the TrendNET TU3-ETG v1.0R with NetBSD. This is a gigabit 
>> NIC with USB3 (though it uses USB2 in NetBSD). It works well and might 
>> give you some more options on smaller machines like that.

> H  That sounds promising. Pi-B+ ? Pi2/3 ? In service ? What are you 
> using it for ? The NIC shows up in
> ifconfig ? Inquiring minds wanna know ;-). Thanks & TIA 

I've only used the adapter on AMD64 and i386. I'm only assuming it works 
on ARM. Sorry, I should have stated that. Here is a bit more info just for 
fun:

% uname -a
NetBSD m83.parsec.com 7.0 NetBSD 7.0 (GENERIC.201509250726Z) i386

dmesg:
axen0 at uhub3 port 2
axen0: ASIX Elec. Corp. AX88179, rev 2.10/1.00, addr 8
axen0: AX88179
axen0: Ethernet address d8:eb:97:b3:ab:d9
rgephy0 at axen0 phy 3: RTL8169S/8110S/8211 1000BASE-T media interface, rev. 5
rgephy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT-FDX, auto

ifconfig:
axen0: flags=8802 mtu 1500
capabilities=3ff00
capabilities=3ff00
capabilities=3ff00
enabled=0
ec_capabilities=1
ec_enabled=0
address: d8:eb:97:b3:ab:d9
media: Ethernet autoselect (10baseT half-duplex)
status: no carrier


-Swift

Re: slightly OT hardware question

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 25 May 2016, Hal Murray wrote:
> Have you considered adding a USB-Ethernet adapter to a Pi?

FYI, I use the TrendNET TU3-ETG v1.0R with NetBSD. This is a gigabit NIC 
with USB3 (though it uses USB2 in NetBSD). It works well and might give 
you some more options on smaller machines like that. 

Thanks,
  Swift

Re: debugging a memory leak

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 20 May 2016, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> I though ElectricFence would only detect things like use after free or 
> out of bound access, but not memory leaks ?

Hmm, I thought it did. Like if you try to malloc() over a pointer and 
clobber it before you free()'d the previous one (say in a loop/iterative 
situation). A ghetto reference counter + LD_PRELOAD works pretty well for 
that, too. The only problem is that it makes your app fairly slow for 
testing if it does a lot of dynamic allocation. Neither approach is near 
as good as Valgrind, for sure.

-Swift

Re: debugging a memory leak

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 20 May 2016, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> what tools do we have on NetBSD to find a memory leak in a userland 
> program (actually OpenCPN - which is a large C++ program with dynamic 
> libraries and uses dlopen()) ?

Manuel, I'm guessing you are a much better C programmer than I, but I can 
relate what I use. I do three different things:

1. If it'll compile on Linux, I'll test it with valgrind and just apply 
the results on the NetBSD side. 

2. ElectricFence, but I doubt it'd work with libs dlopen()'d. Then again, 
if you used it with LD_PRELOAD you might be able to pre-empt the symbols 
even in the dynamic libs (in theory). 

3. I created a cheeseball reference counter similar to the one in glib by 
just wrappering malloc(). It just add/drops/prints a linked list of 
structs which are entries I'm tracking. When everything is working 
perfectly, I remove it. Voila clean memory management without krufty 
GC overhead! 

> The memory usage of the process is slowy growing, until the systems gets 
> out of ram/swap and kills it (on my evbarm which has no swap it takes 
> about 2 days).

My guess (which ain't worth much, take it with a grain of salt) you'd find 
it pretty darn fast with valgrind. It's never failed me, but it's limited 
to Linux, Darwin, and Solaris.

-Swift

Re: IrDA

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 10 May 2016, Andy Ball wrote:
> I am telling irdaattach which serial port the IrDA adaptor is connected 
> to but then irdaattach has that port busy, so it's not free for use with 
> slattach.

That makes sense, but then again, it doesn't make sense that pppd or 
slattach wouldn't let you use the returned TTY as a valid link. 

With Linux there is an "irCom" driver that will re-present the IRDA link 
as a serial port. That's what you use to attach SLIP or PPP there. I'm 
guessing there must be something similar with NetBSD. In fact I just 
looked at an old script (for Linux) that's doing this:

pppd /dev/ircomm0 115200 noauth 192.168.99.1:192.168.99.2

So, there must be something equal to that "ircomm0" device for use with 
either slip or ppp. I'm just not sure what it is or if there is some kind 
of special tool to give it an ioctl() to work as a serial/character 
device.

-Swift

Re: IrDA (fwd)

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 10 May 2016, Andy Ball wrote:
> That returns /dev/irframe0, which apparently is not something that I 
> can use with slattach...

Hmm, yes, it seems it's telling you the framing device, not the TTY. Are 
you giving it a TTY name when you invoke irdaattach? From looking at the 
man page, that would seem to be the norm. Then you'd give that same TTY to 
pppd or slattach. 

-Swift

Re: IrDA

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 10 May 2016, ball@mwo-c9kdw31.localdomain wrote:
> On the desktop PC, "irdaattach -d tekram -h /dev/dty00"...

Good. That gets you frame level attachement to the tty device. Now you can 
run ppp or slip on it. 

> Can I run IP over irframe0?  Are tty524288 and tty524289 devices that I 
> could use to configure SLIP?  Do I need something (ircomm?) in between 
> SLIP and irframe0 to make this work?  I would welcome some guidance.

I think all you need to do at the point where your IRDA framing driver is 
attached to the TTY is to fire up slip or ppp. I'd recommend PPP since 
it's more flexible, supports compression, etc.. However, there isn't any 
reason you couldn't use slip, too. something like this:

server:
pppd 192.168.0.1:192.168.0.2 ttyname /dev/tty524288

client:
pppd noipdefault ttyname /dev/tty524289

That should give you a ppp0 on both sides.  

-Swift

Re: compression in dump(8)

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 2 May 2016, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> It does; the dump format puts the directory info first so that it can 
> restore the stuff you selected in a single pass (it does not need to 
> seek backwards).

Gotcha. Sorry for piping up about something that already works then! I'll 
be sure to try it next time I need to. 

> Of course if you select some, restore, try to select some more, 
> restore... It will not work since it will need to seek backwards then. 

Understood. That makes good sense. 

> Remember all this stuff was designed with tapes in mind, not random 
> access devices.

Roger that. 


-Swift

Re: compression in dump(8)

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 2 May 2016, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> Doesn't that work? zcat dump.gz | restore -f -

Yes it does. What I don't believe will work is this (interactive restores 
when I only want to restore a few files):

restore -i -f /path/to/mydump

-Swift

compression in dump(8)

[Swift Griggs]

I notice that the dump command in NetBSD doesn't feature the use of any 
internal compression. If one compresses the dump file, then you can't use 
it as the basis for a restore. 

Is that because the compression functions aren't in libc (ie.. they are 
off in libz or liblzma) ? Perhaps it's just a matter of someone doing the 
work ? It'd be a big help for admins who want to be able to use a modern 
compression algorithm without having to uncompress the dump to use it. I 
for one, would use it on all my systems. 

-Swift

Rumpkernel comments by Linus

[Swift Griggs]

Linus seems to frown on the rumpkernel efforts since he believes it'll put 
the OS into a straight jacket (my words, not his). The original post is 
below. However, what say you folks? Is he reacting to something he doesn't 
know anything about based on his general instincts or is he making a 
legitimate critique? Is it a value-system judgment or is he missing some 
fact about the AnyKernel approach that negates his preconceptions? Is it 
simply a case that Linux already gets lots of DriverLove[tm] from the 
vendors and they just don't have to care or is that too cynical?

