Church of BSD

frustrating

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as
reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke

Where do I begin. I am forced further and further from BSD land into Linux. Where completely messed up ways of doing things seem to be the norm.
Work queues, kernel threads, and the like seem fundamentally wrong to me. We just dealt with a dead lock condition in the USB Gadget driver last week. Still struggling to understand what is causing spurious interrupts on the MMC driver in this 2.6.15 Linux Kernel we are running on an ARM platform. Odd think is that it's fine in debug mode, just happens in non-debug. Murphy's law certainly applies here. This whole Initrd business is just messy also.

But it's not all griping about Linux, I just set up a New 1TB FreeBSD 6.3 based server. Somehow I feel like that project has taken a turn for the worst. As much as I didn't really care much for Jordan Hubbard, he did manage to do a good job of things overall.
I thought I'd try some new tricks on the box, since it's in a CoLo some 500 miles from home it's a little hard to operate, and rebooting and moving cables or pressing F1 at boot time is just not going to happen.
So I installed Xvnc, very cool thing, usually I'd just open X-terms across the net to work, or more lately tunnel Xterms over ssh, ssh -R 6001:127.0.0.1:6000 sokol@192.168.1.116 http://x.unixprogram.com/ Someday I will make a real site out of that.
Then I bring up olvwm and Firefox. Now overall this is very cool, since I can leave all my Xterms open and connect using VNC and my whole desktop is right where I left it even though I changes locations and computers, even screen resolutions.
My gripe is FireFox on FreeBSD is just 1/2 operations compared to where it's at on Linux.
Or maybe I should say the FireFox is fine, but lacking operational plug-ins.
I just haven't been able to get Java and Flash, or Acrobat working right, in Ubuntu this is a no brainer. In addition Firefox is spewing a stream of error messages at the console that I opened it with. I am not a happy camper, that's for sure.
Now overall I swear by firefox, and the fact that none of these companies or Firefox itself is really paying much attention to FreeBSD is disturbing, maybe even a lack of diplomacy that used to exist under Jordans participation. Mozilla used to do a good job with FreeBSD support including most plugins. Maybe I Need to turn on Linux Support in the BSD kernel and run all linux binaries. Yuck.

On another note. I have found it interesting at the response I get from Linux people. I find I can still run circles around most of them even being someone out of place in the Linux Kernel, but already I have my name in the 2.6.17 kernel and later on the ViVi driver. I have done about half a dozen driver since then. And having had come from a Pre-threaded kernel world, I can do much better jobs at driver interrupts and getting things to work better for real time stuff.

Oh there is also some really interesting TCP/IP socket call stuff I came across to, specifically how long a process spends doing a "write" or "Send" call. It's very different then I had expected. and Both FreeBSD and Linux exhibited similar behavior. This was that even Non-blocking calls can take a very long time to write. Something on the order of 200+ uS. Didn't seems to matter if it was blocking or non-blocking either. And it took even longer with Nagel disabled!.
Blocking was only fast if the socket was really going to block, then the non-blocking would return in 1uS or less even!
200 Micro Seconds, heck that a long time. What the hell is the kernel doing for that time, and it seems to be burning up CPU that whole time no less. I alway just assumed it would take that buffer and put it in some queue and return immediately.
Anyhow that for was 100 to 1000 bytes sends at 1 second intervals.
When I started sending data full out at 10Mbps or higher, this delay for the write calls dropped down to 2ouS or less even. How is that for odd. the more data I send the faster the send call gets! Exactly opposite of what I would have expected.

Please don't spam in my comments here.

I can't believe people are spamming into blog comments now.
It's there no end. I don't want your stock, Viagra, mass mail service, hoodia, Rolex watches or what ever other crap your selling, nor do my readers want this.

On that note, go to my sites and click on all the Google adds you can please.

Seriously, I have Unix Program.com and C-program.com for some notes on programming and development. Unix program also has a good image collection, please don't link to these from your myspace page.

As much as I am pro-BSD, I have had to start doing more and more Linux development. My name is in the Linux Kernel since 2.6.17 on the VIVI driver.

I guess at some level they are on the same side of the battle as us BSDers.

"I must say the linux community is a lot nicer than the unix
community. a negative comment on unix would warrent death
threats. with linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies."

           -- Ken Thompson. 1999

Checkout my junk box /dev/null

And also my Main Blog http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/

Another Microsoft Word Code Execution Exploit

Suddenly, up pops: Hackie
"I see that you are trying to craft an exploit. Would you like me to assist?" <blink, blink>

Change != Improvement

Moving to Linux is like getting poked in the eye with a stick.

