I do my FreeBSD development using git , tmux , vim and cscope .

I keep a FreeBSD fork on my github, I have forked https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd to https://github.com/adventureloop/freebsd

On my fork I have the freebsd/freebsd repo set as an upstream

$ git remote -v
origin  git@github.com:adventureloop/freebsd.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:adventureloop/freebsd.git (push)
upstream        https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git (fetch)
upstream        https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git (push)

See this article for information on setting this up https://help.github.com/en/articles/configuring-a-remote-for-a-fork

I do all work on branches using worktrees, keeping the master branch clean.

Periodically I sync the master branch with the FreeBSD upstream:

$ cd ~/code/freebsd-dev/freebsd-git
$ git checkout master
$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/master
$ git push

I have a development setup based on Ian Lapore's arm set up documented on the FreeBSD wiki https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/crossbuild

I have a freebsd-dev directory in my code directory. It their I keep a copy of FreeBSD in freebsd-git , and obj directory for build output and a projects directory for in progress code.

$ tree -L2
.
├── diffs
│   ├── D15222.diff
│   └── old
├── dstdir
│   ├── boot
│   ├── METALOG
│   └── usr
├── freebsd-git
│   ├── bin
│   ├── sbin
...
│   └── usr.sbin
├── obj
│   └── usr
├── projects
│   ├── atomicstats
│   ├── axp288
│   ├── bugsquash
│   ├── byebyejumbograms
...

I use git worktrees for ongoing projects. git worktrees allow you to have a shallow file system copy on a git branch in a directory.

When starting a new project I do something like:

$ cd ~/code/freebsd-dev/freebsd-git
$ git worktree add thj/newdevelopment ../projects/newdevelopment master
$ cd ../projects/newdevelopment

Once the worktree is set up I launch a tmux session in the projects directory. Each random idea or itch I have, if there is enough there, ends up with a project worktree and a tmux session.

tmux allows me to have many windows in a session, I have a serious tmux problem. Right now I have 11 sessions with 42 windows across them. This is a good indicator of my focus level.

I do FreeBSD development with cscope and vim . With tmux splits I normally have an open file and I use other cscope instances in tmux windows to search for things I need in the tree.

I do testing in a bhyve vm and leave the serial port in a tmux window somewhere. I follow the setup in the FreeBSD handbook and back each vm with a zfs dataset.

I do FreeBSD kernel builds using a command like:

env MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=/home/tom/code/freebsd-dev/obj make -j 44 buildkernel \
        -DKERNFAST installkernel \
    -DNO_ROOT DESTDIR=/home/tom/code/freebsd-dev/dstdir

I then ship kernels to the test vm with scp. jhb@ has a nicer method using the bhyve-loader , but I am yet to try it.

When changes are maturing I create reviews for them using arcanist, manu@ has a good article on doing this

The Wikitravel page for Bucharest has some scary warnings about taxis. I didn't heaer any horror stories from conference goers, but there was a large variation in prices for the same journey.

He held a two day DevSummit before the conference proper. A DevSummit is a chance to talk through technical issues and hash things out face to face. We did some planning for FreeBSD 13 with the idea of setting GGoals for the release.

We tried to match a bit of a hackathon with the DevSummit, but the tutorial schedules meant we couldn't focus the time very well and it was broken up.

EuroBSDCon

Day One :

• Keynote1: Lightweight virtualization with LightVM and Unikraft
• Hacking together a FreeBSD presentation streaming box – For as little as possible
  • That was me, I thought it was quite good :D
• The Evolution of FreeBSD Governance
• Using Boot Environments at Scale
• The End of DNS as we know it
• Keynote2: Some computing and networking historical perspectives
  • Ron's keynote was unreal and it is a massive shame that this sessions wasn't recorded. Ron has a ton of experience with working with network systems since 1976, he shared some stories and anecdotes. The one closest to my heart was pirating away an IMP front pannel and saving it from the scrappers. If you get a chance to see Ron speak you should jump up and down at it.

Day Two :

• Taking NetBSD kernel bug roast to the next level : Kernel Sanitizers
• Livepatching FreeBSD kernel
  • This was an interesting study into how many different platforms do live patching. The FreeBSD way to do live patching could be simplified to 'use dtrace fbt probes'. Which is super reductive of all of the work invovled, but it shows the power of the system we have with dtrace.
• Profiling Packet Processing: Performance & Peculiarities
• Debugging lessons learned as a newbie fixing NetBSD
  • Maya is a terrifying person. Somehow she manages to hack productivly across the entire range of the stack and across many different architectures. There were many debuggin gems in here, I hope she continues to present on this the information was great.
• FreeBSD/VPC: a new kernel subsystem for cloud workloads
  • This was a reprisal of a bsdcan talk .
• FreeBSD on IBM PowerNV
  • An recount of the porting work Semihalf did to POWER8. Interesting, I hope it is also sumbitted to AsiaBSDCon. There need to be more written account of bringing up on different architectures.

Day Two concluded with announcing the location of the next EuroBSDCon, Lillehammer Norway.

EMF Camp is a giant hacker camp that occurs in the deep South of England. It managed to attract nearly 2500 people into a field for four days at the end August.