-Swift


---[ Slashdot Snippet ]---
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-linus-torvalds-answers-your-question

"anykernel"-style portable drivers?
by staalmannen

What do you think about the "anykernel" concept (invented by another Finn 
btw) used in NetBSD? Basically, they have modularized the code so that a 
driver can be built either in a monolithic kernel or for user space 
without source code changes ( rumpkernel.org ). The drivers are highly 
portable and used in Genode os (L4 type kernels), minix etc... Would this 
be possible or desirable for Linux? Apparently there is one attempt called 
"libos"...

Linus: So I have bad experiences with "portable" drivers. Writing drivers 
to some common environment tends to force some ridiculously nasty 
impedance matching abstractions that just get in the way and make things 
really hard to read and modify. It gets particularly nasty when everybody 
ends up having complicated - and differently so - driver subsystems to 
handle a lot of commonalities for a certain class of drivers (say a 
network driver, or a USB driver), and the different operating systems 
really have very different approaches and locking rules etc.

I haven't seen anykernel drivers, but from past experience my reaction to 
"portable device drivers" is to run away, screaming like little girl. As 
they say in Swedish "Brnt barn luktar illa".

Re: Prevent firefox from making noise

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, co...@sdf.org wrote:
> It does.

Great.  I'll switch to pkgsrc-current and shut my whine-hole.

> You may need to delete graphite2.  Do you have version 1.2.4 and it
> doesn't try to update it?

What I've got currently with my pkgsrc-2015Q4 rig is:

graphite2-1.3.5 Cross-platform rendering for complex writing systems

  Swift

Re: Prevent firefox from making noise

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2016, co...@sdf.org wrote:
> my graphics/graphite2 update that broke it (back and forth) I don't know
> what should have been changed but didn't happen, missing revbump?  it will
> not build with graphite2 older than 1.3.5.

Ah, okay. I'm not crazy, then. 

> sorry

Thanks a ton for confirming.  Now I can quit squirming around trying to
figure out what I did wrong.  I'll just wait for a fix. Do you happen to
know if it's building in -current? I can swap out my pkgsrc rev easy enough
if it does. 

Thanks! 

-Swift

Re: Prevent firefox from making noise

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2016, Roy Bixler wrote:
> I tried a quick search on it and the articles all say that firefox doesn't
> have a built-in way to disable audio (surprising, given the sheer number
> of available variables to tweak.)

That is surprising, now that you mention it. 

> However, the articles mention available addons to either mute or alter the
> volume.

Thanks for checking.  That makes sense.  I'll try it.  I should have looked
there already.

I still doubt/wonder about building firefox (today, not in the past) under
pkgsrc-2015Q4.  It appears broken and that brokeness appears to extend to
the FTP site and thus to pkgin as well.  Just wondering how we got to a
pkgsrc-2015Q4 stable freeze with a busted firefox build.  So, I figure it's
got to be on my end, but then there's the "Why isn't it on the FTP site,
then?" Those are auto-built, I believe.  That leads me to speculate that the
build server is having the same build-failure for firefox as I am.

Perhaps there is some problem with dependencies and I need to rebuild them
all?  Anyone know if there is a pkgsrc keyword to do this ?  Make replace
perhaps (or does that just rebuild the current package) ?

Thanks,
  Swift

Prevent firefox from making noise

[Swift Griggs]

First of all, I love pkgsrc, and give hella credit to the team.  Let's just
get that straight before I start whining about what are possibly my own
self-inflicted problems.

Can one disable or prevent sound from playing from one specific application
(at the OS level)?  If not, then is there any way to simply prevent Firefox
from having sound abilities?  

I notice options to disable PulseAudio (the dirty turd that it is), but I'm
not sure that's going to help if it simply switches to OSS, and Firefox has
been utterly broken in pkgsrc-2015Q4 for me on every system I try to compile
it on for some time now (posted about that about two weeks ago on
pkgsrc-users with no replies).  So, I can't test that theory.  I'm using
Firefox24 since it still works.  Perhaps I've just horked up my systems and
everyone else is fine?

I have zero reason to use Firefox or anything it would spawn to play audio. 
If I want to watch a Youtube video, I use youtube-dl.  If I want to stream
music, I'll use a real streaming utility like mplayer.  I'm one of those
curmudgeons that doesn't like s*** just playing willy-nilly from my infernal
browser.  I flat out just don't want Firefox _touching_ my sound device. 
The reason being that it (and/or flash) rarely releases it in a timely or
easy fashion afterward.  The same goes for flash or nspluginwrapper or some
bit of that Rube-Goldberg machine. I find that I also get into a situation
where after Firefox horks up my sound device I can never get it to function
again without a reboot (and yes, I've used fuser and lsof to look for open
file pointers on every damn sound device - fail: they don't exist). 

Has anyone already solved this ? Does anyone else get a big nasty compile
failure when trying to build pkgsrc/www/firefox out of pkgsrc-2015Q4 ? 

If it's working for folks, then why is it missing from pkg_summary.bz2 and
thus I can't even snag it with pkgin from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/7.0_2015Q4/All ?


Any help / answers would be appreciated. 

-Swift

Re: scp dropping connections

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2016, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> >I attached gdb on sparc64 to sshd process and after 30 seconds got the
> >following
> Do you have a NAT/firewall and you don't have keep state in your pass rules?

I've also seen misconfigured NIDS system that are setup for TCP 
"shootdown" (ie..  sending RSTs to both sides with valid SEQ numbers 
causing an instant disconnect). Occasionally they will see something in 
the encrypted data stream (or just the fact that it's encrypted) and shoot 
down the connection because it violates some network policy (usually just 
misconfigured to think that).

If that's the cause, it's very easy to see it in a packet trace because 
all the sudden out of nowhere you just see an RST hit you and kill the 
connection. Then on the opposite (client) side, if you take a trace at the 
same time, you won't see it actually _sending_ the RST. Thus, you know a 
NIDS spoofed it.

-Swift

Re: Graphics wiki page

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2016, co...@sdf.org wrote:
> Others have recommended using such a live image when purchasing hardware
> like a laptop at a store.

That is exactly what I do.  I take a USB stick with a copy of NetBSD
installed on it into the store and boot it up.  Then I simply run startx and
watch the action from there.

BTW, if there is work to be done with C or shell script to help with any
kind of test suite + website idea like this in the future, then I'd be
willing to help out a bit.  The same goes for hardware.  PCIe-wise I have
@20 discrete Radeon and 6 Nvidia graphics cards.  Most of them work, but
some don't.  I'd be willing to test them directly or mail them to folks who
want to help.  There are only 1 or 2 I'd care to get back.

Thanks,
  Swift

Re: PAE + i7 + 24G RAM + i386 kernel = panic

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2016, Benny Siegert wrote:

I just took the GENERIC kernel, modified one line to enable PAE and then 
rebooted my i7 with 24G of RAM. I'm using NetBSD 7.0 i386.
This may not be the point, but: If you have that much RAM, why do you 
use a 32-bit kernel in the first place?


I know what you mean, but I have one lame-but-valid reason: wine. It 
doesn't work on NetBSD AMD64 but rather it works only on i386. I hate this 
fact, but I use it a lot. There are several little windows programs that 
do specialized things that are pretty "must have" for me on this specific 
system (I'm not willing to justify or rationalize to others why I need 
this - just understand it's must-have in my use-case). Running them over 
VNC or something like that isn't an option for these specific apps. They 
need to run on my machine at near-native speed locally.


