As I usually have a few classes at school which requires special software, I
wanted to be able to run some of this software on my own computer, as there are
student versions of some of the software. One of these is
ModelSim from MentorGraphics. ModelSim is basically a
simulator for hardware designs, and I use it to simulate
VHDL. Unfortunately, ModelSim only comes
for Windows, Linux and Solaris. As I only run FreeBSD on my laptop, no software
for me 
But wait, FreeBSD have the
linuxulator!,
which allows Linux binaries to be run unmodified on a FreeBSD host (It is basically an implementation of Linux syscalls within the FreeBSD kernel). The steps I
needed to go through to install the Linux version of ModelSim was pretty easy.
First of all, one of the emulators/linux_base* ports needs to be installed. I
chose linux_base-fc6, as I'd like the Linux 2.6 support (although I'm not sure
if that is actually needed). After installing the port, a linux userland appears
in /compat/linux. To make sure I don't get any problems with programs needing
procfs, I mount
linprocfs(5)
as well.
There, easy! Ready to run linux programs. Now, ModelSim comes with its own
installer, which needs a few additional files that you can get at their
web-site. However, programs may depend on additional libraries, and this is IMO
the most tricky part about the linuxulator. In my case, I got some errors
complaining about not finding libXsomething. Luckily, there are a few ports that
you can install for the most common libraries. In this case, I had to install
x11/linux-xorg-libs. Although a very old version, I was able to run the ModelSim
installer and the installed binaries afterwards. Awesome!
Now that I've managed to knock down the number of bugs in NEWCARD to a more reasonable level, I've started looking at ExpressCard again.
As you may know, FreeBSD supports ExpressCard right now for usb devices. They all work, and there's no additional work needed here, except maybe to make more drivers. In fact, I recently purchased an ExpressCard to CardBus adapter (one that lets me plug in an expressCard into a CardBus slot) and it worked with all the usb-based ExpressCards that I have laying around with no changes.
The problem with ExpressCard for PCIe-based devices is one of resource allocation. If the BIOS allocates the resource, then the ExpressCard works without hot-plug. If the BIOS doesn't, then we can see the device with pciconf -l, as well as probe the device. However, since there's no resources setup for the PCI bridge, attempts for the driver to allocate them fail. There's also some bus numbering issues as well.
I've started to attack the resource problem. I'll keep people posted
Jason Dixon has made available the last 4 videos from
DCBSDCon 2009. The last video marks the 50th video uploaded to the
BSDConferences YouTube channel. This channel was
created less than 5 months ago and now has 924 subscribers from authenticated
YouTube users, and the videos have been viewed over 76,000 times by users from around the world (includes partial views).
The newest 4 videos are :
The average number of daily views is around 500, with significant spikes above 1,500 in the days after a popular new video is announced:
And the top 10 videos sorted by views (biased towards older videos that have been available longer) are :
- FreeBSD Kernel Internals, Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick
- PC-BSD: FreeBSD on the Desktop
- New features in FreeBSD 7
- BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007
- ZFS in FreeBSD, by Pawel Jakub Dawidek
- FreeBSD, Building a Computing Cluster
- FreeBSD Profiling, Kris Kennaway, MeetBSD 2008
- Embedding FreeBSD, MeetBSD 2008
- BSD v. GPL, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon
- FreeBSD Network Stack Optimizations, Robert Watson
Published on
April 21, 2009 in
portmgr.
The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.2 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.
In April 2009 I was invited to speak on FreeBSD/PmcTools by the Bangalore chapter of the ACM. The slides for this talk are available at:
http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/download/acm-apr-09.pdf (550KB, PDF).
This was an overview talk. The talk briefly touched upon: the motivations and goals of the project, the programming APIs, some aspects of the implementation and on possible future work.
As it was
mentioned earlier now I have new cool toy to play with. Flyswatter JTAG with MIPS14 adapter. Though Tin Can Tools kindly warned me that OpenOCD did not support EJTAG/MIPS I decided to order it and it turned to be a good deal. Why? Because there is EJTAG/MIPS support for OpenOCD as of 0.1.0. Moreover it works really nice with FreeBSD port of libftdi. So all I had to do was to make
devel/openocd port and tweak some configs. And that's it. Stock gdb for MIPS is not ready yet, but one can attach, examine registers, single step using telnet interface to daemon:
[gonzo@figaro:][~/FreeBSD]
% telnet localhost 4444
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
Open On-Chip Debugger
> halt
target state: halted
target halted due to debug-request, pc: 0x8023b974
> reg
(0) zero (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(1) at (/32): 0x802c0000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(2) v0 (/32): 0x00000001 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(3) v1 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(4) a0 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(5) a1 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(6) a2 (/32): 0x80280b28 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(7) a3 (/32): 0x00000602 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(8) t0 (/32): 0x802c10b0 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(9) t1 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(10) t2 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(11) t3 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(12) t4 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(13) t5 (/32): 0x00000001 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(14) t6 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(15) t7 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(16) s0 (/32): 0xc082abe0 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(17) s1 (/32): 0x801312a8 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(18) s2 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(19) s3 (/32): 0xc0828b20 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(20) s4 (/32): 0xc0793ea0 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(21) s5 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(22) s6 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(23) s7 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(24) t8 (/32): 0x02887fa0 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(25) t9 (/32): 0x00000002 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(26) k0 (/32): 0x8024e3a0 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(27) k1 (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(28) gp (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(29) sp (/32): 0xc0793e30 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(30) fp (/32): 0x00000000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(31) ra (/32): 0x8023b964 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(32) status (/32): 0x0000ff01 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(33) lo (/32): 0x0000001c (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(34) hi (/32): 0x00000020 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(35) badvaddr (/32): 0xc0797dc8 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(36) cause (/32): 0x40008000 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
(37) pc (/32): 0x8023b974 (dirty: 0, valid: 1)
>
Great Bay Software, the innovator of Endpoint Profiling for enterprise networks, has switched to FreeBSD from Linux for all of its appliances including the Beacon Endpoint Profiler 3.0.
