OpenBSD

LLVM was imported in the OpenBSD ports tree back in 2008, and happily lived there for a long while before being imported in the source tree at the g2k16 hackathon in 2016. I previously wrote about this in “The state of toolchains in OpenBSD” last year. As mentioned in my previous article, we do not use upstream build system to build LLVM in the base system, but hand-written BSD Makefiles. Importing CMake into the base system was not an option, because of the size of the project and the large dependency chain it requires for building....

Back in 2016, I sent a diff to OpenBSD’s tech@ mailing list which added missing airports and area codes for Poland. Theo kindly pointed out privately that there was a rule governing the update of this file, which was known among OpenBSD developers but never made it into a commit. So I ended up making one adding my home airport (RZE) to the list and specifying update rules: only add ones you have been to....

Back in 2017, I bought two used HP thin clients on a local auction site, the t5570e and the t510, both of them powered by VIA x86-64 CPUs. In this article, I will focus on the t510, which is the more powerful of the two. The CPU in this machine is a VIA Eden X2 U4200, which is a dual-core x86-64 CPU running at 1GHz released in 2011. For those interested about the status of those CPUs, I wrote an article about the future of VIA x86 processors back in 2018....

This is the OpenBSD counterpart of my article about running NetBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU, and its purpose is mostly to archive a dmesg entry and various benchmarks for this machine. I should note that with only 256MB of RAM, the machine is too constrained to do kernel and libraries relinking in a timely manner, due to swapping. For more information and background about the hardware, please refer to my other article....

For most of the 2010s, the OpenBSD base system has been stuck with GCC 4.2.1. It was released in July 2007, imported into the OpenBSD source tree in October 2009, and became the default compiler on the amd64, i386, hppa, sparc64, socppc and macppc platforms in OpenBSD 4.8, released in November 2010. As specified in the commit message during import, this is the last version released under the GPLv2 license....

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units. This machine uses the same CPU as the Yeeloong, a Loongson 2F which is a single-core MIPS-III 64-bit processor running at 800/900 MHz....

At the beginning were text mode consoles. Traditionally, *BSD and Linux on i386 and amd64 used text mode consoles which by default provided 25 rows of 80 columns, the “80x25 mode”. This mode uses an 8x16 font stored in the VGA BIOS (which can be slightly different across vendors). OpenBSD uses the wscons(4) console framework, inherited from NetBSD. CRT monitors allowed you to set the resolution you wanted, so on bigger monitors, the 80x25 console in textmode was fairly large but not blurry....

On framebuffer consoles, OpenBSD uses the rasops(9) subsystem, which was imported from NetBSD in March 2001. The RGB values for the ANSI color palette in rasops have been chosen to match the ones in Open Firmware, and are different from those in the VGA text mode color palette. Rasops palette: VGA text mode palette: As one can see, the difference is quite significant, and decades of exposure to MS-DOS and Linux consoles makes it quite difficult to adapt to a different palette....

I bought the CubieBoard2 back in 2016 with the idea to run OpenBSD on it, but because of various reliability issues with the onboard NIC, it ended up running NetBSD for a few weeks before ending up in a drawer. Back in October, Mark Kettenis committed code to allow switching to the framebuffer “glass” console in the bootloader on OpenBSD/armv7, making it possible to install the system without using a serial cable....

Today marks my three year anniversary as an OpenBSD developer. I got my commit bit on August 31th 2016 during the g2k16 hackathon in Cambridge, UK. A few months ago, I came across a Perl one-liner script to produce commit time distribution ASCII graphs from a Git repository, and I finally have a good pretext to run it :-) As of this day, I have done 749 commits to OpenBSD, in the following repositories: src (127), ports(596), www (24), and xenocara (2)....