Category: FreeBSD

Today I discovered keramida@’s blog and was quite surprised to find my own blog linked right next to mwlucas@ Big Scary Daemons.
Time to start a list of FreeBSD committers that write a blog, diaries, livejournals. (Although some take freefall’s motd serious and prefer to code over writing blog entries)

• adamw
• adrian
• alex
• alfred
• anholt
• bmilekic
• clsung
• dds
• delphij
• edwin
• foxfair
• green
• grog
• hosokawa
• hrs
• ijliao
• issei
• jmallett
• keramida
• knu
• le
• leeym
• linimon
• lofi
• lth
• mich
• motoyuki
• mwlucas
• nbm
• niklas
• nobutaka
• nyan
• perky
• remko
• roam
• sheldonh
• trhodes
• yoichi

Disclaimer: This list is not complete, please add a comment if i forgot one. There is also the slight possibility that i added a wrong URL, especially as i neither speak Korean, Japanese or Chinese.

Update 2004-10-05: Added clsung, foxfair, grog, hosokawa, hrs, lth, mich, motoyuki, yoichi.

Update 2004-10-09: Added nyan, issei, nobutaka. Thanks to motoyuki who maintains a diarylist of the japanese BSD community

Update 2004-10-17: Added ijliao, remko

Update 2004-10-23: Added alex

Today is not my day. My new computer arrived on Monday, and I tried today to install it via floppies. As usual 90% of the Floppies are broken. Not as usual FreeBSD (4.10, 5.2.1, 5.3-BETA) refused to install on the machine. Either it errors out during newfs, claims the disk is too somall or fails to load the mfsroot during boot.
I then installed OpenBSD 3.5, which worked without a problem, but OpenBSD does not support the re(4) NIC.
I tried buying an external CD-ROM enclosure, but the Digitus I bought does not work, neither with a Lite-On nor an Aopen CD-ROM drive.
I decided to stop fighting with my computers for today and insted finish reading Terry Pratchett’s “Monstrous Regiment”.

I sometimes wonder, how many computers around me run FreeBSD.
Starting with a small sample: In my house, which is an average viennese house with a mixture of old and young people, there are 17 Computers. Five run Microsoft Operating Systems (I have not converted my neighbors), One Mac, Two NetBSD and the rest runs FreeBSD. Of course I am invalidating the sample :-).
A larger sample is my university. The network contains around 8000 Computers, I guess around half of them run Microsoft Operating Systems and a third runs Linux. As far as I know there are around 10 to 15 machines (less than 0,25%) running FreeBSD (My workstation, my lapotop, winf.at, two or three machines at the RISE, two or three at the DBAI, two or three at the IBK and one at the faculty of architecture)
I would really like to know how many machines run FreeBSD in Vienna or Austria. I found only one old survey in the Google Cache.
I started a short list of FreeBSD servers in Austria by googling for “Powered by FreeBSD” but there are probably a lot more out there.

$ uptime
12:53pm up 200 days, 20:25, 8 users, load averages: 0,07 0,03 0,00
$ uname -a
FreeBSD huckfinn 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #0: Mon Feb 9 21:55:40 CET 2004 arved@sauna.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/local/home2/source/RELENG_4/src/sys/HUCKFINNipf i386
This is an infrequent event, not because FreeBSD is so unstable, but because I usually update the kernel on my machines about once a month. Additional this machine is not connected to an UPS, so this is the proof, there was no power failure in the last half year, Congratulations to Wien Energie.
BTW, i didn’t update the kernel, because I plan to replace this machine, it is now 6 years old, Mini-ITX systems are less noisy and a bit faster then the 200Mhz K6 processor. I am just fearing that today’s cheap IDE hard disks don’t have the same quality. The hard disk is IIRC 5 years old (an 8GB SCSI IBM DDRS-39130D DC1B), and still carries my mail.

Unlike Linux where (nearly) all Networkscards are named eth and all Harddisks are named hd.. BSD names every device after it’s device driver. I like this behaviour, because you don’t get unexpected results, if you load the modules in the wrong order.
Unfortunately there are now so many device drivers, that we are running out of letters, and conflicts happen, e.g. ct0 device is either a “WD33C93[ABC] based CBUS SCSI host adapter driver” found in japanese PC98 or a “Cronyx Tau WAN adapter”, a strange hardware from Russia.
Today I found another conflict, ar0 is either an ATA RAID device node or a
“Digi/Arnet device driver” for another strange PPP/HDLC Adapter.
The greatest problem these conflicts cause, man pages have to have unique names. The ct-conflict was resolved by renaming the Cronyx driver to ctau in CURRENT, but the ar problem is difficult as the Arnet driver is unmaintained (== nobody wants to rename it) and the ATA maintainer is a dangerous axe-wearing Dane. I proposed that the ar.4 link is pointing to the Arnet driver on i386 and to the ATA Raid manpage on !i386.

On August 21 1994 Jordan K. Hubbard committed the first version of bsd.port.mk, which is the base of the FreeBSD ports system, to the FreeBSD CVS Repository. It was a 150 lines Makefile. Today there are 4910 lines, but large parts have been moved to seperate Makefiles.
Currently there have been 497 CVS revisons. Here is the list of people that did most of the commits:

According to Freshports there are currently nearly 12.000 ports and it is still growing with a rate of 200/month.
Currently 150-170 active committers are keeping the ports collection up to date.
Happy birthday ports collection!

Yesterday Pav asked me about a gcc 3.4 bug in one of his ports, crack-attack. I found a fix, and then tested the program. It was so addicting, that i spent most of the last hours playing crack-attack until i became a headache.

The bleeding edge now starts with a 6.
[arved@mchammer:~]% uname -a
FreeBSD mchammer.arved.de 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #22: Thu Aug 19 09:27:19 CEST 2004 root@mchammer.arved.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MCHAMMER amd64
We now finally have a RELENG_5 branch, and rumours are it even compiles under some circumstances. Still a long way to 5-STABLE but at least there is now a supported alternative to the outdated 4-STABLE.
I will update fridge to RELENG_5 next week, because I had my first panic on the sparc64 this weekend.
My insight of the weekend: My flat gets too hot for two humans with five running computers.

Yesterday www.FreeBSD.org was down. I don’t know the reason, but Netcraft already wrote an article with colorful graphics.
Soon the Code Freeze for 5.3 will start. Everybody is rushing in last minute changes, most important for my machines, tjr committed the kernelpart of the linux32 emulator for amd64, njl committed ACPI locking, des fixed fetch(1) on amd64 and iedowse committed a fix for the axe(4) driver. This weeks cvs summary will be a lot of work.
Of course various changes caused a lot of breakage, especially SMP deadlocks and a broken lnc(4). So only upgrade to CURRENT if you want to share the pain.
Portsfreeze was announced to start on September 3, but as there are nearly 900 failing packages on CURRENT/amd64 most of them caused by the gcc 3.4 import, there is a lot to do. Especially I need to get familar with the new obscure C++ errors.