Posts in category www.bsdimp.blogspot.com
Fixing FreeBSD/arm in stable/9…
Just a quick note. I recently tried to create a FreeBSD-stable 9 image for an Atmel AT91SAM9G20 board I have. It didn\'t work. So, I tracked down the problems. It turns out that when the unmapped BIO changes went into stable/9 in revision r251874 a single revision (r246881) was missed. This left the ARM busdma API effectively non-functional. [...]
Tracking down the problem…
OK. After fighting several gdb build issues, I gave up on earlier versions. I thought I\'d go old school to try to find the problem. First step was to figure out where we were dying. I had only one clue, the crash location form /var/log/kernel: Nov 24 19:12:02 (none) kernel: emulate_load_store_insn: sending signal 10 to fred(8249)Nov 24 19: [...]
Cross building gdb for TiVo series 2....
OK. Flush with pride after the success of building tools for my TiVo, I thought I\'d get the program that I built the tools for working. It isn\'t obvious what\'s going on, so I thought I\'d build the debugger to look at the core files that I\'d been able to get.So, first the build steps:tar xvf gdb-7.6.1.tar.bzcd (Read more...)
Building old-school TiVo build tools ...
IntroAs long-term readers of my blog know, I\'ve been nursing along a TiVo HR10-250 for the past few years. It works great for the low-quality material that my younger son loves to watch, plus I can harvest video off of it with ease.Recently, we switched up how it was connected to our TV (and indeed, got a new (Read more...)
How to fix a Washing machine
Let\'s say you have one of those fancy washing machines with sophisticated circuitry.Well, then if your machine is like mine, it sucks to be you.Last night, before a trip, the Kenmore Oasis HE machine that we\'ve had for many years started doing something weird. You\'d turn it on, and it would start cycling from Heavy, to medium, to (Read mo [...]
What could be so hard about an extern...
FreeBSD is moving from gcc to clang as its base compiler. This works really well for x86, and moderately well for arm. However, it doesn\'t work very well for any other architecture that FreeBSD supports.Brooks Davis recently committed changes that he claims allow him to build FreeBSD/mips with an external clang and the cross-binutils port.I [...]
How C can bite you, an example
Consider the function foo:int foo() { if (error) return -1; else return 12; }and consider its use here:int n;...if ((n = foo()) >= sizeof(bar)) { memcpy(dst, src, n - sizeof(bar)); }Seems simple and safe right? Well, not so much. The \'C\' standard states that when you have types that aren\'t of the same rank, (Read more...)
TivoWebPlus 2.1 changes
As you may know, I still have a HR10-250 in service. I run TivoWebPlus 2.1 on the box. It mostly works the way I want it, although at times it is a bit slow.I checked out the latest version from the sourceforge web site many months ago and found there\'s some issues with it that I\'d like to fix. (Read more...)
Some notes on HR10-250 video
Over the past 5 or 6 years, I\'ve had my TiVo HR10-250 setup to extract videos off of it. Please see my other posts on how I set that up with Zipper and mfs_ftp. There are some newer programs to help with the video extraction, but I have a cobbled together system that works OK enough for now, so I\'ll (Read more...)
DirecTiVo HR10-250 restore
I had to move the hard drive between two TiVos recently. Since it was on DirecTV, I got the dreaded Error #51. Since I couldn\'t recall what I did last time I got it, I googled it, only to find I needed to reset the unit with a Clear and Delete Everything (C&DE). Turns out that since I\'d hacked the (Read more...)
FreeBSD/arm booting on SAM9260-EK to ...
Woot! After working hard to get the SAM9260-EK rescued, I\'m able to boot SAM9260-EK to multiuser.Here\'s the dmesg:Copyright (c) 1992-2012 The FreeBSD Project.Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The [...]
AT91SAM9260-EK restored!
Quite some time ago, I received a AT91SAM9260-EK board from Atmel. I tried to turn it on at the time, and it looked dead. I put it on the shelf and got busy with other things: new jobs, a divorce, a new marriage, a son, and a new house.Recently, I became interested in the Atmel SoCs again (Atmel\'s open (Read more...)
Wish me luck: taking the git plunge
Wish me luck.I just typed the following commands:git clone https://github.org/freebsd/freebsd-head.gitcd freebsd-headgit branch armygit checkout armyand started my own local branch. Wish me luck. Oh, I\'ve said it, but with git, I think I might need it. I actually didn\'t type exactly the above, but that\'s what I should hav [...]
Unifying arm boot arg parsing
Greetings again, Here\'s a slightly edited version of a post I made to the FreeBSD arm list, proposing a path forward to cleanup and unify boot arg parsing on arm and at the same time add support to all boards for parsing FreeBSD\'s /boot/loader metadata as well as Linux\'s uboot/redboot meta data. Thought you might be interested. For too lo [...]
Rearranging the deck chairs in the AR...
Recently, I\'ve been trying to catch up with some of the technical debt that the FreeBSD/arm port has accumulated. Some of that technical debt was my fault, of course, but some of it wasn\'t. I don\'t really much care whose fault things were, but I would like to get things cleaned up. Some of these are paths not taken. [...]
FreeBSD Driver book
I recently received a complementary copy of the book FreeBSD Device Drivers by Josheph Kong. I also had the pleasure of meeting Josheph Kong at BSDcan 2012 a few weeks ago. This book serves as a good introduction to all kinds of drivers and kernel modules in FreeBSD. It explores the basics of each kind of driver, complete with an (Read mor [...]
Canon Rebel Xt and 32GB CF
Just thought I\'d mention that I\'ve been using a 32GB CF card with no special formatting in the Canon Rebel Xt. It has been working great for years.
Canon Rebel Xt and 32GB CF
Just thought I\'d mention that I\'ve been using a 32GB CF card with no special formatting in the Canon Rebel Xt. It has been working great for years.
How to run something other than login...
Sometimes you don\'t want to run login on the console or other terminal. The reasons for this vary. Some appliances want to boot to a shell prompt on the console for debugging purposes (this console typically isn\'t exposed, so no security problems there). Sometimes you want to use init\'s restart feature to keep critical daemons alive. I [...]
How to run something other than login...
Sometimes you don\'t want to run login on the console or other terminal. The reasons for this vary. Some appliances want to boot to a shell prompt on the console for debugging purposes (this console typically isn\'t exposed, so no security problems there). Sometimes you want to use init\'s restart feature to keep critical daemons alive. I [...]
