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 bebox Hosted on Zooomr

NetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr

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 – 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.

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…

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.

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.

He was rather amazed at what I already knew for being only 15. After talking a little about what he has taught, he was amazed to see that I’ve done work on Sourceforge, know C/C++, and have my own OS. He seemed kind of baffled how I taught myself all of these things. This makes me wonder about all the other programmers that are my age and have more skill than me. Maybe we could all benefit from a meeting like this?

After talking about the classes for a while, he then showed me around the campus. They had some pretty interesting things around. In one of the extra rooms (an old utility closet?) the graduate students have a room dedicated to themselves. In it were a few SGI octanes, couple parallel computer setups, and a custom designed gaming console they have been working on for a few years. If that isn’t cool enough for you, just having a keycard identification system won’t work. You need a custom one! These students wired the door up to a computer and hung a keyboard on the outside so they could just enter the keycode…

Next I went around to a few labs where kids were building circuits and designing them in CAD for their computer engineering classes. They sure have some super, heavy-duty breadboards in those labs… I found it quite interesting that they had so many SGI and SUN machines. They have several labs that are 100% SUN workstations…

Then we walked into a room with something that really grabbed my attention. Their server room was amazing. There were three, count’em, three beowulf clusters. One had 32 SMP machine nodes. The other two were 64 SMP nodes. One of the 64nodes was *brand* spanking new. To top off this multi-hundred thousand dollar setup. There was probably 5 Sun servers (don’t remember what type) laying around the room.

Didn’t see too much that drew my attention after this. Got to see the level 10 clean room and a few other pieces of equipment used in creating microchips.

After that I went back to my mom’s office and he said that he was amazed at what I knew once again. This is what seems kind of cool, he said that he could learn a lot from what I already know. Good or bad?

On the way home my mom decided I was going to go through the Chemical Materials department as well. Waste of time. I am ABSOLUTELY not interested in this stuff. w00t! I can see crystalline structures in a microscope and do things to them! They are needed no doubt, but that is not the field for me…

Today I also got some coding time in on osdever.net. The forums have come a long way over the past few months. It’s pathetic it’s take this long, but I have more important things to do I guess. Editing of posts should be done in maybe 30 minutes. After that it’s just moderator controls and the forums are done. I’ll probably do a code audit for security holes and optimizations after that is complete.

From there on it’s just finishing up the tutorials system, adding all the existing tutorials into the database, and tweaking the templates. Admin control modules can come later I guess, they won’t take that long to write.

In other news, multitasking is a PITA.

I’m also going to try something new here, weekly PHP tips. I’m not sure if I’ll focus on a designated area or just anything handy, but here is Week #1’s.
PHP Tip #1 – Week 1

This week I’m going to start with an essential security basic. Do not trust any data the user submitted to your site or that the user can edit. This includes query strings and forms usually. Make sure you do the appropiate cleaning of $_POST data.

I usually cast any number values to integers when I clean my $_POST vars. This means that any string that isn’t a number is set to 0. When I’m cleaning user data that needs to be entered into a database, I relyon mysql_real_escape_string to do the dirty work for me. I hope this little tip helps a few of you. =D

I had quite a time getting them to work together, probably because I had never done anything like this before, but once I got it, they worked great. You guys are more than welcome to try it out. /server irc.codymays.net and join #main and tell me what you think.

Tomorrow I head off to the University of Cincinnati to talk to the head professor of the Computer Science and Computer Engineering department. w00t for connections? So the rest of the day and night I plan on coding the hell out of my OS. I still need to finish the multitasking rewrite. Hopefully by the end of today we’ll have threaded ring0 and ring3 processes.

Last night I went to a party and played extreme street ping pong. Basically it was a basement wide hit-each-other-as-hard-as-you-can-with-ball battle.

Today I spent a lot of time working on my OS. Desktop from #IllusionOS helped me find my bochs bug. It turns out that, during a late-night coding session, sleep deprivation had caused me to type “return;” instead of “break;.” This caused the interrupt from the PIT to never get acknowledged, disabling interrupts. Chances are this may be a bochs bug, because it actually worked on real hardware, but I’m very happy that it works.

I also added some very primitive SMP support. As of right now, it can detect all of the SMP related data, but it can’t do anything with it yet. Once I start multi-tasking tomorrow, I should be able to start adding support for scheduling to these CPUs. You can see a screenshot of this achievement here. I’m hoping that by the end of the day tomorrow I’ll have a basic multi-tasking operating system. I would really like to be in userland by then, but it’s not a requirement.

I will also be updating the Server Rack project stuff soon. The router is basically done, but I can’t decide to stick with m0n0wall, or go with pfSense. A few more nights to sleep on it should hopefully do.

Well…off to bed.