That reminds me, I wish there was something like a "SunPC" card for a 
regular old PC. That way I could run Windows or some other heinous crap 
natively on the little PCIe card, while leaving my "real" OS untouched. 
Anyone ever hear of such a thing? I've seen little transputers but nothing 
you can pass through a VGA display from ala the SunPC card for Solaris.


In benchmarks for Go, the devs found that 64-bit code gives a 10-15% 
speedup across the board. This is because there are more processor 
registers in 64-bit mode, so more variables can be kept in registers.


I don't doubt it a bit. I normally run AMD64 on most machines, but I have 
the one that needs to run Wine and when it only sees 2GB of RAM the box 
will swap even just compiling stuff in pkgsrc. I'm using an SSD and I 
don't want it to swap (write cycles). So, I want the extra RAM to work so 
I don't run into swapping issues.


-Swift

PAE + i7 + 24G RAM + i386 kernel = panic

[Swift Griggs]

I just took the GENERIC kernel, modified one line to enable PAE and then 
rebooted my i7 with 24G of RAM. I'm using NetBSD 7.0 i386. As soon as the 
bootloader passes off to the kernel, it crashes and drops into the 
debugger. Trying to do a 'bt' (backtrace) causes an instant-reboot.


So, I recompiled again and turned on all the debugging features. It didn't 
crash this time and I was able to get a backtrace (once, but type it twice 
and get another instant-reboot). I can transcribe what I saw on the screen 
and file a PR if that's helpful. However, I'm curious:


1. Is this a known issue ?

2. Is this reproducible for anyone else ?

Thanks,
  Swift

Re: linking issue - what am I doing wrong?

[Swift Griggs]

Some folks, who have had similar issues, asked what I ended up doing and 
if I'd post it. Here's the skinny:


I was doing this:

gcc -g -Wall -I/usr/pkg/include -I/usr/X11R7/include -lXm \
  -L/usr/pkg/lib -o hello hello.c

I switched it to this:

gcc -Wl,-rpath,/usr/pkg/lib -Wl,-rpath,/usr/X11R7/lib -g -Wall \
  -I/usr/pkg/include -I/usr/X11R7/include -lXm \
  -L/usr/pkg/lib -o hello hello.c

I guess that bakes in the library search path to your resulting binary. 
Very helpful, actually. I just never really knew this was an alternative 
to something like always having to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but since I saw 
other programs that managed to pull it off, I thought I'd ask. I'm glad I 
did. There are so many smart folks on this list.


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: linking issue - what am I doing wrong?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2016, Rhialto wrote:
It looks like you need to give the runtime library path to the linker. 
See ld's -rpath option.


Yep. J. Hannken-Illjes sent me a note about the same issue and I was able 
to make it work.


Unfortunately different compilers have slightly different ways of 
specifying this (and passing it on to the linker). I think 
-Wl,-rpath,arg is a common variant.


Well, I'm glad I'm learning about this. I'm sure it'll be useful on NetBSD 
and other platforms that don't use something like ldconfig.


I have a rant somewhere about how this is better than a global 
system-wide search path such as used by lunix or freebsd, but I'd have 
to look it up :)


No sweat, brother, I have no dog in that fight. I'm just trying to make my 
simple little tutorial programs work. I used to be a lot better with C, 
and I've been striving lately to get better so I can participate in some 
projects I care about. I'm not surprised that I'm tripping over the linker 
after not writing any real C in 10 years.


I guess this is how pkgsrc has to compile a _lot_ of stuff. The syntax for 
GCC is a bit clumsy, but it works. Once it's compiled in, it pretty well 
stays working. So, at least there is that. I don't have to mess around 
with ldconfig et al. Learning this also helps me understand the 
differences between platforms.


-Swift

linking issue - what am I doing wrong?

[Swift Griggs]

I'm doing some tutorials on Motif. I'm really just getting started. I'm 
doing something ignorant while linking and I'm not sure what it is. What 
happens is that I'm able to get Motif and Xtoolkit linked to my little 
test program, but the program won't run unless LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set. Yet 
other programs linked to Motif run fine without even setting that env 
variable. Here's what it looks like (let me know if you care what's in my 
silly little program, I believe this to be my own problem with linking):


So, my fundamental question is: Why does ldd see that 'plan' is linked to 
Motif versus my silly hello program that can't. Understand that if I set 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include /usr/pkg/lib, everything works fine.


sgriggs@m83 ~/code/motif $ gcc -g -Wall -I/usr/pkg/include -I/usr/X11R7/include 
-lXm -L/usr/pkg/lib -o hello hello.c
sgriggs@m83 ~/code/motif $ unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
sgriggs@m83 ~/code/motif $ ./hello
Shared object "libXm.so.4" not found
sgriggs@m83 ~/code/motif $ ldd hello
hello:
-lXm.4 => not found
-lgcc_s.1 => /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
-lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12
-lXt.7 => not found
sgriggs@m83 ~/code/motif $ ldd /usr/pkg/bin/plan
/usr/pkg/bin/plan:
-lXm.4 => /usr/pkg/lib/libXm.so.4
-lXmu.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXmu.so.7
-lXt.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXt.so.7
-lX11.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libX11.so.7
-lxcb.2 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libxcb.so.2
-lXau.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXau.so.7
-lgcc_s.1 => /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
-lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12
-lXdmcp.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXdmcp.so.7
-lSM.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libSM.so.7
-lICE.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libICE.so.7
-lXext.7 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXext.so.7
-lXrender.2 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXrender.so.2
-lXft.3 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXft.so.3
-lfontconfig.2 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libfontconfig.so.2
-lexpat.2 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.2
-lfreetype.17 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libfreetype.so.17
-lz.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1
-lbz2.1 => /usr/lib/libbz2.so.1
-lXrandr.3 => /usr/X11R7/lib/libXrandr.so.3
-ljpeg.9 => /usr/pkg/lib/libjpeg.so.9
-lpng16.16 => /usr/pkg/lib/libpng16.so.16
-lm.0 => /usr/lib/libm.so.0

Any ideas?

-Swift

Re: Silly shell question

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2016, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
Yes just use getenv. See the manpage. I wouldn't call it a "client" but 
either a child or replacement.


Got it. That makese sense. Johnny described it as "inheriting the 
environment" and that concept makes a lot of sense.


The concept doesn't exist at that level. Have a look at the execve 
manpage.  Also have a look at the src/bin/sh source too: execcmd in 
eval.c environment in var.c tryexec in exec.c


Juicy. This is perfect. I've got all those open right now, I'm learning a 
ton. I see what you guys are saying about "environment" at a low level. 
Thanks a lot!


-Swift

Re: Silly shell question

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2016, Johnny Billquist wrote:

Only environment variables are propagated to child processes.


Thanks for the info, but do you happen to know what the actual mechanism 
that the child processes is able to "import" the exported variable ? Ie.. 
is it some special OS glue/magic, or is it just straight getenv() calls by 
the client shell/app ? I don't see anything magical in the man page for 
getenv() that would distinguish an exported versus non-exported variable.


-Swift

Silly shell question

[Swift Griggs]

In ksh, when you use the 'export' keyword, what is actually going on? Does 
it create a copy of the variable in memory? I doubt it since I tried a 
test and I could see the exported version changing even if I just change 
the original variable:


# FOO=abc
# export FOO
# ksh
# echo $FOO
abc
# exit
# FOO=123
# ksh
# echo $FOO
123
# exit

So, what is that really happens with exported variables? Does the 
shell/app that's starting up check for exported variables and somehow 
import them? How can it tell? I noticed there are a LOT of checks around 
exported variables in ast-ksh. It appears to be a dangerous proposition in 
some cases.


