NetBSD Planet

Hi, folks!

Could someone point me to sacred knowledge of how I could possibly downgrade the Transmission bittorrent client from version 4.something to previous version 3.something?

I’m running NetBSD 9.3 on RPI2, I was building from sources some third-party software and it was behaving quite weirdly so before submitting issue to bugtracker I’ve updated/upgraded my system to be sure that problem was not on my side(upgrade was overdue for few years :-D ). Everything went smoothly except for transmission-daemon which started to complain about libunistring library or something(transmission-daemon itself was not upgraded because its package is missing in the current packages tree for earmv7hf architecture). Yep, I did stupid thing and removed transmission-daemon version 3.something with pkgin and took for tests binary from 4.0.5nb2 package for the correct arch, I guess I was in a newer-better mood... It’s working but that thing is tremendously slow, slow to start, slow with response to remote client, heavy on cpu usage, it is not obeying set speed limits and so on.

I was not able to find repository with older packages for NetBSD so I’ve tried to build transmission from sources(checkout by 3.00 tag from github with submodules), no luck here(build errors in miniupnpc third-party library), I have built transmission against its dependencies installed via pkgin but resulted transmission-daemon crashes shortly after it being started, I was able to connect with remote client but not for long. Configuration directory for transmission-daemon was used from backup made prior to system upgrade, so it shouldn't be a problem. So yeah, I kinda stuck, any ideas?

One of the reasons I've been exploring NetBSD over the past few months is that, after more than 30 years in IT, I've grown increasingly frustrated with how frequently mainstream Linux distributions change the way they handle core systems: boot processes, network management, firewalls, and so on. It feels like I'm constantly relearning how to accomplish the same tasks in countless different ways, and frankly, I'm tired of it.

I’ve come to appreciate the value of working with a cohesive operating system—one where technical decisions are made thoughtfully and not simply to reinvent the wheel.

With that in mind, here’s my question: How often does NetBSD introduce breaking changes to the system? Stability is crucial for my professional work, and I believe NetBSD might be the right choice. I’d love to hear your opinions.

I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: I love Perl. I’ve used so many languages over the years, but writing Perl code feels natural. It feels like an extension of my brain. It’s expressiveness, data structures, and near limitless flexibility meant I reached for it whenever I had a problem to solve (it’s probably why I had fun with Ruby too, but that’s a separate discussion).

I’m also keenly aware that I live in the Real World™, and that much (if not most) of the tooling I use is written in Python (and Go). I’d dabbled in it before, but this is the first time I’ve committed to building some personal and work projects in it to get a feel for what makes it tick.

A few things that have surprised me:

• Variables can’t be more local in scope than a function, which is terrifying. The pushback here is that The Python Way prefers concise functions anyway, so this shouldn’t be an issue. I like being able to scope to a block in Perl though (or in basically every other language).

• The OOP features are nice. I got used to Moose, and I tend to write procedural stuff with data structures in lieu of OOP, but it’s there and simple if I need it.

• dict() isn’t a complete replacement for a Perl %hash, but it gets the job done. Quick string manipulation on the other hand: Python is still far inferor. And speaking of which…

• Strings are immutable. That threw me for a loop the first time.

• I’m used to Text::Template, but I’ll admit Jinja is quite nice.

• It’s true, the examples in the Python documentation really do reference Monty Python all the time. This is delightful, and I’m all for it. #lifeofbrian

• I kept hearing that There’s More Than One Way To Do It in Perl, but that it wasn’t the case with Python. Until I started looking at file systems, and there are dozens of ways to do things.

• Python 3.15 will be moving to UTF-8 by default, which is awesome. Perl should do the same.

• pip, easy_install, whatever, it all sucks. Package management in Perl and Ruby weren’t fun either, but I guess it’s the devil you know. I cheated and used pkgsrc like I do for Perl and TeX, not that you read that.

• I miss sigals. You didn’t need syntax highlighting when you could literally tell at a glance the difference between a $scalar, @array, %hash, and &method, or even @scope in Ruby.

• When typing quit in interactive mode, Python tells me that I need to type quit(). This is an interesting philosophical difference; Perl would just quit because it understands and acts upon intent, rather than pretending not to.

• Nevermind, Python 3.13 doesn’t do that anymore!

• Meaningful whitespace doesn’t bother me. I always indented my code correctly in Perl, so all Python does is remove boilerplate and reduce the amount of vertical scrolling I have to do. Dare I say, I think it looks beautiful.

It’s been a lot of fun! I moved away from professional development years ago, but there’s an itch that only writing code can scratch. I should probably blog about some of it.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-10.

As stated in the title of this thread, I am having problems trying to install libreoffice using the precompiled binary version.
This same problem occurred to me when trying to build the binary using pkgsrc. As I understand it, the problem is due to a version conflict between gcc 10 and 12, but I don't know how to fix it, could someone give me some guidance?
Here is the log:

-> $ doas pkgin install libreoffice
calculating dependencies...done.

65 packages to install:
  abseil-20240722.0 alsa-lib-1.2.12 apr-1.7.5 apr-util-1.6.3nb4 argon2-20190702 box2d-2.4.2 coinmp-1.8.4 db4-4.8.30nb1 dejavu-ttf-2.37 dragonbox-1.1.3 fmtlib-11.0.2 gcc10-10.5.0nb2
  gcc12-libs-12.4.0nb1 glew-2.2.0nb2 gnome-icon-theme-3.12.0nb8 gnupg2-2.4.5nb3 gpgme-1.23.2nb1 gsl-2.7.1 gst-plugins1-base-1.24.8 gstreamer1-1.24.8 harfbuzz-icu-9.0.0 hsqldb18-1.8.0.10
  hyphen-2.8.8nb5 iso-codes-4.16.0 libabw-0.1.3nb20 libassuan-3.0.1 libcdr-0.1.7nb13 libclucene-2.3.3.4nb25 libe-book-0.1.3nb29 libepubgen-0.1.1nb8 libetonyek-0.1.10nb13 libexttextcat-3.4.6
  libfixmath-0.0.0pre20220623nb1 libfreehand-0.1.2nb21 libixion-0.19.0nb1 libksba-1.6.7 liblangtag-0.6.7nb1 libmspub-0.1.4nb28 libmwaw-0.3.21nb3 libnumbertext-1.0.11 libodfgen-0.1.7nb8
  libpagemaker-0.0.4nb14 libqxp-0.0.2nb22 libreoffice-24.8.0.3 libstaroffice-0.0.7nb8 libusb1-1.0.27 libvisio-0.1.7nb23 libzmf-0.0.2nb30 lp_solve-5.5.2.3 ltm-1.3.0 mythes-1.2.4nb3
  neon-0.33.0nb2 npth-1.7 openjdk17-1.17.0.11.9 orcus-0.19.2 pinentry-1.3.1nb1 serf-1.3.10nb2 spdlog-1.14.1nb1 ttmkfdir2-20021109nb8 unixodbc-2.3.12nb1 unzip-6.0nb10 xdg-utils-1.2.1
  zip-3.0nb3 zxcvbn-c-2.5 zxing-cpp-2.2.1

0 to remove, 0 to refresh, 0 to upgrade, 65 to install
0B to download, 2685M of additional disk space will be used

proceed ? [Y/n] 
[1/65] installing fmtlib-11.0.2...
[2/65] installing ttmkfdir2-20021109nb8...
[3/65] installing libassuan-3.0.1...
[4/65] installing spdlog-1.14.1nb1...
[5/65] installing libksba-1.6.7...
[6/65] installing gstreamer1-1.24.8...
[7/65] installing gcc10-10.5.0nb2...
[8/65] installing gnupg2-2.4.5nb3...
[9/65] installing alsa-lib-1.2.12...
===========================================================================
$NetBSD: MESSAGE.NetBSD,v 1.2 2021/11/28 14:24:46 pho Exp $

NetBSD does not natively support ALSA. To let applications play or
record audio via ALSA, install one of these packages and follow their
instructions:

        * audio/alsa-plugins-oss
        * audio/alsa-plugins-pulse

===========================================================================
[10/65] installing gsl-2.7.1...
[11/65] installing apr-1.7.5...
[12/65] installing libixion-0.19.0nb1...
[13/65] installing libusb1-1.0.27...
[14/65] installing libetonyek-0.1.10nb13...
[15/65] installing unzip-6.0nb10...
[16/65] installing apr-util-1.6.3nb4...
[17/65] installing openjdk17-1.17.0.11.9...
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-sans.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-sans.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-serif.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-serif.conf
[18/65] installing zip-3.0nb3...
[19/65] installing dejavu-ttf-2.37...
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-sans.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-sans.conf
dejavu-ttf-2.37: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/dejavu-ttf/fontconfig-conf.d/57-dejavu-serif.conf to /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d/57-dejavu-serif.conf
[20/65] installing iso-codes-4.16.0...
[21/65] installing liblangtag-0.6.7nb1...
[22/65] installing pinentry-1.3.1nb1...
[23/65] installing npth-1.7...
[24/65] installing libepubgen-0.1.1nb8...
[25/65] installing libnumbertext-1.0.11...
[26/65] installing gpgme-1.23.2nb1...
[27/65] installing mythes-1.2.4nb3...
[28/65] installing harfbuzz-icu-9.0.0...
[29/65] installing db4-4.8.30nb1...
[30/65] installing libmspub-0.1.4nb28...
[31/65] installing libvisio-0.1.7nb23...
[32/65] installing lp_solve-5.5.2.3...
[33/65] installing libzmf-0.0.2nb30...
[34/65] installing libexttextcat-3.4.6...
[35/65] installing coinmp-1.8.4...
[36/65] installing libcdr-0.1.7nb13...
[37/65] installing abseil-20240722.0...
[38/65] installing libqxp-0.0.2nb22...
[39/65] installing libstaroffice-0.0.7nb8...
[40/65] installing dragonbox-1.1.3...
[41/65] installing libfixmath-0.0.0pre20220623nb1...
[42/65] installing hyphen-2.8.8nb5...
[43/65] installing glew-2.2.0nb2...
[44/65] installing libabw-0.1.3nb20...
[45/65] installing libe-book-0.1.3nb29...
[46/65] installing gst-plugins1-base-1.24.8...
[47/65] installing gnome-icon-theme-3.12.0nb8...
[48/65] installing neon-0.33.0nb2...
[49/65] installing gcc12-libs-12.4.0nb1...
[50/65] installing libodfgen-0.1.7nb8...
[51/65] installing zxcvbn-c-2.5...
[52/65] installing ltm-1.3.0...
[53/65] installing libmwaw-0.3.21nb3...
[54/65] installing unixodbc-2.3.12nb1...
unixodbc-2.3.12nb1: copying /usr/pkg/share/examples/unixodbc/odbc.ini to /usr/pkg/etc/odbc.ini
[55/65] installing argon2-20190702...
[56/65] installing serf-1.3.10nb2...
[57/65] installing libfreehand-0.1.2nb21...
[58/65] installing box2d-2.4.2...
[59/65] installing zxing-cpp-2.2.1...
[60/65] installing xdg-utils-1.2.1...
[61/65] installing libpagemaker-0.0.4nb14...
[62/65] installing hsqldb18-1.8.0.10...
[63/65] installing orcus-0.19.2...
[64/65] installing libclucene-2.3.3.4nb25...
[65/65] installing libreoffice-24.8.0.3...
pkg_install warnings: 0, errors: 3
pkg_install error log can be found in /var/db/pkgin/pkg_install-err.log
reading local summary...
processing local summary...
~ 
-> $ tail -n 30  /var/db/pkgin/pkg_install-err.log
---Dec 08 19:11:40: [46/65] installing gst-plugins1-base-1.24.8...
---Dec 08 19:11:41: [47/65] installing gnome-icon-theme-3.12.0nb8...
---Dec 08 19:11:43: [48/65] installing neon-0.33.0nb2...
---Dec 08 19:11:43: [49/65] installing gcc12-libs-12.4.0nb1...
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libgcc_s.so.1
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libquadmath.so.0
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libstdc++.so.7
pkg_add: 1 package addition failed
---Dec 08 19:11:43: [50/65] installing libodfgen-0.1.7nb8...
---Dec 08 19:11:44: [51/65] installing zxcvbn-c-2.5...
---Dec 08 19:11:44: [52/65] installing ltm-1.3.0...
---Dec 08 19:11:44: [53/65] installing libmwaw-0.3.21nb3...
---Dec 08 19:11:45: [54/65] installing unixodbc-2.3.12nb1...
---Dec 08 19:11:45: [55/65] installing argon2-20190702...
---Dec 08 19:11:45: [56/65] installing serf-1.3.10nb2...
---Dec 08 19:11:45: [57/65] installing libfreehand-0.1.2nb21...
---Dec 08 19:11:46: [58/65] installing box2d-2.4.2...
---Dec 08 19:11:46: [59/65] installing zxing-cpp-2.2.1...
---Dec 08 19:11:46: [60/65] installing xdg-utils-1.2.1...
---Dec 08 19:11:46: [61/65] installing libpagemaker-0.0.4nb14...
---Dec 08 19:11:47: [62/65] installing hsqldb18-1.8.0.10...
---Dec 08 19:11:47: [63/65] installing orcus-0.19.2...
---Dec 08 19:11:47: [64/65] installing libclucene-2.3.3.4nb25...
---Dec 08 19:11:47: [65/65] installing libreoffice-24.8.0.3...
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libgcc_s.so.1
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libquadmath.so.0
pkg_add: Missing required library: /usr/pkg/gcc12//lib/./libstdc++.so.7
pkg_add: Can't install dependency gcc12-libs>=12.1.0
pkg_add: Expected dependency gcc12-libs>=12.1.0 still missing
pkg_add: 1 package addition failed
~ 
-> $ pkgin show-full-deps libreoffice | grep gcc
        gcc10>=10.3.0nb2
        gcc12-libs>=12.1.0

