BSD from scratch - from source to OS with ease on NetBSD
Background photo by Andrew Fresh
Intro / History
Chiphack 2013
- http://chiphack.org/
- No shout out to Altera
Situation doesn’t get better
And it continues
myStorm
- Shout out to myStorm https://mystorm.uk
- http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Why
- To raise expectations
- An exercise for myself to learn and feed things back into NetBSD
Mixed messages
- How many systems folks here?
System developer
Mixed messages
How many embraced devops?
COBOL?
Steep learning curve
Resources are available
- Stevens series (APUE, TCP/IP Illustrated…)
- K&R - The C Programming Language
- Design and Implementation of BSD / FreeBSD
- CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
- Teaching Operating Systems with Tracing - teachbsd.org
Detecting cause & effect - Despite a delay in time
- Brendan Gregg - Shouting in the Datacentre
- Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle.
- Bryan Cantrill - Visualizing DTrace: Sun Storage 7000 Analytics, LISA ‘09
Dynamicland
The suffering is real
Poor tools harbor bad habbits
- Fear of restarting?
- Fear of change / feature creep
- Fear to explore ideas
- No room to manoeuvre (redundancy a licensed feature?)
Manifesting drastic measures
- serverless
- eunuch kernel
- no-ops
- antikernel
- Popping Kernels, Choosing between programming in the kernel or in user space https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3180444
- A Generation Lost in the Bazaar https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
Street light Anti-Methodology
Seat of the pants stuff vs controlled processes
What
- Constraint is how do you make someone’s life easier who is not interested in software
- Ignore the software internal features and present ideas which benefit a user without detailed context
How
- Explore documentation
- Explore source repo
- Cross compilation with ease
- Highlevel language interface to system, in this case Lua
- Rapid prototyping on desktop with rump
- Working locally using simulation
- Tamper resistance
Clumsiness
Ditch serial access On Linux, install UUCP package for cu(1)
chown uucp:uucp /dev/ttyUSB0
Can be worse on OS X (install unsigned kexts)
Building GCC with Clang HOST_CXXFLAGS=”-fbracket-depth=512 -O2”
CH340G
- Bit of a gamble depending on search bubble
Unbootable images
- Mark your DOS partition bootable for your ARM board
NetBSD/lunatik
- netpgp(3lua)
- bozohttpd(3lua)
- unix(3lua) https://github.com/arcapos/luaunix
For next iteration
- Switch to mDNS descovery
- Try testing (ATF / Anita)
- Implement a mechanism to add a user for network access
- Improve documentation
- Extend lua & rump examples
Next workshop
oshcamp 2018 - 1st of July, Lincoln, England. http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2018
Thanks to
- Andrew Back (@9600)
- Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG)
- BCS Open Soure Special Interest Group (BCS OSSG)
- London Hack Space
NetBSD developers:
- Marc Balmer (mbalmer)
- Paul Goyette (pgoyette)
- Nick Hudson (skrll)
- Jared McNeill (jmcneill)
- Alexander Nasonov (alnsn)
Questions
“Do Microsoft users get to go where they want today?” - Bruce Sterling
Questions?