Sorry if this seems like a dumb question. I'm just curious about the 
intrinsics of how it works. I looked at the source code for ast-ksh, but 
it's pretty huge and hard to follow to answer this question. I'm just 
wondering what the key mechanism is. Curiosity only.


-Swift

Per-user/group memory limits

[Swift Griggs]

I noticed this page:
https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/tmpfs-quotas/

Does that only apply to tmpfs (ie.. RAM disks) or would it be usable to 
limit total process memory usage by a given user? I'm just curious as to 
what portion of linux's "Control Groups" / "CGroups" is already present in 
the BSDs, and of course most notably within NetBSD.


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: Random lockups on an email server - possibly kern/50168

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2016, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

Can anyone suggest any other avenues to investigate?


Have you tried running a kernel with DDB enabled ? If the machine will 
handle it, horsepower-wise, I'd turn on that and make sure all your 
debugging symbols are rolled up into your kernel image (ie.. cc -g which 
you can set by un-commenting the makeoption in your kernel config). Then 
when the thing falls over again, get a backtrace from it.


If you get really angry and motiviated you might try a serial line kernel 
debugger since it seems the bug might lockup the keyboard and mouse. There 
are some instructions for that here:


http://www.netbsd.org/docs/kernel/kgdb.html


Swift

Any way to "passive commit" to RAM without syncing ?

[Swift Griggs]

I know NetBSD supports RAM disks. I also know it uses them for 
installation, but I'm not sure if they are overlays on top of the static 
disk images or if they get loaded/populated with the image after the 
system boots. The effect is the same, either way. You end up with a 
writable file system in RAM which is predicated on a disk image. I was 
thinking about this in the context of another problem.


Let's say I've got a machine with a boatload of RAM and I have an 
application which wants extremely fast writes, but doesn't really care 
that much about data integrity, and this case, nor do I. Having the system 
come back in the same state after rebooting is "nice to have" in this 
thought experiment. Soo, here is the question:


Since a RAM disk is probably the fastest option, is there a way to 
basically leave uncommitted data until I run "sync" or something calls 
fsync() ? Even better, is there a way to fake a sync until I run something 
else ?


In other words, operate out of a RAM disk until my human operator gives 
the go-ahead to flush out the writes to disk or the RAM disk gets full. I 
think Sprite did something like this back in the Jurassic Period. I also 
remember CacheFS for Solaris doing something similar for NFS.


I can think of a few applications:

- Internet cafe style browsing where the machines are using older 
hardware. They might benefit from using a small RAM disk overlay rather 
than having to use something like a PATA disks for it's cache.


- Editing high bandwidth data like video or audio. Most of the time my 
editing sessions don't last more than an hour and once I get a final cut I 
just save the project to a server and don't care much about the recording 
or editing workstation.


- Any kind of temporary storage that needs RAM disk speeds, but still 
needs an option to sync/flush the file system back to long term storage.


I'm guessing this would be a little tricky with something like UFS since a 
process could alter/write to a file and it'd need to reflect that when 
another process wanted to do the same, fseek(), or dozens of other 
operations. However, I just wonder if there is already a way to do this 
and I'm just not aware of it.


I wonder if the LiveCD's for Linux that let you flush you changes to USB 
do something similar. I doubt it. I'm guessing they just load a RAM disk 
image and you operate on that until you reboot and it's lost.


-Swift

Re: Reformatting little USB-harddisks

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Andrew Cagney wrote:
One got ya!  They can be slow to come online and may not be ready if 
you're trying to use or mount it during boot.


This is especially slow for some reason on WD drives with SES. I have a 
2TB WD USB3 drive for backups that has this issue. It's fine otherwise. 
NetBSD used to be a bit flaky with the SES operations (a long time ago) 
but it's great these days. My only wish was that it ran at USB3 speeds, 
but most USB3 drives can't exceed the USB2 spec (or not except for 
spikes). So, it's not a big deal to me.


-Swift

Re: SSD TRIM / "discard" works after a remount with mount -a?

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Benny Siegert wrote:
I don?t think that?s a big deal. For the record, I have run my SSD 
without TRIM on NetBSD for a long while now. In fact, your email taught 
me about the ?discard? option :?


Well, I have also on other systems. I've also read that some SSDs don't 
actually need TRIM at all. I use Samsung 850 Pros.



Otherwise, to enable TRIM without rebooting, try:
mount -uo discard /


I think that the mount -a does the same thing. What I did to test was to 
try it on one system and after editing the /etc/fstab and running mount -a 
I see that "discard" is listed in the "mount" output. However, I'm a 
little suspicous that it's not actually on. Paranoia.



3. dd if=/dev/zero bs=4096k of=/my/affected/file/system/DELETEME.000
  I'm assuming short blocks get written as partials.
I would skip this step and the following ones. They likely do more harm 
than good.


I'd like to know where you are coming from on that. I get that SSDs have 
to be wear leveled, but I'm wondering what's going to happen the next time 
that I write to a block that was deleted but not properly trim'd. Wouldn't 
that cause a pause / blocking while the TRIM operation had to complete? 
Maybe I have a jacked up understanding of the dynamics, but hey, that's 
why I asked :-)


Thanks for the feedback.

-Swift

Re: bta2dpd - advanced audio distribution profile bluetooth daemon IMPROVED

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2016, Nathanial Sloss wrote:

Call for testers of the next installment of bta2dpd.


Yay! Nice one. I'll test it out this week. It looks fun.

It allows you to stream music or pad(4) output to bluetooth stereo 
headphones or speakers using the advanced audio distribution profile 
(a2dp).


Ahhh, that's going to rock, quite literally. I've got a SoundBlaster 
BlasterAxx and a new set of Sony BT headphones. I'll try it with both.


NEW!!! bta2dpd can be used also as an audio sink, so you can stream 
music from your phone/computer etc. to a file or audioplay to hear it on 
your computer speakers.  See below.


Hmm, does it have any noticeable delay? Ie.. could it be used to send 
output to a recording monitor without any significant delay (for live 
monitoring while playing music) ? If you don't know off hand, it's not big 
deal. I'll just try it.


I have a two mixers hooked up to my main NetBSD workstation (though I 
sometimes move them to an SGI workstation). One for input, one for output. 
I'd love to be able to add a high bitrate BT DAC on a channel for both 
sides (know of any good ones you like?).


To use this deamon requires 44100Hz stereo signed 16 bit little endian 
wav files or the pad(4) device.


Just like a CDDA converted to PCM WAV would be, right?

Most of the options change the way audio is encoded and are not 
necessary however if you have skipping audio or no audio try the 
following:


Does that buffering result in more jitter or delays? Again, I'll fiddle, 
but just curious about your experience.


What fun!  Great work.

-Swift

Re: ZFS

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2016, co...@sdf.org wrote:
Someone on IRC implied that he is using ZFS. Still struggling to 
believe, so I gotta ask - is there anyone out there using it?


I'm not. I never knew it got past the idea stage for NetBSD. It's listed 
on the projects page here:


https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/zfs/

Did it ever get to the point where it was usable? The last note on the 
project page says "It is not finished. Ask on tech-kern for more 
information about the current state." but it's dated 2014.


Like you, I wonder about ZFS in general. Didn't the NetBSD project pay 
someone to complete it or am I wrong and it was a purely volunteer effort? 
Was it part of a Google SoC project? Can it ever be pulled into the 
mainline code (ie.. isn't the CDDL incompatible with the BSD license?) ?