This is the version of NetBSD I am using:

-> $ uname -a
NetBSD X260 10.0 NetBSD 10.0 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Mar 28 08:33:33 UTC 2024  [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64

Abigail—who has an awesome site, and who encourages you to have your own space as well—emailed asking what database system we used to organise stuff, as I described in my ill-advised MAC address filtering post:

Clara and I maintain a personal DB which includes all sorts of data, from budgets to media collections. One of the tables tracks our assets, including serial numbers, dates of purchase, warranty information, hostnames, ZFS pools, and… MAC addresses.

I’ll admit we’re doing nothing special, it’s literally a PostgreSQL database hosted on a NetBSD box at home, with pgAdmin as the frontend on our machines (thanks to Adam@ for maintaining). Until this year it was a MariaDB/MySQL server, and long before that it was a SQLite3 file sync’d with Dropbox. That last one still makes me nervous thinking about even now.

I’ve always had a database of some sort to organise my life. I was a DBA briefly, and while it’s ridiculous overkill for what we use it for, it does come with some nice benefits:

• We don’t have to worry about syncing or backups, because the database is always consistent, current, and replicated. We’re rarely editing something at the same time anyway, but having that safeguard is nice.

• Like our Minecraft server and other hosted stuff, it’s accessible everywhere over the same Wireguard VPN, which keeps things simple. Well, “simple”. I can tinker on the phone on a crowded train, or a laptop.

• It’s easy to script against, which is how I maintain the MAC address filters I discussed. It’s our “source of truth” for things.

• It’s also a useful testbed for learning, because I teach myself things by designing, tinkering, an upgrading over-engineered stuff for home. Labs are always more useful if you have real data and use cases, rather than synthetic tests.

• In a pinch I can drop to psql(1) and just run rote raw commands that I want.

I can’t say I can recommend this to everyone; it’s a bit silly. Actually scratch that, it’s more than a bit silly. But if you’re weird like me, go for it!

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-12-08.

In my continuing quest to implement All The XML Things, this morning I implemented a lexicon.pls file. Specifically, a Pronunciation Lexicon file, as recommended by the W3C. From the introduction:

The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) is designed to enable interoperable specification of pronunciation information for both Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines. The language is intended to be easy to use by developers while supporting the accurate specification of pronunciation information for international use.

The format is fairly simple. There’s some basic boilerplate for the XML file, where you define the language, namespace, schema, and your chosen phonetic alphabet:

<lexicon version="1.0" 
    xml:lang="en-AU"
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/01/pronunciation-lexicon"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/2005/01/pronunciation-lexicon
        http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-pronunciation-lexicon-20071212/pls.xsd"
    alphabet="ipa">

And then there’s the <lexeme> pronunciation itself. The spec defines what each of these elements mean, but this gives an example of their use:

<lexeme>
    <grapheme>NetBSD</grapheme>
    <alias>Net B S D</alias>
    <phoneme><![CDATA[nɛt biː ɛs diː]]></phoneme>
    <example>Ruben loves NetBSD on his laptops.</example>
</lexeme>

Here we can see a <grapheme> term defined, an <alias> used to indicate the pronunciation using other terms, a <phoneme> using the International Phonetic Alphabet we defined above in the alphabet attribute, and an <example>. Not all of these are mandatory, and you might not need to use CDATA for your elements, but I did just in case.

Here’s another example with the correct pronunciation of OpenZFS:

<lexeme xml:id="openzfs">
    <grapheme>OpenZFS</grapheme>
    <alias>Open Z F S</alias>
    <phoneme><![CDATA[ˈəʊpᵊn zɛd ɛf ɛs]]></phoneme>
    <example>Ruben trusts OpenZFS with his data.</example>
</lexeme>

Then you can link to the resulting file in your website <head>:

<link rel="lexicon" type="application/pls+xml" 
    href="https://rubenerd.com/xml/lexicon.pls"
    title="Pronounciation Lexicon" />

I also updated my nginx mime.types file to recognise pls as an XML file.

My plan is to include a bunch of the jargon, acronyms, and other abbreviations I write about on this blog there. I already (ab)use XSLT to view my Omake, Blogroll, and RSS feeds, so maybe I’ll do one of those too.

My IPA is a bit rusty, so I might be refining these. But I think I got them right, and used tools like toPhonetics to give me hints. Let me know if you see any obvious issues.

I expect modern software packages that can detect and use these files is vanishingly small. But if even one person with a screen reader or other similar tool is helped out by my inclusion of this, it was worth it.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-11-27.

I think I know the answer to this, and I've done a fair amount of google searching but most results relate to linux. I'm clinging onto hope that NetBSD has some way of recovering files accidentally deleted with rm?

I asked on Mastodon, but posting here as well. What 10G Ethernet cards are people using on NetBSD thesedays? Are there any in particular you would recommend?

I just buy used Intel X550 cards for FreeBSD and Penguins, but I’ve never messed with 10G on NetBSD. Ideally it would also work in 2.5/5 mode as well. This is for a new homelab cluster and some experiments I hope to do.

Feel free to reply to the Mastodon thread, or send me an email. Thank you!

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-11-21.

Hi!
I'm using NetBSD 10.0 on a ThinkPad T480. This is a dual GPU version with intel + nvidia GPU.
I am disabling nvidia GPU completely by adding userconf=disable nouveau* in /boot.cfg and this works:

bash-5.2$ dmesg | grep nou
[     1,000000] [   385,000000] nouveau* disabled

i915drmkms seems also to load properly:

bash-5.2$ modstat | grep i915
i915drmkms                 driver   builtin  -        0       - acpivga,drmkms,drmkms_pci

I do get /dev/dri/* nodes created (not sure why that many, though):

bash-5.2$ ls -l /dev/dri
total 0
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180,   0 Jan 23  2024 card0
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180,   1 Jan 23  2024 card1
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180,   2 Jan 23  2024 card2
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180,   3 Jan 23  2024 card3
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180, 128 Jan 23  2024 renderD128
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180, 129 Jan 23  2024 renderD129
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180, 130 Jan 23  2024 renderD130
crw-rw----  1 root  wheel  180, 131 Jan 23  2024 renderD131

Permissions and ownership is what man drm suggests. I've tried with changing the ownership to group users but it didn't help. Neither did starting Xfce as root.

However when I run Firefox from console I get:

bash-5.2$ firefox
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: DRM device has no render node (t=1.25719) [GFX1-]: glxtest: DRM device has no render node
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: DRM device has no render node (t=1.25719) |[1][GFX1-]: glxtest: Cannot find DRM device (t=1.25728) [GFX1-]: glxtest: Cannot find DRM device
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: DRM device has no render node (t=1.25719) |[1][GFX1-]: glxtest: Cannot find DRM device (t=1.25728) |[2][GFX1-]: vaapitest: ERROR (t=1.34748) [GFX1-]: vaapitest: ERROR
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: DRM device has no render node (t=1.25719) |[1][GFX1-]: glxtest: Cannot find DRM device (t=1.25728) |[2][GFX1-]: vaapitest: ERROR (t=1.34748) |[3][GFX1-]: vaapitest: VA-API test failed: failed to open renderDeviceFD.
 (t=1.34753) [GFX1-]: vaapitest: VA-API test failed: failed to open renderDeviceFD.

ATTENTION: default value of option mesa_glthread overridden by environment.

Firefox's about:support shows the same:

And in general Firefox seems to be slower. On https://chromium.github.io/octane/ I get around 15000 points. On the same machine on Debian Linux I get 25000 points.

The only X11 config I have is:

bash-5.2$ cat gpu.conf 
Section "Device"
	Identifier "intel"
	Driver "intel"
##	Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"
EndSection

But it's not required since by default X picks up the intel driver. I also tried with modesetting driver and the situation is the same.

