Sunday, February 27, 2005

Go to new blog This blog is going bye-bye. Head on over to desperatepundit.com and check out the new digs. This page should auto-redirect you within 10 seconds or so. If not, click on the link in the previous sentence. Don't read too much into the new name. I just like the word "pundit," that's all. Th new blog will continue to focus on OpenDarwin related things with an occasional look at other things. 1:57:14 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, February 2, 2005

I plan to have a new ODTulipDriver release (the darwin-tulip project) within the next several weeks. I took a look at the freebsd tulip driver directory a few days ago and noticed that several manufacturers have released cards based on chipsets already supported by this driver. If I add the appropriate vendor-id and device-id codes, the driver will know to "match" against them and load. Also, at some point I intend to put some serious work into supporting the 21040A chipset which drives the ethernet on the original PowerBook G3 "Kanga" model. It's a deficiency listed by the XPostFacto project as needing a fix; I would like to contribute to this project. The author, Ryan Rempel, has done a tremendous amount of great work and deserves the support. 10:38:05 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Hiatus is over! Sorry for the long hiatus. I'm back and ready to kick some ass. My first project is to get opendarwin-x86 booting from HFS+ partitions. My other to-do's on the list are all driver projects. Those projects inevitably lead to lots of kernel panics and hard crashes. When testing them under OS X on a PPC box, all is well since the journaled filesystem completes its integrity checks and boots up very quickly. This is not true at all on the x86 systems; they currently boot from UFS. There is a long fsck even on small partitions (I keep them under 3 GB). I have a vague idea how to accomplish this. I posted a note to the opendarwin hackers list and am awaiting a hint or two before jumping in with both feet. 9:35:47 PM    comment []

	Thursday, November 11, 2004

Kernel panic resolved The kernel panic I posted about last was being caused by a hardware problem. Though I ran the Apple Hardware Test on a 16 hour loop, it failed to detect any problem with the hardware. I took it in to a local Apple store and waited about 10 days for CPU1 to get replaced. Everything is back to normal now. 5:43:17 PM    comment []

	Sunday, October 3, 2004

Kernel semi-panic? Started getting weird errors in my system.log this morning. They look like: Oct 3 10:23:32 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - corrected - pc = 00000000909F4FD0, msr = 100000000200F030, dsisr = 42000000, dar = 00000000F02CFEF4 Oct 3 10:23:32 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - AsyncSrc = 4000000000000000, CoreFIR = 0200000000000000 Oct 3 10:23:32 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - L2FIR = 0000000000000000, BusFir = 0000000000000000 Oct 3 10:23:34 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - corrected - pc = 00000000FFFF8ABC, msr = 100000000200F030, dsisr = 42000000, dar = 00000000F029FEF4 Oct 3 10:23:34 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - AsyncSrc = 4000000000000000, CoreFIR = 0200000000000000 Oct 3 10:23:34 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - L2FIR = 0000000000000000, BusFir = 0000000000000000 Oct 3 10:25:03 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - corrected - pc = 0000000090003788, msr = 100000000200F030, dsisr = 40000000, dar = 0000000006B6811C Oct 3 10:25:03 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - AsyncSrc = 4000000000000000, CoreFIR = 0200000000000000 Oct 3 10:25:03 localhost kernel: Machine check (1) - L2FIR = 0000000000000000, BusFir = 0000000000000000 I googled for this and found nothing except for "uncorrectable" machine checks as part of a panic log. I think I might be developing a hardware problem. This is on a PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 running OSX 10.3.5. Hints anyone? 10:28:08 AM    comment []

	Friday, August 13, 2004

VMware and OpenDarwin Got a note from an employee at VMware stating that he successfully installed OD 7.2.1 on the latest release. It would be really helpful if other people could give this a try and report their results to me. 6:17:17 PM    comment []

	Monday, July 19, 2004

OD 7.2.1 and an emulated environment Since the release of OpenDarwin 7.2.1 hit the news on slashdot, there's been an increase in interest trying to get this thing running. It looks like we have a few people trying to run it under VirtualPC or vmware. Just a few notes about that... VMWare doesn't properly emulate a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. OpenDarwin needs that, so it will likely kernel panic during boot. Getting the folks behind VMWare to fix their video card emulation is one way to resolve this. The second way is for somebody to dig into the OD framebuffer code and remove this restriction. Second, the tulip driver shipping with OD 7.2.1 doesn't yet work with all DEC chipsets. I'm awaiting some data verification from some people running in this configuration, but I believe vmware (and VirtualPC) both emulate a DEC 21040A chipset. That's next on my list for support since I want to get the original "Kanga" PowerBook G3 working under OpenDarwin and it also needs that chipset support. If you are available to beta test this under vmware, VirtualPC or on a Kanga PowerBook, send me an email. 6:52:07 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Chuck Remes. Last update: 2/27/05; 2:08:00 PM.