ZFS has some great features. I've used it quite a bit under Solaris and 
FreeBSD. However, it's also proven to be a source of a lot of crashes I've 
seen under both (but especially FreeBSD).


I'm guessing it'd be a really big challenge to re-implement things like 
deduplication or other key ZFS features, but then again I look at HAMMER 
and wonder... Since HAMMER is BSD-focused (and BSD licensed) maybe that's 
a better choice to want to throw in with ? Then again, I don't know the 
politics of that, either.


A few tidbits about ZFS:

* Solaris never has had LVM. Sun had a history of making spectacularly
  bad choices before ZFS came along. Those of you who have tried to
  recover a mis-matched SDS/SVM rig know what I mean. They had a chance to
  get VxVM on the cheap in the 90's and pooched it (while HP-UX, Tru64,
  and UnixWare snatched it up). So, NetBSD has RAIDframe which works
  nicely, and now a very sweet LVM. The urgency to have something like ZFS
  in NetBSD shouldn't be quite as acute as it was in Slowlaris.

* I don't consider having block storage commands separated from file
  system commands a weakness. Ie.. LVM + FS == ZFS && ! ZFS > everything.
  I think that puts me on the outs with the cool kids.

* If you put all the storage features in NetBSD up against ZFS, the main
  things you come up missing on are:

  - Huge sizes on all the upper limits. The "zettabyte" part is real.
  - Deduplication
  - online fsck (scrub)
  - An unprecedented level of paranoia about data integrity

However, of those only deduplication is all that exciting. Other ZFS-like 
features we have (if you consider the full NetBSD toolset):


  - Block device encryption
  - Ability to grow a file system (don't think UFS in NetBSD can shrink)
  - Block device abstraction, aggregation / RAID (LVM / RAIDframe)
  - File system snapshots
  - Root disk mirroring

Other stuff I'm not sure about:

  - Can NetBSD do RAID6 / RAID-DP in software ?
  - What about the ZIL and L2ARC, are there already NetBSD equals?
  - Does NetBSD's LVM support multiple copies of an LV on physical PVs
ala ZFS ditto blocks ?
  - Does anyone care that ZFS is now closed source and the CDDL forks are
now going to drift significantly from the parent core ? I don't
really, but I'm just wondering if that's a concern.
  - Do we have anything against HAMMER ? I personally think it's cool.

It's an interesting topic to me.

-Swift

Re: "No route to host" in Alpine

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2016, Marco Beishuizen wrote:

Could be I don't know. Is there a way to make try NetBSD IPv4 first?


I'm not sure there is any way to change that. Something like
"ifconfig  inet6 down" might be cool, but doesn't work. It'll take 
down the whole interface (including ipv4).


What you could do, just to be sure, is compile a custom kernel without any 
ipv6 support in it.


-Swift

Re: Qemu + tiny core linux = poor man's chromium on NetBSD

[Swift Griggs]

On Sat, 27 Feb 2016, Mayuresh wrote:
What doesn't change is, whether you like it or not, you have no option 
but to work with such websites. Well, had that not been the case I'd use 
elinks almost everywhere...


I feel the same way. I've used Chrome enough on other platforms to see 
that it's clearly faster than most and has some nice features. However, 
I'm distrustful of Google and Chrome seems to lack some of the privacy and 
anti-tracking features of others.


Best option is of course to have it natively on NetBSD and I am sure it 
will come some day.


I'm sure it will. FreeBSD and OpenBSD already have it. Hopefully, it's 
just a matter of time.


Linux emulation layer could be an option. But I personally do not have 
sufficient expertise to try Linux version of chromium through NetBSD 
Linux emulation layer.


I have tried it. It seems to fall apart somewhere in emulation-land.

May be if someone has, kindly submit a package to pkgsrc or wip. (Just 
like libreoffice has native as well as Linux emulation version we might 
have both in future.)


That'd be nice. I like how that's done with Firefox.

Linux as Xen DomU is an option and I know how to use it, but I have 
several other difficulties with xen, particularly related to graphics.


I have two problems with Xen. Lack of a console is problem #1. The second 
is that the Xen tools that are written in Python love to fail for a 
variety of reasons and when they don't fail, they often don't work 
properly. I've had terrible experiences with the toolset over the years on 
both NetBSD and Linux.



So I come to Qemu.


Qemu is categorically awesome, if you ask me. Fabrice Bellard is a genius. 
The only problem is the lack of any acceleration via kquemu and/or 
friends. Even on very fast systems, the performance hit is massive.


Tiny core Linux can be a very good option as it is lightweight and has 
chromium browser in its repository.


Are you using some kind of Docker version? I'm just curious.

Getting it work is pretty easy as well. After getting the terminal I set 
the DISPLAY to that of the host and launch chromium perfectly fine.


You're lucky then. I've done the same and it doesn't always work. Many 
times it complains about lack of some X11 extensions and XDMCP won't work. 
Sounds like your combination works well.


I tried to create a nested X server with Xnest and launched chromium in 
that.


I suppose you could also try to launch it within an X11 session running in 
Xvnc. Of course, that sucks because you can't simply launch Chrome and 
redirect the display, you have to show the whole "desktop". That's my #1 
complaint about VNC - you can't share out apps (with the not-very-good 
exception of SeamlessRDP which is pretty breaky).


Now the freezing behavior is gone. However the Xnested application does 
not render properly. Many of the widgets, text elements simply do not 
appear properly under Xnest.


That almost always happens to me when using Xnest.

Above was on NetBSD 7.0 amd64 Qemu 2.4.0.1, but I had witnessed similar 
behavior with older NetBSD and Qemu versions in the past.


Does the whole VM lock up or just Chrome within it?

-Swift

Re: create keys and certificates for postfix/tls

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 29 Feb 2016, Martin Husemann wrote:

I am currently using free certificates from StartSSL.


Interesting that they even offer such a thing. I had to look them up.

I looked at letsencrypt, but I couldn't make any sense of it - can 
somebody explain (from an admin point of view) how that is supposed to 
work?


It's a science project, for sure. I was playing with it recently under 
FreeBSD. My impression of how it's supposed to work is this:


1. You install a Python script using git.

2. You run the script and it tries to autoconfigure for your system. It's
   a script, so of course, that's mostly going to fail. The script tries
   to detect things like your cert locations in your Apache config. It
   does claim to be able to manage raw certs.

3. The script in conjunction with back-end tools on their site checks
   your domain's TXT records for an x509 special record with some special
   sauce to auth your CSR or whatever.


Of course I will NOT install arbitrary 3rd party server side software
(where my server OS isn't even officially supported) to handle
important things like certificate renewals when it is a very simple
task to do just once a year.


Their intention is, I believe, for you to run this Python script every day 
until the end of time and it'll handle cert updates automagically. They 
don't issue certs for any longer than 90 days as far as I can tell. So, 
I'm guessing you'll be doing a lot of updating and it'd definitely need to 
work. They have a protocol for the crypto ops called ACME. So, I suppose 
the Python script is the first (and only?) implementation of that.


Given all the hype about it, I am sure I must be missing something. What 
is it?


My take is that it's a way to get a quick domain cert if you have control 
over your domain's DNS. I don't like the script-approach since it threw 
all kinds of warnings and errors, then failed to work under FreeBSD, I'm 
guessing it'll fail even worse for NetBSD.


In short, Linux Foundation + overly ambitious python script = meh.

-Swift

Re: pf or npf?