Everything is compiled from source, using modular xorg.

mk.conf:

bash-5.2$ cat /etc/mk.conf 
.sinclude "/usr/pkg/share/mk/cpuflags.mk"

COPTS?= -pipe ${DEFCOPTS}
CFLAGS+= -pipe

MAKE_JOBS= 8
X11_TYPE= modular

FETCH_FAILOVER= yes
#FETCH_RESUME_ARGS= -c
#FETCH_OUTPUT_ARGS= -O
PKG_RESUME_TRANSFERS= yes
#.if exists(${LOCALBASE}/bin/wget2)
#FETCH_CMD= ${LOCALBASE}/bin/wget2
#.endif

#.if exists(${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo)
#SU_CMD= ${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo /bin/sh -c
#.endif

ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+= mozilla-trademark-license
ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+= mpl-1.1
ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+= ms-ttf-license
ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+= ubuntu-font-license

PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS+= dbus python pam

PKG_OPTIONS.firefox= official-mozilla-branding
PKG_OPTIONS.firefox115= official-mozilla-branding
PKG_OPTIONS.thunderbird= official-mozilla-branding
PKG_OPTIONS.mc+= slang x11 sftp ncurses
PKG_OPTIONS.ncspot+= dbus ncursesw
PKG_OPTIONS.sudo+= pam

Xorg.0.log:

bash-5.2$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[ 46324.696] 
X.Org X Server 1.21.1.13
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
[ 46324.697] Current Operating System: NetBSD troublemaker.sol 10.0 NetBSD 10.0 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Mar 28 08:33:33 UTC 2024  [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64
[ 46324.697]  
[ 46324.697] Current version of pixman: 0.43.4
[ 46324.697] 	Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
	to make sure that you have the latest version.
[ 46324.697] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
	(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
	(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
[ 46324.697] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sat Nov 16 11:16:43 2024
[ 46324.697] (==) Using config directory: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d"
[ 46324.697] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/pkg/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"
[ 46324.697] (==) No Layout section.  Using the first Screen section.
[ 46324.697] (==) No screen section available. Using defaults.
[ 46324.697] (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen Section" (0)
[ 46324.697] (**) |   |-->Monitor "<default monitor>"
[ 46324.697] (==) No device specified for screen "Default Screen Section".
	Using the first device section listed.
[ 46324.697] (**) |   |-->Device "intel"
[ 46324.697] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen Section".
	Using a default monitor configuration.
[ 46324.697] (**) Allowing byte-swapped clients
[ 46324.697] (==) Not automatically adding devices
[ 46324.697] (==) Not automatically enabling devices
[ 46324.697] (==) Not automatically adding GPU devices
[ 46324.697] (==) Automatically binding GPU devices
[ 46324.697] (==) Max clients allowed: 256, resource mask: 0x1fffff
[ 46324.697] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/OTF" does not exist.
[ 46324.697] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.697] (WW) `fonts.dir' not found (or not valid) in "/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic".
[ 46324.697] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.697] 	(Run 'mkfontdir' on "/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic").
[ 46324.697] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/misc" does not exist.
[ 46324.697] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.697] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF" does not exist.
[ 46324.697] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.697] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/OTF" does not exist.
[ 46324.698] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.698] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/Type1" does not exist.
[ 46324.698] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.698] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi" does not exist.
[ 46324.698] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.698] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi" does not exist.
[ 46324.698] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.698] (WW) The directory "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic" does not exist.
[ 46324.698] 	Entry deleted from font path.
[ 46324.698] (==) FontPath set to:
	/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/misc,
	/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/TTF,
	/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/Type1,
	/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/100dpi,
	/usr/pkg/share/fonts/X11/75dpi
[ 46324.698] (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/pkg/lib/xorg/modules"
[ 46324.698] (==) |-->Input Device "<default pointer>"
[ 46324.698] (==) |-->Input Device "<default keyboard>"
[ 46324.698] (==) No Layout section. Using the default mouse configuration.
[ 46324.698] (==) No Layout section. Using the default keyboard configuration.
[ 46324.698] (II) Loader magic: 0xac62dc60
[ 46324.698] (II) Module ABI versions:
[ 46324.698] 	X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4
[ 46324.698] 	X.Org Video Driver: 25.2
[ 46324.698] 	X.Org XInput driver : 24.4
[ 46324.698] 	X.Org Server Extension : 10.0
[ 46324.710] (--) PCI:*(0@0:2:0) 8086:5917:17aa:225e rev 7, Mem @ 0xdb000000/16777216, 0x60000000/536870912, I/O @ 0x0000e000/64
[ 46324.710] (II) LoadModule: "glx"
[ 46324.710] (II) Loading /usr/pkg/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
[ 46324.716] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[ 46324.716] 	compiled for 1.21.1.13, module version = 1.0.0
[ 46324.716] 	ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 10.0
[ 46324.716] (II) LoadModule: "intel"
[ 46324.716] (II) Loading /usr/pkg/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
[ 46324.716] (II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[ 46324.716] 	compiled for 1.21.1.13, module version = 2.99.917
[ 46324.716] 	Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[ 46324.716] 	ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 25.2
[ 46324.716] (II) LoadModule: "mouse"
[ 46324.717] (II) Loading /usr/pkg/lib/xorg/modules/input/mouse_drv.so
[ 46324.717] (II) Module mouse: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[ 46324.717] 	compiled for 1.21.1.13, module version = 1.9.5
[ 46324.717] 	Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
[ 46324.717] 	ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 24.4
[ 46324.717] (II) LoadModule: "kbd"
[ 46324.717] (II) Loading /usr/pkg/lib/xorg/modules/input/kbd_drv.so
[ 46324.717] (II) Module kbd: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[ 46324.717] 	compiled for 1.21.1.13, module version = 2.0.0
[ 46324.717] 	Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
[ 46324.717] 	ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 24.4
[ 46324.717] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Integrated Graphics Chipsets:
	i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 854, 852GM/855GM, 865G,
	915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM,
	Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33,
	GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43
[ 46324.717] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) HD Graphics
[ 46324.718] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Iris(TM) Graphics
[ 46324.718] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Iris(TM) Pro Graphics
[ 46324.718] (--) Using wscons driver on /dev/ttyE4 in pcvt compatibility mode (version 3.32)
[ 46324.787] (II) intel(0): Using Kernel Mode Setting driver: i915, version 1.6.0 20200114
[ 46324.787] (WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support
[ 46324.787] (--) intel(0): gen9 engineering sample
[ 46324.787] (--) intel(0): CPU: x86-64, sse2, sse3, ssse3, sse4.1, sse4.2, avx, avx2; using a maximum of 4 threads
[ 46324.787] (II) intel(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
	"Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32
[ 46324.787] (==) intel(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
[ 46324.788] (==) intel(0): RGB weight 888
[ 46324.788] (==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output eDP1 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output eDP1
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output DP1 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output DP1
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output HDMI1 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output HDMI1
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output DP2 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output DP2
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output HDMI2 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output HDMI2
[ 46324.788] (--) intel(0): Using a maximum size of 256x256 for hardware cursors
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Output VIRTUAL1 has no monitor section
[ 46324.788] (II) intel(0): Enabled output VIRTUAL1
[ 46324.788] (--) intel(0): Output eDP1 using initial mode 1920x1080 on pipe 0
[ 46324.788] (==) intel(0): TearFree enabled
[ 46324.788] (==) intel(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
[ 46324.788] (==) intel(0): DPI set to (96, 96)
[ 46324.788] (II) Loading sub module "dri3"
[ 46324.788] (II) LoadModule: "dri3"
[ 46324.788] (II) Module "dri3" already built-in
[ 46324.788] (II) Loading sub module "dri2"
[ 46324.788] (II) LoadModule: "dri2"
[ 46324.788] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in
[ 46324.788] (II) Loading sub module "present"
[ 46324.788] (II) LoadModule: "present"
[ 46324.788] (II) Module "present" already built-in
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): SNA initialized with Kabylake (gen9) backend
[ 46324.789] (==) intel(0): Backing store enabled
[ 46324.789] (==) intel(0): Silken mouse enabled
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): HW Cursor enabled
[ 46324.789] (==) intel(0): DPMS enabled
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): [DRI2]   DRI driver: i965
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: va_gl
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 enabled
[ 46324.789] (II) intel(0): hardware support for Present enabled
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension Generic Event Extension
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension SHAPE
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension MIT-SHM
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XInputExtension
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XTEST
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension BIG-REQUESTS
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension SYNC
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XKEYBOARD
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XC-MISC
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XFIXES
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension RENDER
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension RANDR
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension COMPOSITE
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension DAMAGE
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension DOUBLE-BUFFER
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension RECORD
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension DPMS
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension Present
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension DRI3
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension X-Resource
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XVideo
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension XVideo-MotionCompensation
[ 46324.789] (II) Initializing extension GLX
[ 46324.795] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized i965
[ 46324.795] (II) GLX: Initialized DRI2 GL provider for screen 0
[ 46324.795] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-VidModeExtension
[ 46324.795] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-DGA
[ 46324.795] (II) Initializing extension XFree86-DRI
[ 46324.795] (II) Initializing extension DRI2
[ 46324.801] (II) intel(0): switch to mode [email protected] on eDP1 using pipe 0, position (0, 0), rotation normal, reflection none
[ 46324.804] (II) intel(0): Setting screen physical size to 508 x 285
[ 46324.878] (II) Using input driver 'mouse' for '<default pointer>'
[ 46324.878] (**) Option "CorePointer" "on"
[ 46324.878] (**) <default pointer>: always reports core events
[ 46324.878] (WW) <default pointer>: No Device specified, looking for one...
[ 46325.333] (II) <default pointer>: found Device "/dev/wsmouse"
[ 46325.337] (--) <default pointer>: Device: "/dev/wsmouse"
[ 46325.337] (==) <default pointer>: Protocol: "WSMouse"
[ 46325.337] (**) <default pointer>: always reports core events
[ 46325.337] (**) Option "Device" "/dev/wsmouse"
[ 46325.801] (==) <default pointer>: Emulate3Buttons, Emulate3Timeout: 50
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: ZAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: Buttons: 9
[ 46325.801] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "<default pointer>" (type: MOUSE, id 6)
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: (accel) keeping acceleration scheme 1
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: (accel) acceleration profile 0
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: (accel) acceleration factor: 2.000
[ 46325.801] (**) <default pointer>: (accel) acceleration threshold: 4
[ 46326.257] (II) Using input driver 'kbd' for '<default keyboard>'
[ 46326.257] (**) Option "CoreKeyboard" "on"
[ 46326.257] (**) <default keyboard>: always reports core events
[ 46326.257] (**) <default keyboard>: always reports core events
[ 46326.257] (**) Option "Protocol" "standard"
[ 46326.257] (**) Option "XkbRules" "base"
[ 46326.257] (**) Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
[ 46326.257] (**) Option "XkbLayout" "us"
[ 46326.257] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "<default keyboard>" (type: KEYBOARD, id 7)
[ 46326.796] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "AUO", prod id 4157
[ 46326.796] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines:
[ 46326.796] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1920x1080"x0.0  141.00  1920 1968 2068 2098  1080 1083 1084 1120 -hsync -vsync (67.2 kHz eP)

I have installed intel-vaapi-driver-2.4.0 but that didn't change anything.
vainfo shows:

bash-5.2$ vainfo 
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/pkg/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
libva info: Trying to open /usr/pkg/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.22.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Kaby Lake - 2.4.0
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointEncPicture
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD

Do you have any suggestions?

