BSD from scratch - from source to OS with ease on NetBSD
Sevan Janiyan - sevan @ {pkgsrc,NetBSD,FreeBSD}.org
Intro / History
Chiphack 2013
- http://chiphack.org/
- No shout out to Altera
myStorm
- Shout out to myStorm https://mystorm.uk
- http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Situation doesn't get better
Why
- To raise expectations
- To demontstrate respect by saving time
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
Brittle tools
- Brendan Gregg - Shouting in the Datacentre
- Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle.
- Bryan Cantrill - Visualizing DTrace: Sun Storage 7000 Analytics, LISA '09
:)
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?)
Manifest 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
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"
Switch to network access with mDNS discovery
Bugs
- Autoconf hell
- Unbootable images
- Driver bug fixes
- Variations in kernel configuration
- Broken u-boot scripts
New changes since started
- Lua subsystem improvements - Marc Balmer (mbalmer)
- u-boot packages in pkgsrc/sysutils/u-boot-* - Jared McNeill (jmcneill)
- Veriexec improvements
Todo
- Improve documentation
- Extend lua & rump examples
- Implement a mechanism to add a user for network access
- luaunix - A Lua binding for various Unix functions and system calls https://github.com/arcapos/luaunix
- Add a testing exercise? (ATF / Anita)
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)
Questions
"Do Microsoft users get to go where they want today?" - Bruce Sterling