FreeBSD/mips: what's cooking

In last two months I've got two new toys: WGT634U from bms@ and Ubiquity Networks' Router Station 2 provided by manufacturer. The first one is Broadcom's Sentry5 based and the second one is built on Atheros' AR7100 chip. As AR7100 is more advanced technology (and has less obscure design, at least it seams less obscure to me) I decided to pick up this low hanging fruit. So far so good: kernel boots, PCI bridge detects Atheros miniPCI wireless card. GigE driver is on its way.

Thinkpad T400 and FreeBSD

Finally I got my hands on new and shiny Lenovo Thinkpad T400. What can I say? It's cool. My only complaint about T60 was its somewhat dim display (yes, I tried to save some money on this vital part and got punished). This time I ordered model with LED backlight and it's worth every dime spent :)

My configuration also included Atheros wifi, built-in bluetooth, Intel GMA X4500 graphics (I'm not in games, really). Unfortunately 7.1 was able to run wifi. Newer HAL did the trick though and here I am: eating my own dog food - running -CURRENT on a workhorse.

Intel graphics was kind of disappointment. I expected no problems with this integrated chipset but there were a lot. "Ghost" video output (or companion display) that was causing mplayer not to run in fullscreen mode (fixed with xrandr). With SWCursor option off text console is garbled when switching to it from X. mplayer is somewhat laggish in full screen mode :( I hope intel driver will be updated soon, meanwhile I'll refrain from watching movies (it should boost my productivity :))

UPD: It seems that Intel Video artifacts is due to unsymmetrical memory layout (I have 2G + 1G). Windows 7 is affected as well.

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!