We’ve all seen those multi-function devices people use in small offices and when working from home. They’ve been invaluable to me over the years, but they’ve always lacked a certain Je ne sais quoi.

This would be my dream device:

• Monochrome laser printer, for expediency and legibility for things like tickets and reservation forms.

• Colour inkjet printer, for when we want to print and frame photos on semi-gloss paper.

• Label printer, for printing labels. Great work on that description Ruben, you’re really selling it. The first label printed would always be for the device itself.

• Separate paper storage, for A4 (the standard) and Japanese B5 (the best paper size), in both plain and semi-gloss.

• Document feeder scanner, with a built-in guillotine for slicing the spine off books.

• Flatbed scanner, for those oddly-shaped scannables that won’t fit in the document feeder. “Scannables”?

• Document copier, for scanning and printing in one step, with automatic monochrome laser or colour inkjet selection depending on the type of media being copied.

• Fax machine, for sending and receiving important correspondence to government departments in 2024, which can also import/export from PDF.

• Built-in VoIP handset, for use with the aforementioned fax machine, and for those forms that expect a different number to your mobile in 2024 for reasons nobody can explain to me.

• Cross-cut document shredder, with support for automatic document shredding after scanning if one is feeling adventurous.

• Conical steel burr coffee grinder, to deliver fresh grounds to the brewing chamber, and a timer for automatic morning brews. This could use the same motor as the aforementioned shredder if sufficient torque is available.

• Coffee and tea brewing chamber, with large shower-head water dispersion for even extractions, compatibility with Hario V60 filter papers, and a chute for expired coffee and tea leaves. This could also talk HTCPCP, and implement CUPS.

• Automatic clothing press, for those difficult mornings where you have to commute to the office in a collared shirt instead of working from home in an AsiaBSDCon 2019 shirt. Between this, the automatic coffee, and the document feeder for those papers you needed to present, your morning would be set.

• Built-in toaster, that could also double as a CD/DVD/BD burner for exporting and sharing scanned documents and/or received faxes. Clara suggested this addition, so the machine could also operate NetBSD as its firmware. This is why Clara is the best.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-11-16.

NetBSD is an open-source, Unix-like operating system known for its portability, lightweight design, and robustness across a wide array of hardware platforms. Initially released in 1993, NetBSD was one of the first open-source operating systems based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) lineage, alongside FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD’s development has been led by a collaborative community and is particularly recognized for its “clean” and well-documented codebase, a factor that has made it a popular choice among users interested in systems programming and cross-platform compatibility.

↫ André Machado

I’m not really sure what to make of this article, since it mostly reads like an advertisement for NetBSD, but considering NetBSD is one of the lesser-talked about variants of an operating system family that already sadly plays second fiddle to the Linux behemoth, I don’t think giving it some additional attention is really hurting anybody. The article is still gives a solid overview of the history and strengths of NetBSD, which makes it a good introduction.

I have personally never tried NetBSD, but it’s on my list of systems to try out on my PA-RISC workstation since from what I’ve heard it’s the only BSD which can possibly load up X11 on the Visualize FX10pro graphics card it has (OpenBSD can only boot to a console on this GPU). While I could probably coax some cobbled-together Linux installation into booting X11 on it, where’s the fun in that?

Do any of you lovely readers use NetBSD for anything? FreeBSD and even OpenBSD are quite well represented as general purpose operating systems in the kinds of circles we all frequent, but I rarely hear about people using NetBSD other than explicitly because it supports some outdated, arcane architecture in 2024.

I can't understand what "-f" option to find command on NetBSD mean.

Manual: https://man.netbsd.org/find.1 says

-f Specifies a file hierarchy for find to traverse. File hierarchies may also be specified as the operands immediately following the options.

Usage:

find [-H | -L | -P] [-dEhsXx] -f file [file ...] [expression]

find [-H | -L | -P] [-dEhsXx] file [file ...] [expression]

I would expect the two following calls to be equivalent:

home# find ./ -name "*c"
./1.c

home# find -f ./ -name "*c"
find: unknown option -- n
find: unknown option -- a
find: unknown option -- m
find: unknown option -- e
./
./1.c
find: *c: No such file or directory

Instead to make second equivalent I have to run

home# find -f ./ -- -name "*c"
./1.c

Am I missing something?

I have a very old AirPort Extreme, the A1408. Is it possible to install Linux on it, using the AirPort functionally as a hard disk, and then boot from that? I have also heard that AirPorts run NetBSD. Can you boot into that and run commands?

I have not been at EuroBSDCon for a while, unfortunately! My last EuroBSDCon was EuroBSDcon 2017 in Paris, France (and I have also blogged about it)!

I was very excited to come back to EuroBSDCon. Meet again in person with people. Talk in the "hall track"... and, why not!, have some fun and do some shenanigans in the nights! :)

And... definitely it was very nice, instructive and fun!

I have not fully unpacked the bag but it's time to share some notes!

Friday (20/09): arriving in Dublin

I arrived in Dublin on Friday afternoon. After some sightseeing on foot I got lost in the paintings of the National Gallery of Ireland.

I then spent the rest of the evening and night in Porterhouse Temple Bar. I had a tasty soup and garlic bread and several delicious craft beers!

Saturday (21/09): 1st day of conference talks and social event

My hotel was a 40 minutes walk from University College Dublin (UCD). I arrived a bit early for the registration. I then met some other NetBSD folks that I had missed in person since 2018 and met new ones.

View from O'Reilly Hall, University College Dublin.

After the Opening Session that welcomed us, the conference started with the opening keynote Evidence based Policy formation in the EU what Evidence are we Presenting to the EU? by Tom Smyth. Tom Smyth shared his experience on evidence based policy formation in the European Union from a point of a relatively small ISP. EU is open to feedback and as a BSD community we can shape and influence policies.

Flipping Bits: Memory Errors in the Machine, Taylor R Campbell

Taylor talked about bit flips, the memory errors in the machine.

Memory errors caught in the act: corruption of a filename in Riastradh's local machine.

He started sharing a catch of bit flip in a filename corruption on his local machine in NetBSD src repository. A bit flipped and that resulted from external/gpl3/gdb/dist/gdb/testsuite/gdb.linespec/cpls.cc to e\370ternal/gpl3/gdb/dist/gdb/testsuite/gdb.linespec/cpls.cc (In ASCII lower case x is \170 that is 01111000 in binary, while \370 is 11111000, the most significant bit got flipped!).

He also opened several PRs - due to several experienced kernel panics mostly in ZFS - before he realized that it was bad RAM.

As part of the talk a lot of fundamentals concepts and theory behind Error Detection And Correction (EDAC), causes of memory errors, where memory errors can happen, error severity and error persistence were shared.

Taylor then talked and digged in ACPI Platform Error Interface (APEI) that is the standard interface in ACPI that abstract EDAC device registers.

In NetBSD APEI is supported by the apei(4) driver.

The apei(4) driver also exposes a sysctl interface to APEI EINJ (Error INJection) that permit to also inject errors. Using such interface Riastradh live demoed that and trigger a memory error that was corrected and reported by apei(4)!

Riastradh live demoing a memory error using APEI EINJ via apei(4).

The talk was great and super-interesting. Memory errors are also pretty common. Taylor also shared a lot of anecdotes and that make his talk even more fun and interesting!

An introduction to GPIO in RPi3B+ and NetBSD, building a wind-speed logger as an application, Dr. Nicola Mingotti

Dr. Nicola Mingotti talk was a great introduction (and more) to Generalized Pin Input Output (GPIO)!

He started really from the start by populating a uSD card and installing and configuring NetBSD on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.

He then introduced GPIO, how the RPi3B+ pin maps to the GPIO number and then we were ready to get our hands on GPIO!

As first exercises he showed how to set a PIN state (on/off) and read a PIN state via gpioctl(8). This can be used respectively to turn a LED on/off and to read the state of a switch.

The second series of exercises looked on how fast gpioctl can be. This is limited for several applications and so Nicola introduced how to write and read pin states in C via ioctl(2). This is much faster and with that we can go from switches to square waves!

To avoid bit-banging and polling respectively gpiopwm(4) and gpioirq(4) can be used. Nicola shared several applications of them, like blinking LED and loopback. (Another possible application, left as an exercise to the reader is the "daemon toggler". The "daemon toggler" starts/stops a daemon (e.g. ntpd(8)) based on the state of a physical switch!)

He then shared a much bigger application a Wind-Speed Logger (AKA WSL). This was used by Nicola in order to evaluate if wind turbines could be installed or not. He also shared how he adjusted an RPi case and built housing for it (the RPi will be outside, needs to cool off so needs some ventilation but at the same time the housing should block rain!)

Nicola showing the sensor used to build the Wind-Speed Logger (WSL).

He concluded the talk on why he used NetBSD.

The talk was really educational. Nicola did a great job in summarizing and providing a lot of references. If you are more interested I suggest to catch up with the video recordings, slides and try to do the exercises in it!

"Hall track" and preparing for the social event

After Nicola's talk I have spent some time in the "hall track" talking with other people and missed a couple of talks (recording should be available so I will hopefully catch up!).

I have then attended Stefano Marinelli's talk Why (and how) we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.

Stefano shared his more than 2 decades old experience with BSD systems and how he made his passion his profession.

He shared his philosophy, experience with clients and why it is important to focus on solving problems.

During the talk he shared also several interesting stories with clients. In one of them to avoid possible bias on BSD systems he migrated client hosts without informing them. A client called alarmed because he noticed a massive performance boost!

His talk was inspiring and you can find more in his I Solve Problems blog post.

After Stefano's talk we gathered to join the social event and took a DART train (Dublin Area Rapid Transit).

Social event: BrewDog Dublin Outpost

The social event was in BrewDog Dublin Outpost.

We were in an area dedicated to EuroBSDCon participants so that we can eat, drink and talk. There was a buffet and we received tickets to grab beers.

Several folks gifted me an handful and I have definitely had a pretty ample beer tasting experience too! :)

I also had a Vegan Spicy Meaty pizza: a pizza with seitan, mushrooms, chilli flakes, fresh red chilli, tomatoes and vegan mozzarella. My italian-pizza-side is usally pretty orthodox and I usually go for a pizza marinara! :) But overall that was actually pretty nice and I really appreciated the topping!

I have staid with a couple of folks until the closure. With Christoph Badura (<bad@>) we walked in the desperate search of grabbing some more food. However, at the end we ended up in The Temple Bar Pub for "only another beer"! We met with some friendly Swedish and Swiss tourists and we started talking about BSD systems at 2:00 AM! The weather was pretty nice (it was always pretty cloudy but there was no rain for the entire conference) and we decided to continue walking back to our hotels. At the end we have walked for a bit less than 9 kilometers from Temple Bar to nearly Booterstown! That was a great walk though and definitely we had no traces of hangovers in the morning! :)

Sunday (22/09): 2nd day of conference talks

I wake up a bit late on Sunday and arrived in UCD at around 12:00 and staid until lunch in the "hall track".

