Converting caffeine to code, shooting pics, and cruising the roads of life.

Archive for the ‘Operating System Development’ Category

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NetBSD 3.0 Release Now runs on the bebox

Monday, October 9th, 2006

As some of you know, and some of you don’t, last weekend was the 2nd NetBSD bugathon. Over 300 bugs have been reported as fixed and over 97 people joined the IRC channel to help out and talk about their ideas, I was one of them. I spent a lot of yesterday, in between homework assignments, chatting to a few of the developers about getting NetBSD/BeBox running again, and I succeeded.

Currently, the only thing you have to do to get NetBSD 3.0 Release to compile is edit the list file that has two entries for pte.h, one marking it obsolete and one marking it not. Remove the line marking it non-obsolete and compile as the handbook says with build.sh.

The good news to come from this is that one of the developers instructed to get the port updated was there. He doesn’t have a bebox, so he didn’t want to do it blindly. He asked me to assist him with getting it up-to-date. So not only was yesterday the first day that NetBSD 3.0 has run on the bebox, as far as I know, but it also marks my slow journey back into an open source project. (I’m not going to get near as involved this time.)

Here are some pics to drool over, click for larger versions:

NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr
NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr

Posted in C/C++, Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, NetBSD, Operating System Development, Personal, Programming, Tips and Tricks | 5 Comments »

A bit of a test

Monday, September 25th, 2006

The past few weeks have been pretty insane. I have not only had a lot to do at school, but a lot going on too. My Counter-Strike: Source addiction is coming back too, thanks to a bunch of my friends at school and our newly formed clan. I wont’ have much time for anything the rest of the week though. Tomorrow and Wednesday I have PLAN testing, which is basically the pre-ACT test. Then I have a week to do my PSAT practice booklet and take the PSAT. Fun times ahead. :)

In other news, I would like to leak a bit of news on one of my new projects that I am co-developing with a network operator for theWyldRyde.org IRC network, DamnSmallBSD. It is a take off of the very first linux distribution I ever used, Damn Small Linux. Our goals are similar, but we are based on a completely different operating system, FreeBSD. We also have some cool ideas to keep it modular for people looking to remaster it. Keep your eyes open, the cd is bootable, we just haven’t done much work on the userland yet.

Over the past day, I also broke back into some PHP. ThreadBound officially moved a step closer to it’s main goal. Here is a little hint of a very early page:

ThreadBound - previewThreadBound – preview Hosted on Zooomr

I have also been contacted to do some more work for ThunderIT.com, so I’m very happy about that. The project I’ll be working on is very cool. Hopefully some of the cash I get from this job will help me get a new laptop.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, Linux, Operating System Development, PHP, Personal, Programming, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Web 2.0, Web Development | No Comments »

PowahPC

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

Well, i spent the last hour and a half reading up on PowerPC assembly code. It’s definitely interesting coming from an 80×86 background. (Even though I knew very little x86 assembly) I will say one thing right now, I can imagine it being pretty odd pulling all nighters with ppc asm, since there is no way to distinguish the type or register you are modifying. They are identified by just a digit, 1-32.

I definitely find the architecture to be cool though. One of the really nice things about it, is the insane backwards compatibility with 32bit ppc apps on ppc64 machines. The binaries usually work just great. Unlike going to longmode, where you have to actually try in the kernel so you have 32bit support.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m planning on porting my OS to my BeBox as soon as I have enough knowledge of the architecture. Hopefully, I can manage to get another OS going in the process too, maybe updating the netbsd port of porting haiku?

I would also like to say that the ThreadBound teaser page has done better than I thought it would in one day. We’ve already got quite a few email address sign up for the updates. Keep them coming. :)

If I don’t update for a while, I’m rushing to get my summer assignment finished. I have a huge precal packet to do and a report on Fahrenheit 451 and I haven’t started to read it yet…

Posted in C/C++, Daily Grindage, Experiences, Geekery, Operating System Development, Personal, Programming, Reading, Web 2.0, Web Development | No Comments »

printf(”ERROR: Invalid mm on OS %s\n”, __ILLUSIONOS__);

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Today I found out that I’m still going to have to do work to IllusionOS’s memory manager to get multitasking up because the current one won’t take into account of each process’ address space. I’m not sure what to do here, completely rewrite the thing or adapted it. I may try to adapt it to the current system, but either way it won’t be easy for me. If there is one think I suck at, it’s writing a memory manager. This made me very depressed for some reason.

A few round of Counter-Strike:Source later and I was fairly undepressed, but felt like I needed to accomplish something. So I started working on JayantHTTPD again. I finally got the rewrite listening for connections now via my custom libserver.so. I finally decided how I’m going to handle the connections after reading up on pthreads. They really aren’t too complicated, and as long as I don’t need Windows support, work on basically every OS. Right now libserver creates a thread with a callback specified to that file descriptor, but you may also have a custom connection handler for you application. So basically the server will hand out connections via a thread instead of forking.

Support me! Buy this. I’ll be using the money from these to rebuild my SGI 1100. :)
P.S. If you were wondering what pthreads page I was reading, check this out.

Posted in C/C++, Daily Grindage, Experiences, Geekery, Operating System Development, Personal, Programming | No Comments »

The ultraSPARC T1 is amazing

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

I’ve been reading this blog since the first linux ultraSPARC T1 dmesg was posted there and I must say that these processors seem amazing. I had read an article in InformationWeek about them a few weeks ago and was truely amazed. Each core can run 8 simultaneous threads at once and the processor only draws 72watts.

I hope that this architecture survives, it looks extremely fun to program for. I wait for the day that these processors come into some cheaper machines, as the cheapest machine right now is $2300. I don’t have $2300 just to play with, so I’m going to have to wait. :( Reading the docs though, I do think I’m going to try and obtain an older SPARC, they look extremely fun to port my OS to. >:)

In other news, buy this and support your favorite osdeving blogger.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Geekery, Operating System Development, Personal, Reading | No Comments »

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