It hurts and I can't see where I am going.

But I have to, BSD is a victim of it's own success. It has been so reliable there just isn't any work out there to maintain BSD systems. Sort of like building cars that run forever, you'd put your self out of business.

I think we BSD people have put ourselves out of work by making these systems too reliable and simple to use.

So as a result, I have been doing more and more Linux projects. After all it's C and Unix like, doing a device driver in Linux isn't that hard right? Well it's not, if you can get the dam OS to run in the first place.

I find it's always the same crap. They keep changing things, moving things and renaming things so you can never count on things working the same way on any two distros, versions, shells, /etc, file trees, driver interfaces or really anything in the box.

Like instead of Mbuf's there called skbuff's for there network driver. But it's beyond just renaming away from SVR4 and BSD-ism's , but even between kernel versions.

Things like renaming pci_find_class to pci_get_class, pci_dev->slot_name to pci_dev->dev.bus_id and remap_page_range to remap_pfn_range around 2.6.10 that broke almost ever driver in Linux! I mean these were needed to Port an existing driver up to a newer kernel within the 2.6.x tree, it only took me a week to figure out these thing, and I couldn't' find much documentation on these changes. What they hell are they thinking!!

Changing "find" to "get" is not an UPGRADE! It's not helping anyone and cost hundreds of thousands of man hours for all of the sysadmins and developers out there that were burned on this.

I am now working with the Author of the BASH shell. Him, his 3 uber geeks and myself could not figure out how to set up a static IP on a server here! They eventually got it after a few hours. Hell this is like a 1 minute thing in FreeBSD.

It's doesn't just end there.

I have about 10 systems at home.
4 FreeBSD, 3 Linux and 3 windows systems.
In the past 12 months, I have never had to install, rebuild, update or do any maintenance on the FreeBSD boxes. They are also the boxes I do most of my work on.

I have had to reinstall windows twice, and ended up not ever getting some DVR software working on one box and have in general had to spend a lot of time tweaking the boxes to keep running.

With Linux I have installed Fedora Core 4, 8 times, each installed work for about 2 weeks to 2 month before getting Segfaults while running, then become unable to reboot. I was unable to even read my data back off of the driver. Fortunately I had made tar files backed up on my FreeBSD boxes.

I have also installed Ubuntu twice, both installed systems were a big hassle to get the C compiler and dev environment working.

Even those aren't running very well, crashing every few days.

The thing that really get me though was I have been trying to get a 2.4.X distro working. I have tried Debian, Gentoo and Slackware to no avail.

Two weeks of manually partitioning and having CD only distro's insists on access to the net, while not detecting the network card on My 3 year old Via EPIA M10K motherboard. I really am pulling my hair out.

I have tried everything and just can't get a dam distro to just install and run correctly.

I really need to work on a driver, and a very simple one at that. If only I can just get past the dam basic install!!!

In my team I have Debian members, and a current maintainer in the Linux kernel who also didn't' fair a whole lot better at getting and only distro installed, but at least one had a working system he found from 3 years ago that was already good to go.

So it's not just me, but I find it far more frustrating and infuriating spending weeks to get a dam OS installed.

Such has been my adventure with Linux.

Eris the Greek goddess

Eris is the Greek goddess of discord, whose golden apple was marked, "to the fairest" (Kallisti). The squabble over this apple created the jealousy that led to the Trojan War. We have adopted that name to describe a group of free thinkers who meet once a year to discuss the arts and sciences, philosophy and theology and any other subject which may lead us to the world of ideas beyond our workaday lives.

New logo for site

13:35:06) YahonatanWalther: lol!
(13:35:16) YahonatanWalther: I love it, you have an image of Eris on at the top of the page. that is so appropriate
(13:35:31) YahonatanWalther: A BSD religion is gauranteed to Discordian/Erisian type of religion. :)
(13:35:33) sokolvideo: I was going to toss in a budda also.
(13:35:42) YahonatanWalther: nah. stick with Eris.
(13:35:49) YahonatanWalther: Eris is the Khaos Mother
(13:36:58) sokolvideo: don't know that much about it, it more a certain astetics I was shooting for.
(13:37:12) sokolvideo: search for purity, elegance and truth in source code.
(13:37:56) YahonatanWalther: yeah, and by accident you stumbled on the image of Eris. it is SOOO appropriate.