For lunch the vegetarian dish was a vegetarian curry, pretty tasty!

On Sunday we had a longer lunch break also to take a family photo.

EuroBSDCon 2024 family picture. You can find more EuroBSDCon photographs taken by Ollivier Robert at EuroBSDCon 2024 - Dublin, Ireland album.

After lunch I have attended FreeBSD at 30 Years: Its Secrets to Success by Kirk McKusick. In this talk Kirk looked back at 30 years of FreeBSD history (and also more for BSD years!) and what made its success. He talked about a lot of different topics, including leadership, development, importance of adopting ideas and codes from NetBSD and OpenBSD, communication, documentation and project culture. He also shared several interesting statistics and demographic about FreeBSD.

I have then attended Confidential Computing with OpenBSD by Hans-Jörg Höxer. Hans-Jörg introduced concepts about confidential computing, the threat model that it cover and then digged in AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and how he is using that in OpenBSD vmm(4).

Then I have attended Building an open native FreeBSD CI system from scratch with lua, C, jails & zfs by Dave Cottlehuber. In this talk Dave shared the design and implementation of a Continuous Integration (CI) system focused on FreeBSD technologies but that can be ported also to other BSDs.

The final talk I have attended was SIMD-enhanced libc string functions: how it's done by Robert Clausecker and Getz Mikalsen. In this talk Robert shared how several libc string functions were reimplemented in other to use SIMD techniques on amd64 and arm64. Getz worked on porting such work on arm64 as part of Google Summer of Code 2024 and he shared his work and challenges in porting that. The talk was interesting and micro-benchmarking showed performance increase by factor of 5 on average!

Then I have joined the Closing Session.

There was a wrap up of the conference and some stats about it.

And *drumrolls* the next EuroBSDCon location was announced! EuroBSDCon 2025 will be in Zagreb, Croatia!

After the Closing Session with other NetBSD folks we met again for one last dinner. We met with Andy Doran (<ad@>) and we had some junk food and several beers.

Conclusion

I had not traveled a lot in the last years and I have missed several EuroBSDCon-s and I really regret that! EuroBSDCon 2024 was great: very interesting talks, friendly folks and it was some time that I did not had so much fun!

Dublin was also really nice. All the locals were also very friendly. I hope to come back to both Dublin and Ireland to do some much more sightseeing in a more relaxed pace. Enjoy food, beers, drinks and more. Talk with locals.

I would like to thanks a lot to all the EuroBSDCon organizers for the amazing conference!

I also would like to thanks The NetBSD Foundation that funded my EuroBSDCon registration.

If you have never been to EuroBSDCon and you are curious about BSDs... I strongly suggest to attend either as participant or speaker! Folks are super-friendly, there are a lot of interesting tutorials and talks and I'm pretty sure you will have fun too!

And... if you are still reading until here... thank you too! :)

This report was written by Emmanuel Nyarko as part of Google Summer of Code 2024.

Alternate Queuing has been of great need in the high Performance Computing space since the continuous records of unfair disruption in network quality due to the buffer bloat problem. The buffer bloat problem still persists and not completely gone but modern active queue managements have been introduced to improve the performance of networks.

ALTQ was refactored to basically improve maintainability. Duplicates were handled, some compile time errors were fixed and also performance has been improved too.

This improves the quality of developer experience on maintaining the ALTQ codebase.

The Controlled Delay (CoDel) active queue management has also been integrated into the netbsd codebase. This introduces improvements made in the area of quality of service in the netbsd operating system. CoDel was a research led collaborative work by Van Jacobness and Kathleen Nichols which was developed to manage queues under control of the minimum delay experienced by packets in the running buffer window.

As it stands now, ALTQ in NetBSD is integrated in PF packet filter. I am currently working to integrate it in the NPF packet filter. The code in NetBSD is on the constant pursuit to produce clean and maintainable code.

I'll also be working to improve quality of service in NetBSD through quality and collaborative research driven by randomness in results. As a research computer scientist, I will be working to propose new active queue managements for the NetBSD operating system to completely defeat the long lasting buffer bloat problem.

More details of the work can be found in my Google Summer of Code 2024 work submission.

I am trying to install, for the first time, NetBSD-10.0-amd64 on HP EliteBook 8570w. After choosing "Install BSD" option installer goes to the booting mode and gets interrupted with an error:

502c0
Stopped in pid 294.294 (init) at            netbsd:breakpoint+0x5: leave
breakpoint() at netbsd:breakpoint+0x5
vpanic() at netbsd:vpanic+0x183
panic() at netbsd:panic+0x3c
cnopen() at netbsd:cnopen+0x104
cdev_open() at netbsd:cdev_open+0x12a
spec_open() at netbsd:spec_open+0x1e0
VOP_OPEN() at netbsd:VOP_OPEN+0x3e
vn_open() at netbsd:vn_open+0x2ec
do_open() at netbsd:do_open+0xc3
do_sys_openat() at netbsd:do_sys_openat+0x74
sys_open() at netbsd:sys_open+0x24
syscall() at netbsd:syscall+0x1fc
--- syscall (number 5) ---
netbsd:syscall+0x1fc
ds            8
es            2
fs            180
gs            4a80
rdi           0
rsi           ffffffff81d88000
rsi           ffffbe8345a54ad0
rbx           0
rdx           1
rcx           ffffffffffffff
rax           800000000000000
r8            0
r9            0
r10           ffffffff818450e0      x86_mem
r11           fffffffe
r12           ffffffff8139af6f      ostype+0x13aa
r13           ffffbe8345a54b18
r14           104
r15           ffff8046d2cbdbc0
rip           ffffffff80235385      breakpoint+0x5
cs            8
rflags        202
rsp           ffffbe8345a54ad0
ss            10
netbsd:breakpoint +0x5: leave

If I continue the system precedes to reboot.

I'm not familiar with bsd tools so please tell me if I left important information.

Notice

I installed FreeBSD and Arch Linux on the same machine and it worked fine.

After several sessions with intense Google searching and trying several angles with ChatGPT, I seem to be at a dead-end, my problem arises when I try to build OpenSSL from source, it seems that the build process wants to link with libcrypto.so located in /lib, but the system supplied version of OpenSSL is ancient, so this fails miserably, since OpenSSL now includes functionality not present in my version of libcrypto.so, specifically QUIC, its failing on safe_muldiv_uint64_t. It seems like a catch-22, and I have absolutely no idea how to break out of this.

Some of the suggestions I have found involved building OpenSSL in a chroot jail, but I think it seems a little excessive?

So I guess my question is: How do I build OpenSSL without linking with /lib/libcrypto.so, but linking with the version of libcrypto from the source package?

Output:

${LDCMD:-cc} -pthread -Wa,--noexecstack -O2 -O3 -pipe -I/usr/include -I/usr/pkg/include  -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/pkg/gcc7/lib/gcc/x86_64--netbsd/7.5.0 -Wl,-R/usr/pkg/gcc7/lib/gcc/x86_64--netbsd/7.5.0 -Wl,-zrelro -L/usr/lib -Wl,-R/usr/lib -L/usr/pkg/lib -Wl,-R/usr/pkg/lib \
        -o fuzz/quic-srtm-test \
        fuzz/quic-srtm-test-bin-fuzz_rand.o \
        fuzz/quic-srtm-test-bin-quic-srtm.o \
        fuzz/quic-srtm-test-bin-test-corpus.o \
        libssl.a libcrypto.a -pthread
...
apps/libapps.a -lssl -lcrypto -pthread
./libssl.so: undefined reference to safe_muldiv_uint64_t
./libssl.so: undefined reference to safe_mul_uint64_t

-L/usr/lib is specified in the above command executed by the Makefile, and that folder contains libcrypto.o and libssl.o from the system supplied version of OpenSSL,

For certain use cases, it’s advisable to set up a read-only root file system, which ensures better reliability in case of system issues. Think of scenarios like a router (critical for network access) or a caching reverse-proxy, such as the one described in my series “Make your own CDN“.

While FreeBSD natively supports this configuration and some Linux distributions offer custom solutions (e.g., Alpine Linux), NetBSD stands out as an excellent choice for such devices. It supports nearly all embedded devices, is lightweight, and its stability minimizes the need for frequent updates.

↫ Stefano Marinelli

Exactly what it says on the tin. Friend of the website (a new term I just made up and will use from here on out for some people) Stefano Marinelli, fresh from his series about making your own CDN using the various BSDs, explains how to set up a NetBSD system with a read-only root filesystem for the special use cases where this makes sense.

After covering setting up your own CDN with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it’s now time to learn how to set up your own CDN wit NetBSD.

This article is a spin-off from a previous post on how to create a self-hosted CDN, but this time we’ll focus on using NetBSD. NetBSD is a lightweight, stable, and secure operating system that supports a wide range of hardware, making it an excellent choice for a caching reverse proxy. Devices that other operating systems may soon abandon, such as early Raspberry Pi models or i386 architecture, are still fully supported by NetBSD and will continue to be so. Additionally, NetBSD is an outstanding platform for virtualization (using Xen or qemu/nvmm) and deserves more attention than it currently receives.

↫ Stefano Marinelli

All the same from my previous post still applies, and it’s a great thing that Marinelli covers all three of the major BSDs (so far). If you want to run your own CDN on BSD, you can now make a pretty informed decision on which BSD best suits your needs.

Thanks to open source, no technology ever has to become obsolete, so long as a community remains to support it. You can sync Newtons and Palm Pilots with modern desktops, download web browsers for long-discontinued operating systems, or connect vintage computers like the Apple IIe to the modern internet via WiFi. Every year, new cartridges are released for old-school video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.

People keep old software and online platforms alive as well. The Dreamwidth team forked an old version of the early social network LiveJournal’s source code and built a community around it. The dial-up bulletin board system software WWIV is still maintained and there are plenty of BBSes still around. Teams are working to restore aspects of early online services like AOL and Prodigy. And you can still use Gopher, the hypertext protocol that was — for a brief period in the early 1990s — bigger than the web.

↫ Klint Finley

Retrocomputing is about a lot of things, and I feel like it differs per person. For me, it’s a little bit of nostalgia, but primarily it’s about learning, and experiencing hardware and software I was unable to experience when they were new, either due to high cost or just general unavailability. There’s a lot to learn from platforms that are no longer among us, and often it helps you improve your skills with the modern platforms you do still use.

The linked article is right: open source is playing such a massive role in the retrocomputing community. The number of open source projects allowing you to somehow use decades-old platforms in conjunction with modern technologies is massive, and it goes far beyond just software – projects like BlueSCSI or very niche things like usb3sun highlights there’s also hardware-based solutions for just about anything retro you want to accomplish.

