FreeBSD/MIPS: something lost, something gained

And again long pause in blogging. In this 4 months several things happened to me: I relocated to Vancouver, was interviewed and rejected by Microsoft (don't know why they contacted me in the first place), met new people (philip@ and thompa@ among them), saw new places and even got some free time and learned to cook (it turned out to be fun!).

Being close(geographically) to PMC-Sierra, major MIPS vendor, I tried to contact them and ask for a donation for FreeBSD/MIPS project. Got no reply, though. Predictable result, but it's better to try and fail then have never try at all.

Relocations is ideal way to get rid of garbage that has been accumulated through years. Unfortunately Mikrotik RB532, ADM5120-based Edimax device and Linksys WRT54GL were in the "garbage" I had to left. So it's kind of a loss. But life without wireless AP is miserable (don't blame me, I'm just a geek) so new and shiny Linksys wrt160n was bought from nearest Future Shop. And I even managed to solder serial console to it. And it works. I'm really bad with soldering iron so it's something I'm going to be proud of for the next two years. By the way the process has been documented.

Though it took some efforts FreeBSD was successfully booted on it! Well, sort of successfully. But I'm making progress and going to keep you informed! Stay tuned!

The Joy of Bugbusting

While waiting for MIPS toolchain import to happen I entertain myself with bugbusting. You should try it sometime. GNATS jungle, small and large bugs are sneaking around, scent of rotten emails in the air. I don't feel like hunting down large bugs. They're dangerous beasts. It's much better to deal with small ones. Pick a (one|two|three|up-to-twenty)-liner and fix it. Then you can bring it home, varnish it and eventually MFC it. Nice outdoor activity for developers :)
PS
The first PR I've nailed: kern/123685.

bsddev blog SitRep

Long time no blog. Many things have happened during last 6 months: I got a commit bit, FreeBSD/MIPS reached multiuser and started migration from P4 to CVS. Right now we're waiting for toolchain patches to be imported to contrib/binutils properly. So let's prepare to celebrate buildable FreeBSD/MIPS world in a couple of weeks! Meanwhile I'm busy with getting latest zaptel (they changed name to DAHDI, actually) drivers to FreeBSD and a couple of side aсtivities like digging into aio code from OpenSolaris/Linux/FreeBSD. Hope to blog more regularly now. Stay tuned.