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....

I’ve been wanting to learn more about compilers and toolchains in general for a while now. In June 2016, I asked about recommended readings on lexers and parsers on Twitter. However, I have to confess that I didn’t go forward with reading the Dragon Book. Instead, I got involved as a developer in the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects, and witnessing the evolution of toolchains within those systems played a big role in maintaining my interest and fascination in the topic....

I’m not exactly sure how I first heard about the Vortex86 CPUs, I think it was either when seeing the demonstration video on KolibriOS project site showcasing the system running on a DMP EBOX machine, or when skimming NetBSD’s identcpu.c code. Or did the discovery of the machine prompted me to check if the CPU would be correctly probed by the NetBSD’s kernel? For those interested, Wikipedia has an article retracing the history of the Vortex86 from its birth at Rise to our days....

As mentioned in my previous post about playing with DJGPP and GCC 10 on DOS, I have been redoing my small character and color cycling effect in text mode. The original version in JavaScript can be seen here. To understand why we can’t access video memory directly and need to use the DPMI service to create a selector to access the required real-mode segment address, please refer to section 18.4 of the DJGPP FAQ....

I was recently amazed to discover that DJGPP was still being maintained, and had very recent versions of GCC and binutils available. I have not been doing any C programming on DOS in a very long time now, so I think the timing is right. There is an installation program with an interface very similar to the good old Turbo Vision, which could be helpful in case one wants to install the full environment....

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....

This post is the AArch64 counterpart of my “Speedbuilding LLVM/Clang in 5 minutes” article. After publishing and sharing the previous post URL with some friends on IRC, I was asked if I wanted to try doing the same on a 160 cores ARM machine. Finding out what my answer was is left as an exercise to the reader :-) The system I’m using for this experiment is a BM.Standard.A1.160 bare-metal machine from Oracle Cloud, which has a dual-socket motherboard with two 80 cores Ampere Altra CPUs, for a total 160 cores, and 1024 GB of RAM....

This post is a spiritual successor to my “Building LLVM on OpenBSD/loongson” article, in which I retraced my attempts to build LLVM 3.7.1 on MIPS64 in a RAM constrained environment. After reading the excellent “Make LLVM fast again”, I wanted to revisit the topic, and see how fast I could build a recent version of LLVM and Clang on modern x86 server hardware. The system I’m using for this experiment is a CCX62 instance from Hetzner, which has 48 dedicated vCPUs and 192 GB of RAM....

While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn’t mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license, and the NetBSD Foundation’s has issued a statement about its position on the subject. Realistically, NetBSD is more or less tied to GCC, as it supports more architectures than the other BSDs, some of which will likely never be supported in LLVM....

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....