And we really can’t forget NetBSD, which seems to be the go-to modern operating system for bringing new life to old and retro hardware, as it often runs on just about anything. When I got my PA-RISC workstation, the HP Visualize c3750, I couldn’t find working copies of HP-UX, so I, too, opted for NetBSD to at least be able to see if the computer was fully functional. NetBSD is now a tool in my toolbox when I’m dealing with older, unique hardware.

Retrocomputing is in a great place right now, with the exception of the ballooning prices we’re all suffering from, with even successful mainstay YouTubers like LGR lamenting the state of the market. Still, if you do get your hands on something retro – odds are there’s a whole bunch of tools ready for you to make the most of it, even today.

This is a new installation for a wordpress site that hasn't launched yet.

The memcached process is always at near 100% of cpu usage:

load averages:  1.93,  1.78,  1.83;               up 3+22:29:29                                                                                      21:49:18
31 processes: 28 sleeping, 3 on CPU
CPU states: 59.1% user,  0.0% nice,  4.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 36.8% idle
Memory: 2069M Act, 1014M Inact, 44K Wired, 175M Exec, 2447M File, 54M Free
Swap: 512M Total, 512M Free / Pools: 279M Used / Network: 23K In, 1K Out

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE       TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
 5770 memcache  25    0    70M 3112K CPU/0      19:11 94.58% 94.58% memcached

And memcached-tool /var/run/memcached/memcached_0.sock stats reports

#/var/run/memcached/memcached_0.sock Field         Value
              accepting_conns             1
                    auth_cmds             0
                  auth_errors             0
                        bytes             0
                   bytes_read            21
                bytes_written          4435
                   cas_badval             0
                     cas_hits             0
                   cas_misses             0
                    cmd_flush             0
                      cmd_get             0
                     cmd_meta             0
                      cmd_set             0
                    cmd_touch             0
                  conn_yields             0
        connection_structures             2
        crawler_items_checked             0
            crawler_reclaimed             0
             curr_connections             1
                   curr_items             0
                    decr_hits             0
                  decr_misses             0
                  delete_hits             0
                delete_misses             0
              direct_reclaims             0
               evicted_active             0
            evicted_unfetched             0
                    evictions             0
            expired_unfetched             0
                  get_expired             0
                  get_flushed             0
                     get_hits             0
                   get_misses             0
                   hash_bytes        524288
            hash_is_expanding             0
             hash_power_level            16
                    incr_hits             0
                  incr_misses             0
                     libevent 2.1.12-stable
               limit_maxbytes      67108864
          listen_disabled_num             0
             log_watcher_sent             0
          log_watcher_skipped             0
                 log_watchers             0
           log_worker_dropped             0
           log_worker_written             0
            lru_bumps_dropped             0
          lru_crawler_running             0
           lru_crawler_starts             6
       lru_maintainer_juggles     103444004
            lrutail_reflocked             0
                 malloc_fails             0
              max_connections          1024
                moves_to_cold             0
                moves_to_warm             0
             moves_within_lru             0
                          pid          5770
                 pointer_size            64
               read_buf_bytes         98304
          read_buf_bytes_free         32768
               read_buf_count             6
                 read_buf_oom             0
                    reclaimed             0
         rejected_connections             0
                 reserved_fds            20
           response_obj_bytes         49152
           response_obj_count             1
             response_obj_oom             0
         round_robin_fallback             0
                rusage_system      1.053032
                  rusage_user   1136.463840
        slab_global_page_pool             0
   slab_reassign_busy_deletes             0
     slab_reassign_busy_items             0
  slab_reassign_chunk_rescues             0
slab_reassign_evictions_nomem             0
 slab_reassign_inline_reclaim             0
        slab_reassign_rescues             0
        slab_reassign_running             0
                  slabs_moved             0
              store_no_memory             0
              store_too_large             0
                      threads             4
                         time    1724186947
   time_in_listen_disabled_us             0
            total_connections             4
                  total_items             0
                   touch_hits             0
                 touch_misses             0
          unexpected_napi_ids             0
                       uptime          1177
                      version        1.6.23

Memcached is configure to start with:

# grep memcach /etc/rc.conf
memcached=YES
memcached_jobs="job0"
memcached_job0_args="-a 660 -s /var/run/memcached/memcached_0.sock -m 64 -c 1024"

What might be wrong?

After years of inactivity, the Kyua project has graduated as an open source citizen and has a new home under the FreeBSD umbrella!

But uh… wait, what is Kyua and why is this exciting? To resolve confusion and celebrate this milestone, I’d like to revisit what Kyua is, how it came to be, why I stopped working on it for a while, why that was a problem for FreeBSD—and, indirectly, NetBSD—and how Kyua being free software has helped keep it alive.

As usual, partway through a couple weeks in Mallorca, we’re just getting the hang of it. After a few days of only the pool, it’s been pool mornings and beach afternoons. Every day, each kid gets more bold in both. I’ve managed to avoid getting sunburnt so far, though it’s getting harder to stay ahead of the situation. For mealtimes it’s kind of fun to be stuck in a tiny kitchen trying to cook my way out; bedtimes, down a sleepable room due to a broken air conditioner, were less so. My carcass got taken over by mosquitoes, who then rented most of it back to me. In a few days I might be ready to buy them out.

Usually here I’d consider taking a nap when the littles do. Definitely tired enough. But a little solo computer time feels more like what I’m needing: Refactoring some code, backing up some photos, updating pkgsrc stuff, writing posts on my website, that sort of thing.

For this summer vacation we’re hopping around more, which happens to simplify our transatlantic travel days. (Traditionally we’d have connecting flights before arriving anywhere.) One flight into Munich, where we stayed in the area for a few days visiting in-laws. From there a quick hop to Mallorca, the meat in our vacation sandwich. From here a quick-ish hop to Hannover for a week back in the little north-central German village where we lived out the first two years of COVID. Then we’ll drive to Frankfurt to see friends before our return flight to New York. Hopping around like this means we get to see more people and places, in exchange for which we get to find out what happens when kids try to sleep in a wider variety of environments and configurations. So far, sokay.

I wanted to clear all the newsletters items I’ve saved, so you are getting links until my inbox no longer paginates.

• Just Use Postgres for Everything.  (via)
• When web search failed me for Postgres.
• The Future of MySQL is Postgres. (target from previous link)
• From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency.  Or any BSD.   (via)
• Layers and Gateways, a historical view.  Railways vs networks.
• The workstation you wanted in 1990, in your pocket.
• Paul Ceruzzi has a Substack.
• pkgsrc-2024Q2 is out.
• X Window System at 40.  (via)
• Some TENEX history.
• Why shitty robots are the antidote of perfectionism, a video.  Her store has neat stuff.
• Scifiinterfaces.com.  I linked to this in 2013 but it’s still going.  (reminded via)
• Largest old computer I’ve seen a person keep yet.  (via)
• Tiny TV 2.  (via)
• UNLICENSED: Bootlegging As Creative Practice, a book.  (via)
• One Page Dungeon Reviews.  (via)

All that to say, I find that NetBSDs philosophy aligns with mine. The OS is small and cozy, and compared to many minimal Linux distributions, I found it faster to setup. Supported hardware is automatically picked up, for my Thinkpad T480s almost everything (except the trackpad issue I solved above) worked out of the box, and it comes with a minimal window manager and display manager to get you started. It is simple and minimal but with sane defaults. It is a hackable system that teaches you a ton. What more could you want?

↫ Marc Coquand

I spent quite some time using OpenBSD earlier this year, and I absolutely, positively loved it. I can’t quite put into words just how nice OpenBSD felt, how graspable the configuration files and commands were, how good and detailed the documentation, and how welcoming and warm the community was over on Mastodon, with even well-known OpenBSD developers taking time out of their day to help me out with dumb newbie questions.

The only reason I eventually went back to Fedora on my workstation was performance. OpenBSD as a desktop operating system has some performance issues, from a slow file system to user interface stutter to problematic Firefox performance, that really started to grind my gears while trying to get work done. Some of these issues stem from OpenBSD not being primarily focused on desktop use, and some of them simply stem from lack of manpower or popularity. Regardless, nobody in the OpenBSD community was at all surprised or offended by me going back to Fedora.

NetBSD seems to share a lot of the same qualities as OpenBSD, but, as the linked article notes, with a focus on different things. Like I said yesterday, I’m looking to building and testing a system entirely focused on tiled terminal emulators and TUI applications, and I’ve been pondering if OpenBSD or NetBSD would be a perfect starting point for that experiment.

I was not able to get this done early like the last few posts, but there’s still a good range here.

• Can You Make It Bigger? – A Journey In Building Arcade Cabinets.  (via)
• Via previous story, the Picade.
• The 84 Series.  On point for current topics and period stylings.  (via)
• Bat Hauntings on Apple VR.  This, then, is the future.  (via)
• 3D Printing My Teeth.  (via)
• valve.computer.  Hardcore analog.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Schotter – Georg Nees – Part 1.  (via)
• The Old Computer Challenge v4 (Olympics edition)
• Try out a NetBSD system in 20 seconds (amd64 & amr64).
• Things to Make and Do.

Blog System/5 hasn’t always been called this way and it hasn’t been my first experience with blogging either. In fact, today marks the 20th anniversary of this publication in its various incarnations so it’s time for a bit of reflection.

Just to set context for when 20 years ago was: Windows XP was almost 3 years old, Ubuntu had just debuted, Apple computers were still PowerPC-based, Half Life 2 was about to launch, and Slashdot was the place to be instead of the yet-to-be-created Hacker News. As for myself, I was still in college, had copious amounts of free time, and was a really active contributor to NetBSD.

On my home network, some important jobs are performed by little ARM computers.

AirPlay to sound system

The house came with a decent sound system wired in. The receiver can take 1/8” stereo input — from AirPlay, with help from a decade-old Raspberry Pi 1 Model B Rev 2.

1. Prepare disk

With a 4GB SD card, from macOS:

$ diskutil list    # inspect output
$ SDCARD=disk6
$ diskutil unmountDisk ${SDCARD}
$ links https://raspi.debian.net/tested-images/
$ DISKIMAGE=20231109_raspi_1_bookworm.img.xz
$ fetch https://raspi.debian.net/tested/${DISKIMAGE}
$ xzcat ${DISKIMAGE} \
  | sudo dd of=/dev/r${SDCARD} bs=64k oflag=sync status=progress
$ diskutil eject ${SDCARD}

2. First boot

Place the RPi somewhere convenient. Connect SD card, keyboard, HDMI, Ethernet, and power. Log in as root, no password:

# apt update
# apt -y install etckeeper
# cd /etc
# git branch -M main
# apt -y install sudo
# visudo    # for the sudo group, insert NOPASSWD: before the final ALL
# useradd -m -G sudo -s /bin/bash schmonz
# passwd schmonz
# exit

Log in as schmonz:

$ sudo passwd root
$ sudo sh -c 'echo 127.0.1.1 schleierplay >> /etc/hosts'
$ sudo hostnamectl hostname schleierplay
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Set root password, hostname, and timezone.'
$ sudo apt -y install shairport-sync
$ sudo vi /etc/shairport-sync.conf
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Set AirPlay name.'
$ sudo shutdown -h now

3. Deployment

Place the RPi where it’ll live. Connect audio cable, Ethernet, and power.