EMF Camp 2018 was the first time I have volunteered to help with the organisation. I volunteered to help out the content team earlier in the year, it wasn't until the week before that we realised lightning talks needed more organisation. Foolishly I stepped up and got a weird split experience between attending the camp and running a tiny slice of it.

It wasn't sooooo awful, I'll probably do it again.

I attended EMF Camp 2014, since then they have really managed to integrate well with the village system used at other camps. The map shows all the spontaneous events that people put together during the camp, the adage 'it is what you make it' really comes out at these events with many participants helping to make it hole.

In our own way the Scottish Consulate contributed too, with our bureaucratic role playing game going beyond the pale and expanding into operation of a phone network (cups and string) and a Hard border from the rest of the camp.

Toorcamp is America's Hackercamp, it happens on the stunning Orcas Island an hour or so North West of Seattle. Hacker events always manage to create their own neon lit world, Toorcamp took this to another level and sequestered 500 hackers away in a idillic resort in the Pacific North west and even then it poured on the neon lighting effects to keep us in a dream world.

Doe Bay resort spreads over three regions, a bay area (were I camped with Milliways), an island outcrop and a field at the top of a hill. This division (especially the hill) make it less enticing to move around the site. It also meant that the nosiy area in the bay, by being far away from most of the camping, was able to go all night long without disturbing too many people.

Toorcamp is serviced by a group of telephone enthusiasts called Shady Tel. They operate a highly reptuable phone company in the American fashion, offering service anywhere on the camp site, whether near an exchange or on a boat out in the bay.

I hate talking to people on the phone, but I found this limited network to be a ton of fun. I must have spent hours wardialling around trying to find people to call. Once I discovered the maintainence line that echo'd back your phone number I started going around and collecting interesting phones.

Because we are hackers on top of this phone network highly ammusing things pop up. Milliways ran a pager network and from their payphone I spent many hours paging people to call numbers. Knowing how to find numbers for a phone I started paging people to call me at random places.

The Doe Bay resort that hosted Toorcamp would be a wonderful place to go even without an amazing hacker camp in toe. Rather than attempt to describe the event it is easier to link to the 10 intervies the amp hour podcast did on site.

The final night nature decided to turn on a smoke machine and join the party.

A FreeBSD developer has been tricked somehow into working on EFI boot. A large missing piece has been support for 32 bit EFI. Many devices with Intel mobile SOCs have shipped with bios which only support 32 bit EFI for boot even on 64 bit processors.

Rumour had it the Intel Compute Stick STK1AW32SC was one of the platforms with only 32bit EFI. This compute stick has a SOC from the Cherryview family, the same as the GPD Pocket , I want FreeBSD to support this SOC well and 32 bit EFI to boot is a part of that.

This compute stick is end of life and looking around I saw a few on ebay. I managed to win an auction for a new in box compute stick, getting it for about £50. For that I got:

• x5-Z8330 4 Cores 1.44 GHz
• 2GB Ram
• 32GB Internal Flash
• 1 USB 2 Port
• 1 USB 3 Port
• MicroSD Card slot
• Intel Wireless-AC 7265 + Bluetooth 4.2
• Intel Integrated Graphics

I asked Allan Jude to take his compute stick to the DevSummit at EuroBSDCon , while he was grabbing it someone else piped up and claimed to have run FreeBSD on the compute stick before. Turns out there is a bios option to switch between 32bit boot and 64bit boot.

Yes, our deliberate FreeBSD brick actually works. Here is how to install FreeBSD on a Compute Stick:

Break into the bios by hitting F2 at boot.

In 'Configuration' change Operating System from 'Windows 32-bit' to 'Windows 64-bit'

Reboot and break into the boot menu and choose your FreeBSD USB stick.

As with the x5 box there is an issue where the uart causes the compute stick to hang.

Break into the loader menu and set:

OK unset hint.uart.1.at
OK boot

Install as normal

Before rebooting at the end of the installer you need to edit device.hints to disable the uart again.

# chmod +w /boot/device.hints
# vi /boot/device.hints
....
hint.sc.0.flags="0x100"
hint.uart.0.at="isa"    # comment this line out
hint.uart.0.port="0x3F8"
....

WiFi

Bluetooth is present in the dmesg, but we need to load the iwm kernel module then we can configure WiFi as normal .

# kldload if_iwm

Graphics

Since setting up the x5 box in January our FreeBSD has has gained support for integrated graphics on CherryView SoCs. Now graphics support is available by installing and loading the drm-next-kmod .

# pkg install drm-next-kmod
# kldload /boot/modules/i915kms

Meat

I was unable to find any tear down pictures of the compute stick so I had to make some. The cast is easy to take a part, there is a single screw under a rubber foot once that is removed the rest of the top case is held on with snap fits. Inside the fan is connected with a tiny cable, the 2.4GHz and 5GHz antennas are glued to the side of the case, everything else is held down with 2 screws. 3 screws hold the heat sink assembly to the pcb.