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2016, John Nemeth wrote:
You didn't ask, but I'll add that the third option is ipfilter. It sits 
somewhere in the middle.  It hasn't seen a lot of maintenance or 
enhancement lately, but it is still much newer then pf.


Just FYI, the last version was 4.1.33 and was released 2013-04-24 
according to source forge. Looks like Darren Reed still runs the project, 
but as you say, there isn't any action lately.



It is also quite stable and usable.


I still use it on Tru64 5.1B as it is the only realistic and free option 
available that I'm aware of. I've also used it on Solaris 8, IRIX 6.2 and 
6.5, Unixware 7, QNX, and HPUX.


I don't know much about all the bitchery and crying that went on between 
Darren and Theo. *shrug*. I will just say ipfilter works amazingly great 
considering some of the challenging and crappy situations I've put it in. 
Years ago I ran a firewall with IRIX 6.2 that was up for about 3 years 
with no issues at all (yeah, laugh it up at IRIX, but it was beat on 
constantly and nobody hacked it).


All that said, I'm excited about NPF, too. Finally our own code we can go 
fine-grain or lockless on. That should help us push the turbo-button on 
the filtering performance. Congrats to Mr. Rasiukevicius and friends on a 
great job so far!


-Swift

Linux emulation - chroot always?

[Swift Griggs]

When a Linux-binary runs, what does it "see" in terms of the root file 
system? So, for example, if I run 'ldconfig', does it see Linux libraries 
in /emul/linux/lib or just "/lib" ?


Also, how does this play out when I want to run Linux binaries from my 
home directory? Ie.. if I wanted to run foobar.exe and it expects to find 
some shared lib in /usr/local/lib does that need to be relative or 
absolute?


What about 32 vs 64 bit binaries, is there any automatic translation or 
chrooting for /emul/linux vs /emul/linux32 ?


-Swift

Re: Disconnect/connect usb ports

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2016, Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia wrote:
The problem is very random. As you can suppose. Neither my pc ( a 
nettop) or my lapto have ground.


I've had similar problems to the ones you and Felix describe. I was using 
a USB audio device with a fancy D/A converter. It'd get reset or stutter 
ever time I'd use my KVM. My KVM had a USB port that would get swapped 
between whatever systems it was currently connected to. That was causing 
some kind of surge or inrush that was causing the whole bus to reset. I 
also noticed that wasn't the only thing that would do it. Just about any 
power or USB related event would cause bus-resets.


The problems were specific to that system and to NetBSD running on it. It 
was using an AMD USB chip, too. I've had more problems from those versus 
Intel. Until I swapped out the system about four months ago, the only way 
I could use that little Brown-Burr USB audio device was to put it on a USB 
hub with it's own discrete power supply. I got even more paranoid and put 
the power adapter on a battery backed up line conditioner, too. I got some 
nice recordings after that.


Thanks,
  Swift

NetBSD wiki question

[Swift Griggs]

Folks,
  I used to contribute to the wiki.netbsd.se site. I also used to 
source/use several articles there for various tidbits and procedures. I 
found the site very helpful / useful. IIRC, there was some controversy 
over the whole thing. This page hints at some of that:


https://wiki.netbsd.org/wiki/todo/migrate_content_from_wiki.netbsd.se/

As far as the controversy goes - I'm (mostly) indifferent. I can see both 
sides to both policies (open edits with liberal membership, or 
pre-approved content by vetted authors). So, I'm not out to participate in 
the debate or try to sway anyone away from the current policy/system. 
That's too much of a hassle and a stress I'm not game for.


Having said that, I don't like having to work with a Big Brother who 
trusts you so little they have to sign-off on every change (just my 
personal style-issue / preference). I'm not an anointed contributor nor do 
I have any access to wiki.netbsd.org, anyway. So, sadly, those two facts 
pretty much rake that option off the table.


Currently, strictly in my personal opinion, the current wiki.netbsd.org 
pales in comparison to what wiki.netbsd.se had (content-wise). The content 
is clearly manicured for style and correctness, but the volume or perhaps 
how germane the answer to my specific queries are is noticeably different. 
Again, this is just my personal opinion and experience, YMMV. No offence 
intended to the contributors, organizers, or sysadmin/maintainers. It's a 
great resource, just not what I'm looking for.


The question is, does any know of another site, similar to wiki.netbsd.se 
that has the following attributes:


* Use a wiki or otherwise automated CMS (wiki is what I prefer)

* It allows for post-review for edits by logged-in users rather than
  pre-review. Ie.. more trust. Ie.. like wiki.netbsd.se used to do.

* It has some chance of enduring a few years.

Is there any such beast available ? Am I all wet about the way the 
wiki.netbsd.org works and need to be disabused of my notions ? Thanks.


-Swift

Re: Installing packages with wildcards

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2016, co...@sdf.org wrote:
If you are me, you hate installing all the gstreamer plugins one at a 
time.


Heck yea, I'm right there with you. Of course, I'd take it one step 
farther and call just about anything associated with Gnome annoying. I 
must be an alien, but if I am, I'm certain folks on my home planet do not 
immerse themselves in world-eating GUI-desktop environments. They have 
small bodies, oval shaped eyes, grey skin, and an abiding love for the 
CLI.


Nonetheless, I still get caught in the dependency trap and have to install 
them. The main reason: Pianobar.



# cd /usr/pkgsrc/ && printf '%s\n' ./multi*/gst-plugins1*/ \
 | xargs -I % sh -c 'cd %; make install; cd ../../'
I think it's pretty handy.


Yep. Works. Stored in my notes on installing Pianobar, now, too.

-Swift

Re: NetBSD-7.0 and mc in console

[Swift Griggs]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2016, Marco Beishuizen wrote:

Can you take advantage of mc's "Learn keys" under its "Options" menu?

I can't get to the options because I then need F9, which doesn't work.


Sometimes escape-9 will do the same thing depending on your terminal 
settings, even when the F-keys don't work. That's saved me a few times.


-Swift

Re: GPT vs BSD-label

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2016, Christos Zoulas wrote:
OpenBSD has done it. I've made the same code changes but I stopped just 
before committing because we have dozens of custom copies of disklabel 
code that would need to be adjusted and tested.


Well, not like I have any authority, but I'd welcome that change. I can 
learn to love GPT at some point, too. It's just a bit different. However, 
there is still some functionality that comes with labels that seems needed 
above and beyond what a simple partition table will do. Ie.. things like 
the 'overlap' partitions.


Of course, the way Linux does it also works, but if you think about it, 
it's the same as the BSD system in reverse ie..


/dev/sda1 vs /dev/sd1a

So, they use letters first, then numbers. When they run out of letters 
Linux doubles them up:


/dev/sdaa1

I'm not sure there are applications where folks want to make more than 26 
total slices on a disk, but maybe someone knows of one. Since in BSD, the 
disc names are ordinal, that's not going to be a problem. They can just 
number off till the end of time (or their buffer, whichever comes first).


Anyhow, it sounds like GPT is the short answer, and BSD disklabels still 
have some mindshare and it's possible they will also see some enhancement 
(I'm hoping). I will certainly be willing to test on i386, AMD64, SGIMIPS, 
and SPARC platforms. I'll have Amiga 68k going soon as well, but I won't 
have any huge disks to test with on the A68k platform.


Anyhow, I guess there is probably also work to do in other areas like RAID 
Frame and LVM to make sure they can cope with any changes to the disklabel 
code. Hopefully, most of that is abstracted in library calls.