$ ssh-copy-id schleierplay.local

4. Usage

Make sure receiver is set to AUX input. Use AirPlay.

5. Maintenance

As with any Debian:

$ ssh schleierplay.local -t 'sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade && sudo apt -y autoremove'

To back up /etc, git push it someplace trustworthy and private.

6. Wishlist

I’d rather run NetBSD, but on 10.0 with shairport-sync, I saw a lot of AirPlay Speaker Not Available: 'House' is being used by someone else (even when it wasn’t).

AirPrint to old printer

My ancient USB-only HP LaserJet P1006 remains reliable for our basic needs and we’ve still got a pile of toner cartridges. A friend recently sent me a comparatively beefy Pine A64 board.

1. Prepare disk

With a 4GB SD card, from macOS:

$ diskutil list    # inspect output
$ SDCARD=disk6
$ diskutil unmountDisk ${SDCARD}
$ links https://www.armbian.com/pine64/
$ DISKIMAGE=Armbian_24.5.1_Pine64_bookworm_current_6.6.31_minimal.img.xz
$ fetch https://dl.armbian.com/pine64/archive/${DISKIMAGE}
$ xzcat ${DISKIMAGE} \
  | sudo dd of=/dev/r${SDCARD} bs=64k oflag=sync status=progress
$ diskutil eject ${SDCARD}

2. First boot

Place the A64 somewhere convenient. Connect SD card, keyboard, HDMI, Ethernet, and power. Follow the prompts to set the root password, create a user account, and select a locale. Then continue:

# apt update
# apt -y install etckeeper
# cd /etc
# git branch -M main
# visudo    # for the sudo group, insert NOPASSWD: before the final ALL
# exit

Log in as schmonz:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo 127.0.1.1 schleierprint >> /etc/hosts'
$ sudo hostnamectl hostname schleierprint
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Set root password, hostname, and timezone.'
$ sudo apt -y install hplip avahi-daemon
$ sudo usermod -a -G lpadmin schmonz
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Make myself a printer admin.'
$ sudo shutdown -h now

3. Deployment

Place the A64 where it’ll live. Connect printer, Ethernet, and power.

$ ssh-copy-id schleierprint.local
$ ssh schleierprint.local
$ sudo hp-setup -i    # follow prompts, mostly defaults; name the queue 'hpljp1006'
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Add initial hplip config for P1006.'
$ sudo sed -i \
  -e '/^\*ColorDevice: True$/s|True|False|' \
  -e '/^\*OpenUI \*Duplex\/Double-Sided Printing: PickOne$/,/^\*CloseUI: \*Duplex$/s|^|*% |' \
  -e '/^\*OpenUI \*ColorModel\/Output Mode: PickOne$/,/^\*CloseUI: \*ColorModel$/s|^|*% |' \
  /etc/cups/ppd/hpljp1006.ppd
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Correct advertised printer capabilities.'
$ sudo sed -i \
  -e 's|^Info $|Info HP LaserJet P1006|' \
  /etc/cups/printers.conf
$ sudo lpadmin -d hpljp1006
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Name printer and set it as default.'
$ sudo cupsctl --remote-any
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Let local network talk to CUPS.'
$ sudo sed -i \
  -e '/^WebInterface /a PreserveJobFiles No' \
  /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
$ sudo etckeeper commit -m 'Maybe avoid some disk writes.'
$ sudo systemctl restart cups

4. Usage

On macOS, add the printer. When it autoselects “Generic PostScript Printer”, leave it (details in sidebar). Print.

On iOS, print.

On Windows, add the printer. Print.

5. Maintenance

As with any Debian:

$ ssh schleierprint.local -t 'sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade && sudo apt -y autoremove'

To back up /etc, git push it someplace trustworthy and private.

6. Wishlist

I’d rather run NetBSD, but neither 10.0 nor -current brought up HDMI. I could try writing NetBSD to an SD card, mounting it from another NetBSD system, setting hostname in rc.conf, adding a non-root user, and then booting the A64 from it in order to do the rest over ssh. (Other systems that also didn’t bring up HDMI, wherefore I landed by trial and error on Armbian: FreeBSD 14, OpenBSD 7.5, Debian 12.)

AirPlay to old Sonos

Since one of my old Sonos speakers can’t be upgraded to AirPlay-compatible firmware, I’m not eager to upgrade the other. Instead, I’ve added AirConnect on the Pine A64 as an AirPlay relay.

Contents of /etc/systemd/system/airupnp.service:

[Unit]
Description=AirUPnP bridge
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/schmonz/bin/airupnp-linux-aarch64-static -l 1000:2000 -N '%%s' -x /home/schmonz/etc/airupnp.xml -Z
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Contents of /home/schmonz/etc/airupnp.xml (to omit my UPnP router from the AirPlay list):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<airupnp>
    <device>
        <udn>uuid:1e38fc78-51f5-5f5d-9268-50c6b1dc59f8</udn>
        <name>Verizon FiOS-G1100 ManageableDevice+</name>
        <mac>bb:bb:bb:bb:bb:bb</mac>
        <enabled>0</enabled>
    </device>
</airupnp>

I’d rather install AirConnect from a system-provided package, but there isn’t one for Debian. Maybe I can puzzle out the AirConnect build system and add it to pkgsrc.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.3, the third and final release from the NetBSD 8 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 8.2 in March 2020, as well as some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 8.0.

This also represents the end-of-life for the netbsd-8 release branch. No further security updates will happen. Users running 8.2 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade to a newer branch, preferably the recent NetBSD 10.0 release.

Pkgsrc has already desupported the netbsd-8 branch.

See the full release announcement (including download links).

My early imaginings of a collaborative Open Source successor to qmail, let me assure you, did not include going nearly four years between releases. Well, at least it hasn’t been more than four. notqmail 1.09 is here:

• qmail list announcement
• Fediverse and Twitter
• Lobste.rs, Hacker News, and Reddit
• Release notes

For decades, due to each administrator needing to patch in their particular missing bits of functionality, the qmail source code itself has effectively been a public API. Some future release of notqmail will include everything most everyone needs. On that day, we’ll freely make desirable code changes without worrying about breaking people’s patches. On that day, notqmail will have become a relatively normal software project operating under relatively normal constraints.

This is not that day. notqmail remains a uniquely challenging legacy-code rehabilitation project, and 1.09 is merely a solid, long-overdue release that includes the work of a couple dozen new contributors.

Since this release took too long, our next development cycle will be

1. Time-bounded
2. Focused on process improvements

In legacy code, every time we can turn a vicious cycle virtuous, it’s a big win. By making the code easier and safer to change, we’ll have more fun; by having more fun, we’ll make more progress; by making more progress, we’ll get more feedback; by getting more feedback, we’ll have more fun; and so on.

Have fun with notqmail 1.09! Let us know how the upgrade goes for you. (I’ll be updating the pkgsrc package soon.) And if getting involved is your kind of thing, please feel welcome to join us.

I am trying to use OpenVPN as a client under NetBSD using this command:

openvpn --client --config /etc/openvpn/config.ovpn

I am getting the following output and errors:

localhost# openvpn --client --config /etc/openvpn/openvpn.ovpn 
2024-04-26 10:29:35 WARNING: Compression for receiving enabled. Compression has been used in the past to break encryption. Sent packets are not compressed unless "allow-compression yes" is also set.
2024-04-26 10:29:35 DEPRECATED OPTION: --cipher set to 'AES-256-CBC' but missing in --data-ciphers (AES-256-GCM:AES-128-GCM:CHACHA20-POLY1305). OpenVPN ignores --cipher for cipher negotiations. 
2024-04-26 10:29:35 OpenVPN 2.6.10 x86_64--netbsd [SSL (OpenSSL)] [LZO] [LZ4] [MH/PKTINFO] [AEAD]
2024-04-26 10:29:35 library versions: OpenSSL 1.1.1k  25 Mar 2021, LZO 2.10
Enter Auth Username:********
Enter Auth Password:********
2024-04-26 10:32:48 TCP/UDP: Preserving recently used remote address: [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701
2024-04-26 10:32:48 Socket Buffers: R=[32768->32768] S=[32768->32768]
2024-04-26 10:32:48 Attempting to establish TCP connection with [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701
2024-04-26 10:32:48 TCP connection established with [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701
2024-04-26 10:32:48 TCPv4_CLIENT link local: (not bound)
2024-04-26 10:32:48 TCPv4_CLIENT link remote: [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701
2024-04-26 10:32:48 NOTE: UID/GID downgrade will be delayed because of --client, --pull, or --up-delay
2024-04-26 10:32:48 TLS: Initial packet from [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701, sid=0006909e 9b0d208f
2024-04-26 10:32:48 WARNING: this configuration may cache passwords in memory -- use the auth-nocache option to prevent this
2024-04-26 10:32:48 VERIFY OK: depth=1, C=US, ST=New York, L=New York, O=Ubiquiti Inc., OU=UniFi_OpenVPN_CA, CN=UniFi_OpenVPN_CA
2024-04-26 10:32:48 VERIFY KU OK
2024-04-26 10:32:48 Validating certificate extended key usage
2024-04-26 10:32:48 ++ Certificate has EKU (str) TLS Web Server Authentication, expects TLS Web Server Authentication
2024-04-26 10:32:48 VERIFY EKU OK
2024-04-26 10:32:48 VERIFY OK: depth=0, C=US, ST=New York, L=New York, O=Ubiquiti Inc., OU=UniFi_OpenVPN_Server, CN=UniFi_OpenVPN_Server
2024-04-26 10:33:53 Control Channel: TLSv1.3, cipher TLSv1.3 TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, peer certificate: 2048 bits RSA, signature: RSA-SHA256, peer temporary key: 253 bits X25519
2024-04-26 10:33:53 [UniFi_OpenVPN_Server] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]**.191.33.**:1701
2024-04-26 10:33:53 TLS: move_session: dest=TM_ACTIVE src=TM_INITIAL reinit_src=1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 TLS: tls_multi_process: initial untrusted session promoted to trusted
2024-04-26 10:33:53 PUSH: Received control message: 'PUSH_REPLY,dhcp-option DNS 192.168.7.1,route 192.168.4.0 255.255.255.0,route 192.168.2.0 255.255.255.0,route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0,route 192.168.3.0 255.255.255.0,route-gateway 192.168.7.1,topology subnet,ping 10,ping-restart 60,ifconfig 192.168.7.2 255.255.255.0,peer-id 0,cipher AES-256-GCM'
2024-04-26 10:33:53 OPTIONS IMPORT: --ifconfig/up options modified
2024-04-26 10:33:53 OPTIONS IMPORT: route options modified
2024-04-26 10:33:53 OPTIONS IMPORT: route-related options modified
2024-04-26 10:33:53 OPTIONS IMPORT: --ip-win32 and/or --dhcp-option options modified
2024-04-26 10:33:53 TUN/TAP device /dev/tun0 opened
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/ifconfig tun0 192.168.7.2 192.168.7.1 mtu 1500 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 192.168.7.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 255.255.255.0
add net 192.168.7.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net **.191.33.** 192.168.1.254 -netmask 255.255.255.255
route: writing to routing socket: File exists
add net **.191.33.**: gateway 192.168.1.254: File exists
2024-04-26 10:33:53 ERROR: OpenBSD/NetBSD route add command failed: external program exited with error status: 1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 0.0.0.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 128.0.0.0
add net 0.0.0.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 128.0.0.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 128.0.0.0
add net 128.0.0.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 192.168.4.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 255.255.255.0
add net 192.168.4.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 192.168.2.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 255.255.255.0
add net 192.168.2.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 192.168.1.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 255.255.255.0
route: writing to routing socket: File exists
add net 192.168.1.0: gateway 192.168.7.1: File exists
2024-04-26 10:33:53 ERROR: OpenBSD/NetBSD route add command failed: external program exited with error status: 1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 /sbin/route add -net 192.168.3.0 192.168.7.1 -netmask 255.255.255.0
add net 192.168.3.0: gateway 192.168.7.1
2024-04-26 10:33:53 GID set to nogroup
2024-04-26 10:33:53 UID set to nobody
2024-04-26 10:33:53 Initialization Sequence Completed
2024-04-26 10:33:53 Data Channel: cipher 'AES-256-GCM', peer-id: 0, compression: 'lzo'
2024-04-26 10:33:53 Timers: ping 10, ping-restart 60

