Monthly Archive for December, 2007
Juniper released FreeBSD/MIPS port to public. There are no references to JNPR-specific hardware pieces but a lot of mature code for generic MIPS devices that mips2 tree lacks: VM/pmap, libc, FPU support. Nice gift, thanks JNPR!
Some time ago several people (most notably skv@) ranted about including a list of changes or a link to such list in the commit message for a port update.
I thought it was a great idea and started including a link to a CPAN’s distribution Changes file in my commits some time ago.
What I did not like was that those links looked like this:
http://search.cpan.org/src/JESSE/Template-Declare-0.27/Changes
FreeBSD’s commit messages are preserved in our repository and mail archives forever, for a suitable definition of “forever”. On the other hand, CPAN authors are encouraged to clean up old and obsolete versions promptly.
Thus there is a discrepancy between expected time of life of the link in the commit message and the link contents.
While older CPAN distributions can still be found on BackPAN, it only provides links to tarballs and not individual files like Changes.
Luckily, it turns out that version-less links like
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-Declare/Changes
work just fine, redirecting to the most recent version of the file. This is acceptable, since Changes is expected to be a prepend-only file, so the information the commit message was trying to link to can (almost) always be found there.
This weekend I spent writing driver for IDT RC32434 on-board Ethernet adapter. Weird hobby, isn't it? Writing NIC drivers is new to me so I shared my time between reading if_XX sources, reading IDT specs and writing my own code. Task turned out easier then it appeared and 15 minutes ago I managed to mount root over NFS using kr0 interface. Time to get some beer and celebrate!
Another update of our base freebsd/doc Mercurial tree has been pushed to hg.hellug.gr.
The bundles for populating new Mercurial trees with the changes are being uploaded to freefall as I’m typing this post. They should be available in a short while from:
- bsd.hg-2007.12.02.20
-
A bundle of the clean imports done from FreeBSD doc/
- el.hg-2007.12.02.20
-
A bundle of the merged sources, including all the changesets I have pulled from other translators
Happy translating!
Today I managed to get shell prompt on Mikrotik's Routerboard 532. So now we have 3 platforms with single user mode for FreeBSD/mips, not very useful :) The last problem was getting high-level console interface working. I always fell lost when it comes to resource allocation and uart stuff. I should write a couple of posts on these subjects to memorize all details better.
