Spot the Bug!

I was looking over some code for someone today. They were having problems with preemption in the write routine and couldn't understand why, since they said to take Giant for all devsw operations. In digging into the problem, I discovered the following code. Maybe you can spot the bug:

#ifdef D_NEED_GIANT
#define FOO_GIANT D_NEEDGIANT
#else
#define FOO_GIANT 0
#endif

(FOO_GIANT is used in the devsw data structure to paper over differences between 4.x and 6.x in this driver).

I think I know who did this change, but without cvs access to the code I can't be sure. Which is good, because I think it was me, but it might have been the person I was helping out. The change was made almost 4 years ago. This code has been in there that long and it wasn't until an especially demanding application came along on a faster CPU was it a problem.

Just goes to show you can never be too careful, or test too much...

Random Acts of Kindness

I went to my old house yesterday. Like many others, my old house hasn't sold in a while. There was a showing today, so I had to shovel the snow off the driveway. While I was there I discovered a most interesting package on my doorstep.

It was a nice, large calendar of African animals in the wild. I hadn't ordered the calendar, so I was very confused. It was from Cafe Press, so I thought it was a dividend from an item I'd designed and put up there. But after shoveling a little I realized that couldn't be it: I've just bought stuff from Cafe Press in the past. I hadn't designed anything for there. I'd thought about it, but never put my thoughts into actions.

After I finished shoveling, I took a closer look at the package. I found a card I'd overlooked before. Inside the card there was a nice note thanking me for the USB and other bits of FreeBSD work I'd done. It was anonymous, so I don't know who to thank for this bright spot in a busy day.

It is the little things like this that really make my involvement in the open source community enjoyable.

Thank you!

Building a big endian ufs image on a little endian system

Let's say you want to create a ram disk for a kernel, or a ufs image for an emulator. To make it interesting, the image needs to be in big endian format and you just have an intel x86 machine which is little endian. How do you proceed? If you were building a little endian image, the answer is simple: just newfs an md partition, mount it and copy. But that won't work for a big endian image. Fortunately, the answer is straight forward:

1. create a tree of files you want in the image
2. install the makefs port
3. use makefs to create your image.

You'll need a /tmp file system of at least 2GB to follow these steps exactly. If you don't have one this big, then you'll need to use a different path below to use a different partition.

Create a tree of files

You'll need to create an image of what you want. Let's assume that it is a powerpc root disk for FreeBSD. For the sake of simplicity, I'm assuming that the kernel comes from elsewhere. If not, then you'll need to add the buildkernel/installkernel targets

• setenv TARGET powerpc
• setenv MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX /tmp/imp/obj
• make buildworld
• sudo make installworld DESTDIR=/tmp/imp/ppc-root
• sudo make distrib-dirs DESTDIR=/tmp/imp/ppc-root
• sudo make distribution DESTDIR=/tmp/imp/ppc-root
• echo "hostname=ppc-qemu" > /tmp/imp/ppc-root/etc/rc.conf
• echo ifconfig_DEFAULT=DHCP >> /tmp/imp/ppc-root/etc/rc.conf
• echo /dev/ad0a / ufs rw 1 1 > /tmp/imp/ppc-root/etc/fstab

The above steps build the FreeBSD world, and create a directory that could be used as a root directory. It can be used via NFS, or placed on a flash or in a ram disk.

Installing the makefs port

NetBSD created a tool to create file systems. Colin Percival ported this to FreeBSD and make a FreeBSD port to boot. He's no longer maintaining the port, but I try to keep it compiling. Installing the port is done in the usual FreeBSD way:

• cd /usr/ports/sysutils/makefs
• make all
• sudo make install
• make clean

Making the image

Once you have makefs installed, creating the image is the next step. You'll need to figure out how big you wish to make the image. For me, I think that 500MB is a good size. The base system is about 250MB, and that leaves room left over for testing programs in the emulator.

• makefs -B big -s 500m /tmp/imp/ppc-root-image /tmp/imp/ppc-root

The resulting file, /tmp/imp/ppc-root-image is going to be 500MB in size.