I have a working internet connection when running OpenVPN as a client, but I can't access any of the machines on the network **.191.33.**, I know I should be able to SSH into 192.168.1.114, but I can't reach that machine through OpenVPN, there are firewall rules in the Ubuiquity box allowing traffic from 192.168.7.* to 192.168.1.* I know this is working, its testet from Mac and PC using the OpenVPN Client, I just can't get it to work on NetBSD

This is my routing table before running OpenVPN:

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags    Refs      Use    Mtu Interface
default            192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
127/8              127.0.0.1          UGRS        -        -  33624  lo0
127.0.0.1          lo0                UHl         -        -  33624  lo0
192.168.1/24       link#2             UC          -        -      -  iwn0
192.168.1.68       link#2             UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.1.254      00:1e:80:a2:2e:ff  UHL         -        -      -  iwn0

This is my routing table when running OpenVPN:

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags    Refs      Use    Mtu Interface
0/1                192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
default            192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
**.191.33.**/32    192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
127/8              127.0.0.1          UGRS        -        -  33624  lo0
127.0.0.1          lo0                UHl         -        -  33624  lo0
128/1              192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.1/24       link#2             UC          -        -      -  iwn0
192.168.1.68       link#2             UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.2/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.3/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.4/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.7/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.7.1        192.168.7.2        UH          -        -      -  tun0
192.168.7.2        tun0               UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.1.254      00:1e:80:a2:2e:ff  UHL         -        -      -  iwn0

This is my routing table after stopping OpenVPN:

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags    Refs      Use    Mtu Interface
0/1                192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
default            192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
**.191.33.**/32    192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
127/8              127.0.0.1          UGRS        -        -  33624  lo0
127.0.0.1          lo0                UHl         -        -  33624  lo0
128/1              192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.1/24       link#2             UC          -        -      -  iwn0
192.168.1.68       link#2             UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.2/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.3/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.4/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.7/24       192.168.7.1        UGS         -        -      -  tun0
192.168.7.2        tun0               UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.1.254      00:1e:80:a2:2e:ff  UHL         -        -      -  iwn0

This is my routing table when i have destroyed tun0:

ifconfig tun0 destroy

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags    Refs      Use    Mtu Interface
default            192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
**.191.33.**/32    192.168.1.254      UGS         -        -      -  iwn0
127/8              127.0.0.1          UGRS        -        -  33624  lo0
127.0.0.1          lo0                UHl         -        -  33624  lo0
192.168.1/24       link#2             UC          -        -      -  iwn0
192.168.1.68       link#2             UHl         -        -      -  lo0
192.168.1.254      00:1e:80:a2:2e:ff  UHL         -        -      -  iwn0

The route to **.191.33.** is still there when stopping OpenVPN and destroying the tunnel tun0, I don't know if this is expected behaviour.

Update I have checked several computers now, and none of them have the 192.168.1/24 route, its only on the PC running NetBSD, I have tried to delete it, with no success. I have also read a lot of man pages and various other documentation, but I have not come up with anything usefull yet.

OpenVPN Config

client
dev tun
proto tcp
remote **.191.33.** 1701
resolv-retry infinite
nobind

# Downgrade privileges after initialization (non-Windows only)
user nobody
group nogroup

persist-key
persist-tun

auth-user-pass
remote-cert-tls server
cipher AES-256-CBC
comp-lzo
verb 3

auth SHA1
key-direction 1

reneg-sec 0

redirect-gateway def1

<ca>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</ca>
<tls-auth>
-----BEGIN OpenVPN Static key V1-----
...
-----END OpenVPN Static key V1-----
</tls-auth>
<cert>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</cert>
<key>
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
...
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
</key>

Intent

I am trying to connect to a VPN at a remote location, from home. The remote network is protected by a firewall facing the internet, all computers on the network behind the router is accessible, the 192.168.7.* network is standard Ubuiquity and used for VPN clients, I have added a firewall rule to allow traffic from 192.168.7.* to the 192.168.1.* network, this works fine from all computers I have tried it with, Mac, PC, Windows, Linux, MacOS. etc. except a PC running NetBSD.

The network configuration on the PC running NetBSD was performed during installation, and I used the auto-configuration feature, so I have not specified any networks, routes or rules at all. I am able to access the internet when using OpenVPN client, I just cannot access any of the machines on the remote network. So I guess the part I am missing is the routing from 192.168.7.* to 192.168.1.* so I will be able to access computers attached to that network

A few years ago, I wrote a "state of things" blog post about Wayland on NetBSD. It's only natural that I should do one about X11, which is used by far more people to get a graphical environment on NetBSD.

There are a lot of differences from how NetBSD and the typical distributor ship X.Org. For one, we ship it as an optional monolithic package rather than separate individual packages. This means every driver is included on every system, rather than as an optional module. Sometimes, this means we need to fine-tune driver selection to ensure the correct drivers are loaded on the correct hardware, since multiple conflicting drivers can claim a video output. We also want sensible fallbacks, since if you're using a GPU from the future with an old OS version, you probably want X to seamlessly fall back to a regular framebuffer.

Secondly, the way our "xsrc" repository is set up, it's effectively functioning as a fork of X.Org that regularly pulls from upstream freedesktop.org (but does not push back). This allows X development to happen as part of NetBSD.

Thirdly, we use our own build system based purely on BSD makefiles, not X.Org's based on GNU autotools. This fits well with our build.sh cross-compilation system.

We have a number of drivers which have not made their way upstream. Perhaps the most ubiquitous of these is xf86-input-ws, a driver which came from OpenBSD, targets an API from NetBSD, and continues to be developed in both. This is a generic input driver that can support any pointing device that the kernel supports. Unlike xf86-input-mouse, it doesn't assume the device is a mouse, and can support advanced touchpad and touchscreen features. Other NetBSD exclusives include xf86-video-pnozz, xf86-video-mgx, and xf86-video-crime. While these all share the "xf86" name inherited from the historical XFree86 distribution, none of them are exclusively for x86.

There are a number of drivers that are accelerated when used in NetBSD, but the acceleration support is missing upstream. This is mostly due to the work of macallan@, who has diligently worked on drivers for accelerators found on SPARC and PowerPC hardware.

X.Org has historically supported two 2D acceleration modes, XAA and EXA. XAA seems complicated - according to the X.Org Foundation it supports accelerating "patterned fills and Bresenham lines" (eh?). XAA was removed from the X.Org server in 2012, and many old drivers were not updated to support the newer and simpler EXA model, except in NetBSD, over a time period of several years.

Did you know that Nvidia used to have an open source graphics driver? It supported 2D acceleration for a range of cards. In NetBSD, it's retained for platforms that included embedded Nvidia chips and aren't capable of (or predate, or don't want) the modern novueau driver. Six years ago, it was updated in NetBSD to support EXA acceleration.

There are a few ways our X integration could be improved. While lots of attention has been paid to the server, less has been paid to clients (programs). Did you know that X includes a text editor, and that text editor supports syntax highlighting and spell checking?

NetBSD includes its own command-line spell checker and associated dictionaries, spell(1), inherited from the BSD UNIX of yore. It's pretty basic, and only supports variations of English. To get spell checking to work in xedit, you need to install ispell (another command-line spell checker) from pkgsrc, install a dictionary, then set some Xresources (or create symlinks) to make sure xedit finds ispell. This could surely be streamlined by teaching xedit about spell.

We also ship every program that has been included with historical X.Org distributions. This includes well-known things like xterm, slightly less well-known things like xbiff(1), and obscurities like bitmap(1) (apparently a 1-bit-per-pixel alternative to MS Paint). A while ago, we removed some libraries which are no longer used by the modern X server, and maybe we should evaluate whether we need all of these programs too. xmh(1) is a frontend for a mail system that isn't included in base. Together, bitmap and xmh are around 300 kilobytes.

We include fonts, bitmaps and scalable, for a wide range of computing devices. In the latest versions of NetBSD, the font size will automatically scale with the screen size to support HiDPI displays as well as small mobile devices. However, we don't ship a scalable cursor theme at the moment. We're also missing high-resolution fonts for Japanese, a shame considering the popularity of NetBSD in Japan. Koruri looks interesting and is suitably small, maybe we should import it.

While we have many useful simple programs by default (a clock, a calculator, an editor, a window manager, a compositor, a terminal emulator...), we're notably missing a screen locking program for X in the default install, although we have lock(1) for the tty.

The big question - does all this have a future? The good news is that all new hardware has generic support in X. Someone writes either a modesetting kernel driver or a classical wsdisplay kernel driver and they will be automatically supported by the associated drivers in X. The bad news is that to have applications running we require access to a larger open source ecosystem, and that ecosystem has a lot of churn and is easily distracted by shiny new squirrels. The process of upstreaming stuff to X.Org is an ongoing process, but it's likely we'll run into things that will never be suitable for upstream.

Of course, on NetBSD, you also have the option of trying vanilla modular X.Org from pkgsrc, or using something else entirely.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.4, the fourth release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.3 in August 2022, as well as some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.3 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade.

The general NetBSD community is very excited about NetBSD 10.0, the latest NetBSD release, but if for some reason you can not (or do not want to) update to 10.0, it is strongly recommended to update to 9.4. This is especially true for users still using a NetBSD 8.x release as that old release branch will be desupported by the end of April 2024.

Full release notes, including download links