-Swift

GPT vs BSD-label

[Swift Griggs]

Can one use the BSD disklabel to fully replace a GPT or MBR table? I 
understand why folks want to move from MBR to GPT, but do the same reasons 
apply to BSD disklabels? In other words, is there any advantage to using 
GPT over BSD diskabels ?


The only thing I can think of is that the partitions might be visible to 
other OS's which aren't savvy about BSD disklabels. In my case, there is 
no value in that as my disks stay with BSD machines.


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: GPT vs BSD-label

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2016, John Nemeth wrote:
Standard BSD disklabels have the same limitation as MBRs as they use 
32-bit numbers for partition start and size.


I take it that there is more to it than that... ? I'm sure I'm 
over-simplifying, but simply changing the long to a int64_t I suppose has 
greater impact and implications for other tools and code that read 
disklabels, right ?


I'm sure you see where I'm going. I'm just basically thinking that I have 
no need for GPT partition tables on systems that will never run anything 
but NetBSD. The only concern is losing capacity or the ability to get at 
future capacity. Your point about 6TB disks is spot-on. However, disk 
slices are fundemental to BSD and it's tools, so I figured I do an 
experiment with "nothing but what I need". I find GPT's tail-backup 
annoying anyway.


Thanks,
  Swift

History behind pkgsrc 'biology' category

[Swift Griggs]

I am curious (only curious - this is not a complaint): Does anyone know 
why there ended up being a pretty well-fleshed-out 'biology' section in 
pkgsrc but there isn't "chemistry", "physics", "engineering" etc...


Was there some prodigious pkgsrc maintainer/hacker who was a biologist or 
is it just that there happen to be more biology-related programs which 
justify the discrete category?


Again, not complaining. I think it's quirky and cool. I'm just curious.

Thanks,
  Swift

SSL makes me crazy (was Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?)

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016, Hal Murray wrote:

Without something like a chain-of-trust you don't know that your encrypted
connection is going to the right site.


I understand it's design purpose, but I disagree with where the design 
puts that trust. When it comes down to brass-tacks, do you trust Verisign 
is doing what they say they do to verify that the cert holder is the party 
you want to have an encrypted conversation with ? My answer to that 
question is "hell no". I don't trust Verisign or any other corporation 
that would be a CA under our current system. Thus, I think the system is 
flawed.


A man-in-the-middle can claim to be your bank.  How do you propose 
verify that?


Well, the way I understand it, (and I'm probably wrong) but a 
man-in-the-middle would have to be able to break Diffie Hellman unless you 
can force a key update. It doesn't have much to do with the cert being 
presented.  So, I'm not sure that's true (not trying to be difficult or 
troll, just saying). However, I do take your point. Ie.. how do you verify 
the remote party's identity without a trusted 3rd party saying "Yeah, 
that's him" ?  My preferred answer would involve removing the trust from 
the dirtbag corporation and giving it to another entity. Some 
possibilities include:


* A non-profit organization with fewer motives to get in bed with the NSA
  or other corporations.

* A pool or group of trusted users who rate / rank trustability. People
  with a vested interest in getting it right and difficult to pay off or
  bribe.

* Get rid of the trust idea altogether and use some kind of
  physical or manual challenge-response. The genius would be in coming up
  with one simple enough to work, yet maintain security. Do you really
  think folks are clicking on the cert and following the chain of trust
  anyway ? Most users don't even understand it's happening (not good).

I'm not saying that the same issue (authentication of a remote party's 
identity) wouldn't come up in any system you created. However, I am saying 
that SSL has done an exceptionally poor job at...  well... it's job. It's 
over-complicated, apparently quite insecure. So insecure in fact that it's 
been nearly completely broken twice. Each time the fixes have been 
increasingly painful and disruptive enough to warrant asking the question: 
Is SSL really a good system? My experience as a user and admin would 
prompt me to answer "No way, Jose. Start again without the committee."


As an example, PGP was designed well before SSL. PGP has survived all this 
time without any exposures on the order of what we've seen with SSL (it's 
had plenty of coding issues, but no completely-busted algorithm issues). 
It's also quite a bit more simple (and that's kind of my point). 
Complexity is the enemy of security since it only provides more attack 
surface. I would submit that to "secure" is most of the time to simplify.


It's nothing personal against you, Hal, or anyone else. Hopefully, nobody 
here used to work for Netscape or other folks involved with designing SSL. 
I just think SSL was badly designed from the start and I believe the facts 
(the security issues) back me up.


-Swift

Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016, Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia wrote:

It is still in pkgsrc : net/citrix_ica version 10.6.115659.


Ugh. I forgot about that. I need to go back to i386. It fails for AMD64, 
but yeah, it's still a certificate trust-nightmare.


 I used to mildly dislike SSL before it was completely broken by the 
NSA and others. Now, I consider it WAY too complicated to believe in and I 
really hate it. This whole idiocy with "trust" has gone down some road 
where I'm supposed to trust that one dirty corporation (like Verisign) 
believes that another slimey corporation is legit, (and their verification 
steps are easily defrauded/circumvented). What if I fundamentally despise 
both of them and don't trust either one? Then all I am left with is a 
turd-hunt for the latest certificate bundle that XYZ crapware needs to run 
and a bad attitude. What 99% of folks who use SSL care about is 
_transport_ encryption, NOT the chain-of-trust, which I consider to be 
fundamentally flawed and broken at it's very core. However, it's the 
chain-of-trust features that drag down SSL the most. Encryption is hard 
enough to understand & manage without adding in a double-batch of 
committee-based stupidity. Okay, now I'll be over here crying "KISS!" in 
the wilderness if anyone needs me...  :-P 


Also, IIRC, even on i386 (from memory, because I fiddled with it about 6-8 
months ago) it had major issues. The main thing I ran into was that 
without the browser plugin you just get prompted for what to do with an 
".ICA" file when the Citrix portal throws that at you. The package 
compiled & installed, but once I actually tried to use it, I noticed it 
had some other major issues (and it seems like they were more than just 
certificate issues). In fact, IIRC, I think the 'wfica' binary was missing 
some libraries it was linked to, and that was my biggest problem. Check 
your output from: ldd `which wfica`


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2016, Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia wrote:
Does anyone tried a new version of citrix (not the one from pkgsrc) 
client in NetBSD?


The so-called "Citrix Receiver" ? I've tried it using both Wine and Linux 
emulation. The Linux version was a huge pain. It segfaulted, whined about 
SSL / x509 certificates (so tired of seeing this lately in apps), and had 
the usual way-too-many-dependencies on a zillion worthless GUI libraries 
and abstraction layers. Honestly, the Wine version looked like it was 
going to work up until the last moment when ... it didn't. With Windows 
apps you can't do much but just shrug when they fail.


It seems like the previous ICA client didn't have nearly as much kruft and 
actually worked. I know I've used it at some point on NetBSD. Of course, 
that version is probably no longer around. It's too bad, though. IIRC, you 
could often use older clients with newer Citrix servers.


-Swift

Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016, Mayuresh wrote:

This may be an OT.


Nah, it's "user" related. Spot on the topic. :-)

I don't think using i386 is a bad idea either, unless one has some 
specific reason to use amd64.


I mostly agree with this sentiment.

I recently switched to amd64. I gained nothing, at least for my purpose, 
but lost wine.


I may be completely misremembering, or perhaps these reasons are merely 
superstitions, but I had a couple of reasons for opting for AMD64. Folks, 
please disabuse me of these notions if they are wrong.


* At some point I thought that PAE wasn't working properly on i386. My
  workstation machine has 24G of RAM (yeah yeah, but it was on sale). I
  have a foggy recollection of i386 only letting me access the first 4GB.