Inside there is very little to see

On the top is the SOC is in a puddble of goop, an AXP288 PMIC, 64Mb of Winbond flash and two Kingston 4Gb DDR3 Ram modules.

On the bottom there are two more DDR3 modules (taking us up to 2GB), a SanDisk SDINADF4A 32GB eMMC and an Intel 7265D2W WiFi + Bluetooth module..

---<<BOOT>>---
Copyright (c) 1992-2018 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
    The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 12.0-ALPHA7  r338849 amd64
FreeBSD clang version 6.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_601/final 335540) (based on LLVM 6.0.1)
WARNING: WITNESS option enabled, expect reduced performance.
VT(efifb): resolution 1920x1080
CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) x5-Z8330  CPU @ 1.44GHz (1440.00-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin="GenuineIntel"  Id=0x406c4  Family=0x6  Model=0x4c  Stepping=4
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0x43d8e3bf<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,RDRAND>
  AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x101<LAHF,Prefetch>
  Structured Extended Features=0x2282<TSCADJ,SMEP,ERMS,NFPUSG>
  VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,UG,VPID
  TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics
real memory  = 2147483648 (2048 MB)
avail memory = 1955004416 (1864 MB)
Event timer "LAPIC" quality 600
ACPI APIC Table: <Intel  COMSTKFC>
WARNING: L1 data cache covers fewer APIC IDs than a core (0 < 1)
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs
FreeBSD/SMP: 1 package(s) x 4 core(s)
random: unblocking device.
ioapic0 <Version 2.0> irqs 0-114 on motherboard
Launching APs: 2 1 3
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 1439997858 Hz quality 1000
random: entropy device external interface
netmap: loaded module
[ath_hal] loaded
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (vesa, 0xffffffff810e1920, 0) error 19
random: registering fast source Intel Secure Key RNG
random: fast provider: "Intel Secure Key RNG"
kbd1 at kbdmux0
nexus0
efirtc0: <EFI Realtime Clock> on motherboard
efirtc0: registered as a time-of-day clock, resolution 1.000000s
cryptosoft0: <software crypto> on motherboard
acpi0: <Intel COMSTKFC> on motherboard
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
unknown: I/O range not supported
cpu0: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
attimer0: <AT timer> port 0x40-0x43,0x50-0x53 irq 0 on acpi0
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
Event timer "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 100
atrtc0: <AT realtime clock> port 0x70-0x77 on acpi0
atrtc0: Warning: Couldn't map I/O.
atrtc0: registered as a time-of-day clock, resolution 1.000000s
Event timer "RTC" frequency 32768 Hz quality 0
hpet0: <High Precision Event Timer> iomem 0xfed00000-0xfed003ff irq 8 on acpi0
Timecounter "HPET" frequency 14318180 Hz quality 950
Event timer "HPET" frequency 14318180 Hz quality 450
Event timer "HPET1" frequency 14318180 Hz quality 440
Event timer "HPET2" frequency 14318180 Hz quality 440
Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 850
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0x408-0x40b on acpi0
pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib0
vgapci0: <VGA-compatible display> port 0xf000-0xf03f mem 0x90000000-0x90ffffff,0x80000000-0x8fffffff at device 2.0 on pci0
vgapci0: Boot video device
xhci0: <Intel Braswell USB 3.0 controller> mem 0x91500000-0x9150ffff at device 20.0 on pci0
xhci0: 32 bytes context size, 64-bit DMA
usbus0 on xhci0
usbus0: 5.0Gbps Super Speed USB v3.0
pci0: <encrypt/decrypt> at device 26.0 (no driver attached)
pcib1: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 28.0 on pci0
pci1: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib1
pci1: <network> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 31.0 on pci0
isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0
acpi_button0: <Power Button> on acpi0
acpi_tz0: <Thermal Zone> on acpi0
sdhci_acpi0: <Intel Bay Trail/Braswell eMMC 4.5/4.5.1 Controller> iomem 0x9152c000-0x9152cfff irq 45 on acpi0
mmc0: <MMC/SD bus> on sdhci_acpi0
sdhci_acpi1: <Intel Bay Trail/Braswell SDXC Controller> iomem 0x9152a000-0x9152afff irq 47 on acpi0
mmc1: <MMC/SD bus> on sdhci_acpi1
atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0
atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
atkbdc0: non-PNP ISA device will be removed from GENERIC in FreeBSD 12.
est0: <Enhanced SpeedStep Frequency Control> on cpu0
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
ugen0.1: <0x8086 XHCI root HUB> at usbus0
uhub0: <0x8086 XHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 3.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
mmcsd0: 31GB <MMCHC DF4032 0.1 SN 9557679A MFG 05/2016 by 69 0x0000> at mmc0 200.0MHz/8bit/8192-block
mmcsd0boot0: 4MB partion 1 at mmcsd0
mmcsd0boot1: 4MB partion 2 at mmcsd0
mmcsd0rpmb: 4MB partion 3 at mmcsd0
mmc1: No compatible cards found on bus
WARNING: WITNESS option enabled, expect reduced performance.
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/mmcsd0p2 [rw]...
uhub0: 13 ports with 13 removable, self powered
lo0: link state changed to UP