Published on
April 14, 2009 in
FreeBSD.
After Arnar Mar Sig posted his patchset for an initial skeleton of the AVR32
port almost a year ago, things started to catch speed in the beginning of this
year. The work is done in
perforce,
and is progressing well. Currently, the system boots and recognizes most of the
hardware, but linker work is required to be able to run init.
So far, I've been working on busdma support, grabbing the source from the mips
port and adjusting it as well as implementing support for cache operations on
the AVR32. It seems to work for now, as Arnar was able to get the ate(4) device
driver to work with it.
The last work have been to design and implement a generic device clock
framework. This is supposed to be used with devices in an architecture
independent way, so that devices can be associated with a clock without knowing
what clock it is (assigned internally for each architecture). This is necessary
for a few devices to avoid #ifdefs all over the place. For instance, the
at91_mci device is identical to the one used in AVR32, and it gets the clock
frequency based on at91 machine dependant defines. Another property of this
would be to export clocks using this interface to userland (AVR32 have a set of
generic clocks as well).
Hello guys,
As part of my bachelor thesis, I am developing a script that automatically documents settings of particular FreeBSD box.
The point of this script is to provide some descriptive information about unknown system’s configuration (hardware and software) for administrator who has no idea about the given system.
I would greatly appreciate if you guys could test it in your environment and provide some feedback. Â I would also like to hear your opinions on what kind of information would you be interested in, in the above described situation. If your ideas happen to be reasonable, I will gladly implement them and include in the next release of SysInfo.
You may be also interested in the Forums thread I have created for this tool at the FreeBSD forums:
https://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=19321
And finally, the latest version of this script can be found at:
http://people.freebsd.org/~danger/sysinfo/
Thank you.
The ports tree is now frozen for the 7.2 release cycle.
No commits will be allowed without explicit portmgr approval. We hope we can keep the freeze short and go into slush after two weeks. The tree will be completely unfrozen after the release is announced. For the full schedule, see the release schedule.
As always, only commit that fix existing breakage will be allowed during the freeze and we encourage everyone will help fix as many ports as possible for this release. For more information about what kinds of commits are allowed during which period, please see the portmgr policies webpage.
Related posts:
- Ports freeze schedule for FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE Below is the tentative schedule for the ports freeze in...
- Ports feature freeze now enforced As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports...
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A reviewer takes PC-BSD 7.1 out for a spin.
My SCM of choice for FreeBSD-related projects is SVK (it's much faster then subversion and provides offline access to repo history, easy branching/merging and so on). And my editor of choice is vim. And it turns out vim doesn't highlight svk commit files. What a shame. No bright colors for happy hacker who is about to commit clean and robust code (or break buildworld, whatever). So I spent 20 minutes of tweaking svn.vim and produced
this.
It's a syntax file for svk-commit* and two functions to place file under/out of SVK control (just like in perforce one can tweak commit file to select which files will be committed and which won't).
The FreeBSD GNOME team is proud to announce the release of
GNOME 2.26.0 for FreeBSD. The official release notes can be
found at
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26/
. On the FreeBSD front, we introduced a port of libxul 1.9 as
an alternative for Firefox 2.0 as a Gecko provider. Almost
all of the Gecko consumers can make use of this provider by
setting:
WITH_GECKO=libxul
The GNOME 2.26 port was done by ahze, kwm, marcus, and mezz
with contributions by Joseph S. Atkinson, Peter Wemm, Eric L.
Chen, Martin Matuska, Craig Butler, and Pawel Worach.
Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about BSDCan 2009. More information at http://www.bsdcan.org.
File Info: 13Min, 6MB.
Ogg Link:
http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk172.mp3
Coverage of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, a GNU operating system that uses the FreeBSD kernel.
Published on
April 6, 2009 in
FreeBSD.
Last weekend I imported gvinum into HEAD, and I hope many users (and old users)
of gvinum will try it out, as it have some nice improvements. Moving it into
HEAD now, means it also will become part of 8.0-RELEASE which is coming later
this year, and since it is a lot of changes, the intention is to have it in HEAD
now for a while before the release process begins. Among the most interesting
updates for users are:
- Support more of the old vinum command set
- Less panics
- Rebuilding and synchronizing plexes can be done while mounted.
- Support for growing striped or raid5 plexes while mounted, meaning that you
can just add a new disk to your gvinum configuration, and grow it to cover the
new disk.
The ports freeze for the upcoming release of 7.2 will start in one week time on April 13. Release packages will be built immediately and have to be ready for RC2 which is scheduled for April 20. To keep the freeze as short as possible, the date might be moved depending on any delays in the src release process. Also, to keep this freeze this short we kindly ask anyone with commits in their queues that might have any larger effect on the packages to run their changes by portmgr from today to make sure no new regressions are introduced.
As always, we are looking for volunteers to fix outstanding errors, and this is a good time to focus on existing errors and regressions instead of new features to make sure as many packages can be included in the
release.
For a list of outstanding build errors, please see this link.
Remember: All commits after April 13 need explicit approval from portmgr!
Related posts:
- Ports feature freeze now enforced As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports...
- Ports tree frozen in preparation for 7.2-RELEASE The ports tree is now frozen for the 7.2 release...
- FreeBSD 9.0 packages and 8.0 freeze update Earlier today, Ken Smith bumped the version of the HEAD...
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