* I get slightly better performance on system benchmarks (again mostly the
  memory benchmarks) with AMD64. Interestingly, lately with NetBSD 7.0
  some benchmarks are beating Linux across the board on the same hardware
  (I use removable drives on the same workstation). I was very pleasantly
  surprised at that.

However,

* It seems like at some point flash was working on i386 but not on AMD64,
  but that may have been a long time ago.

* As you point out wine seems perpetually broken on AMD64. I'm not
  sure why, since it works on Linux x86_64. However, I'm not trying to
  make light of anyone's efforts. Everything takes work.

* Also some time in the past I had major USB bus error problems with AMD64
  but I'd try i386 and the system behaved fine.

All in all, Mayuresh, while I can see some reasons to run AMD64, I'm 
really on the same wavelength as you are - what's the point of hassling 
with AMD64 anyway ? Perhaps someone will point out the "killer feature" 
that we missed. :-)


-Swift

Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016, Mayuresh wrote:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 11:31:17AM +0100, Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia wrote:

I need to use Internet Explorer for access a web from my company:

www/ies4linux? [ I haven't used of late. ]


That is a useful package, but it won't work if you are on NetBSD 7.0 AMD64 
since Wine is -currently broken for AMD64, IIRC. Last time I checked was 
about a week ago.


Thanks,
  Swift

Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016, Hal Murray wrote:
The thing you get with 64 bits is pointers that work in more than 4 
gigabytes of memory.


Yes, of course, but with PAE that shouldn't be a problem. Of course, it 
appears that PAE is still considered experimental in NetBSD, since it's 
not enabled by default.


There are some problems where you need 64 bit integers.  You can get 
those on a 32 bit system with long long.


If you are lucky... Without the new-school integer types in in stdint.h, 
those canonical declarations like "long" or even "long long" can be fuzzy.


That may be a pain if you are trying to compile software that somebody 
else wrote.


Agreed. That's why I wish things like uint16_t ,uint32_t, and uint64_t are 
so nice. However, I think they came with C99 or something like that. So, a 
lot of "legacy" code and code written by people who don't know about the 
new types (or don't care) still has older integer types. Programmers 
usually like determinism. I'm not sure why things went so far off the 
rails with integer sizes et al. Probably has to something to do with 
having so many compilers and CPU types in the 80's and 90's.


I have amd64 7.0 running on a system with 4 GB but /proc/meminfo says 
it's only using 3.  Is there anything I have to do to get it to use the 
other GB?


I've noticed the same thing. I always just figured it was the kernel 
reserving buffers or something. I guess if you switched on the 
experimental PAE code, it you might see a lot more of your RAM. Scope out 
this blog:


https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/pae_support_for_native_i386

I learned a thing or two when I read it just now and it speaks directly to 
this topic.


-Swift

Re: Support for Intel P3500 PCIe SSD drive

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 28 Jan 2016, Derrick Lobo wrote:
Trying this new toy and would to have support for it.. vendor 0x8086 
product 0x0953 (Flash mass storage, interface 0x02, revision 0x01) at 
pci1 dev 0 function 0 not configured


Personally, I've never seen these PCIe adapters work unless they implement 
a standard SATA controller (and most don't). I know for certain-sure that 
the OCZ Revo series will NOT work. Sorry I can't be more helpful.



vga0 at pci4 dev 4 function 0: vendor 0x102b product 0x0532 (rev. 0x0a)


As an aside, this appears to be a Matrox G200eW. This is just an server 
embedded version of the G200 that supposedly takes less power. The mga(4) 
man page says it supports the G200. However, my guess is that the pcidevs 
don't know the product code (0x0532). If you are having X11 problems, 
mayhap that you can just add that code to your local pcidevs, rebuild a 
new kernel, and it'd be supported. However, perhaps you are like me and 
couldn't care less if graphics worked on your server... I just thought it 
was slightly amiss that such an old VGA chipset wasn't working.


I loved my old Matrox Millennium II cards. So much 2D win... I've great 
memories of playing Sega Genesis emulators on the Linux framebuffer 
console before Linux got udev'd && systemd'd :-P


Thanks,
  Swift

Interesting new hardware that works in 7.0

[Swift Griggs]

[Tandberg RDX Removable drive - USB 3.0 model 8666-RDX]
http://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/removable-disk/rdx-quikstor/

I got a this drive for backups. It's basically a rig where they 
encapsulate SATA 2.5" drives in a hardened case and treat them in a hybrid 
fashion between tape and disk. The drive itself shows up as a standard USB 
mass storage device (I got the USB version; there is a SATA version). I 
get about 14 MB/s write speeds with 'dbench -t 30 16' which is a bit low, 
but the read speeds are usually between 90-100 MB/s. It really depends on 
the 'cartridge' (think drop-hardened case around a SATA drive) that you 
use. If you use an SSD one, you obviously get faster results. They go up 
to 2TB so far. I did a cheer when "eject sd0" resulted in a motorized 
eject of the 'cartridge' (ie.. the SCSI enclosure services thingy is 
working). UFS + logging on drive worked great.



Radeon 290X
http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Version-PCI-Express-Graphics-11226-00-40G/dp/B00HJOKARI

It works! It's fast! I can reboot off a different drive (or dual boot) and 
play games with it, then reboot and run X11 in gloriously fast native 
mode. I get a gtkperf score of 1.6 seconds !!! ie.. the 2D is wicked fast. 
The framebuffer console loads automatically even when booting from a 7.0 
CDROM. I've waited for years to have a NetBSD rig that I could dual 
purpose like this... way to go 7.0...


-Swift

Re: tmux overhead

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 21 Jan 2016, John Klos wrote:

Ideas about why this is so busy?


No. However, you could try to profile it to find out. Run it in ktrace(1) 
and/or do a gdb -attach to it's PID. Then start looking at the trace 
output to see what kind of library functions it's running in it's main 
event loop. Use kdump to view the ktrace output. That may give you some 
idea.


If you've already tried that... there is always fprintf() logging 
statements stuffed in the code in key places to see what bits of logic are 
getting the most action.


  Swift

Any Postfix solution for mail server migration?

[Swift Griggs]

How can this be done? I've Googled and there only seem to be vague hints, 
but no solid method to migrate in the way I'm proposing.


---[ Problem Description ]---
Server "Oldserv" = old MTA system I want to get away from
Server "Newserv" = new MTA I want to migrate TO.

1. Mail to flow to Newserv first.
2. If mail is for a local user, the mail stays on the system.
3. If the mail is for an unknown user it's forwarded to Oldserv.
-

I don't want the header getting re-written. So, I see people doing things 
like setting up aliases so that userp...@mydomain.com gets changed to 
userp...@oldserv.mydomain.com. That's unacceptable. It'll hork up the 
user's mail experience and re-write addresses that were fine the way they 
are.


The whole point of this is creating a method where I can migrate one user 
at a time to the new system without having to do a "big bang" migration of 
the whole company at once. The logistics of that are too big for me. So, I 
have to be able to take it on in chunks.


Plus, I'm not married to Postfix. I'd use Exim or anything else if it'd 
work. The postfix mailing list and IRC channel are super-hostile & 
abusive. I certainly wouldn't be heartbroken to never have to communicate 
with them. This is one of many reasons why I run NetBSD rather than 
OpenBSD ... Community attitude/spirit also matters to me.


This is a simple "checkbox" feature in Communigate Pro, but I'd rather 
stick with open source, given a choice.


 Swift