Luigi Rizzo -- FreeBSD-related projects

Useful links

NetBSD: [CVS repo]
anoncvs through cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot

OpenBSD: [CVS repo]
anoncvs through cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.de.openbsd.org:/cvs

Dragonfly BSD:

Linux: [view source] [kernel.org]

OpenWRT: [viewvc] svn co https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/

FreeBSD Compatibility notes

• FreeBSD 8.1 install notes (updated 20100811)

FreeBSD Hardware Compatibility

Assorted FreeBSD-related code

Note: in most cases the code is in form of a gzipped tar archive. Be careful to instruct your browser not to treat it as a text file and do unexpected conversions.

• [2009.03.07] GEOM-based disk schedulers
  Fabio Checconi and myself have developed a GEOM-based disk scheduler for FreeBSD. The scheduler is made of a GEOM kernel module, the corresponding userland class library, and other loadable kernel modules that implement the actual scheduling algorithms.

  The code is in FreeBSD 8.1 and above.

• [2009.01.12] kldpatch (formerly called kmodpatch), an utility to print/alter the content of device tables in kernel modules (available as a FreeBSD port). These tables are generally used to identify devices, and possibly apply specific quirks to enable/disable certain features. kmodpatch is especially useful to let the kernel recognise a new device without rebooting and rebuilding/reinstalling kernel or mod- ules.
  A couple of real life examples:
  • kmodpatch umass.ko - @0 0x4050 0x4a5 0x0101 0x4200
    set the kernel to use flags UMASS_PROTO_SCSI | UMASS_PROTO_BBB and quirks WRONG_CSWSIG | NO_SYNCHRONIZE_CACHE for a certain GSM phone that implements the umass interface;
  • kmodpatch uscanner.ko - @0 0x04b8 0x084a 0
    let uscanner.ko recognise a newly introduced MFP scanner device.

• [2008.12.30] epkowa-port, a Freebsd port of the Epkowa sane scanner backend (version 2.11.0) for various Epson scanners (or multifunction printer/scanners). This has been committed to FreeBSD ports as graphics/sane-epkowa
• [2009.01.02] jpg2pdf is a small C program to convert one or more JPG file into a PDF or Postscript document. The program has no external dependencies and exploits the ability of both PDF and Postscript to process a JPG file through filters: so the program only produces the glue required to process images, and has a minimal amount of options to scale the images.
• [2008.12.04] iso2flash is a simple script to convert ISO images to disk images that can be copied to a flash device.
• [2008.12.03] some changes to newfs have been committed to HEAD, allowing the creation of filesystems on plain files
• [2008.12.03] some changes to newfs_msdos have been committed to HEAD, simplifynig the creation of filesystems at arbitrary offsets on plain files
• [2008.12.02] an enhanced version of boot0.S has been committed to HEAD, together with a matching boot0cfg, supporting the selection of PXE/INT18 booting with key F6, and preserving the NT/XP/Vista Volume ID. Committed to HEAD
• [2008.11.26] FreeBSD port of syslinux 3.72
  The following tarball, syslinux-20081126.tgz contains a port of syslinux to FreeBSD. This is a useful tool to make bootable filesystem images. Committed to FreeBSD ports as sysutils/syslinux
• [2008.08.19] FreeBSD port of busybox 1.11.1
  The following tarball, busybox-port-20080819.tgz contains a minimal port of busybox to FreeBSD.

  Note that some of the system commands that rely on /proc do not work on FreeBSD, but many other userland commands do their job just fine.

• [2008.07.28] edit annotations on Xpdf
  Xpdf is a nice viewer for PDF file. The patch below, written together with two students of mine, Gaetano Catalli and Matteo Landi, implements support for freehand in Xpdf, with the option to save and delete annotations from a file.

  This code is on the official freebsd port, ports/print/xpdf, but you need to build the port with "make WITH_DRAW=yes".

  To try the code on an older version of FreeBSD, or on a different platform, the patch file is patch-zz-xpdf-annot.20080728a. On FreeBSD you can put it into the /usr/ports/graphics/xpdf/files directory, and rebuild the port.
  Then you can click on the Draw button in xpdf to start an annotation, draw using the left button on the mouse, and close the annotation with EndDraw. On Quit, or calling the Save menu with the right button, you can save the modified file.

• [2008.06.02]minixmlrpc, a very compact program (and C library) to access XMLRPC servers and manipulate the results from command line, shell or C programs, without using a ton of external libraries. The (dynamically linked) binary is only about 25k, builds fine on OpenWRT, and can talk to https servers if you have the openssl libraries.

  You can do something like this:

  		./xmlrpc http://time.xmlrpc.com/RPC2 'currentTime.getCurrentTime()'
  		./xmlrpc - '{a=3, b=5, c=8}' '.keys()' '[a,c]'
  	

• [2008.06.02] dynstring-20080602.tgz, a small set of C functions to implement dynamic C strings (and byte arrays). This code is derived from something I implemented some time ago for Asterisk, and is as easy to use as sprintf:

  		#include "dynstring.h"
  		...
  			dynstr s = NULL;
  			for (i=0; i < 10; i++)
  				dsprintf(&s, "next comes %d, ", i);
  			fprintf(stdout, "you wrote [%s]\n", ds_data(s));
  			ds_free(s);
  	

• [2008.05.22]A firefox plugin to run arbitrary applications within the browser
• [2008.04.26]patch to prevent stalls in the 'nfe' driver. At least on the ASUS M2N-VM DVI" board I have, using the MCP67 ethernet chip, the 'nfe' driver stalls under heavy load. The patch above tries to identify the stall condition and reinitialize the chip to let the machine continue communication.
  A related patch addresses problems with the polling implementation.
• [2008.04.08]xorg.conf for dual-head nvidia, a sample xorg.conf file to be used for nVidia cards with dual head support and x11/nvidia-driver port.
• [2007.09.09]FreeBSD Port of xoscope, an X11 oscilloscope using the soundcard as input device (see the xoscope home page on sourceforge).
• [2007.08.28]Support for Epson DX-5000/5050/6000 scanner, some FreeBSD patches to get better support of the Epson DX-5050, DX-6000 (and likely also DX-5000 and DX-6050) printer-scanner. All three devices (scanner, printer, card reader) are supported. Once you have this working you might want to install the graphics/tesseract port, a nice OCR software with support for several languages.
• [2007.07.04]Configuring CUPS to implement print-to-email, some simple instructions to configure cups and cups-pdf to implement a print-to-email service for windows clients with credential checks (the CUPS documentation is severely lacking in this area).
• [2007.02.26]Making a dumb switch into a managed one, describes how to modify a cheap ethernet switch based on the Realtek8316 controller to be monitored/configured through the network using the RRCP protocol.
• [2007.02.20]linphone-1.6.0.tgz, a port of linphone with support for v4l webcams.
• [2007.02.09] emulation layer for Linux device drivers
  The goal of this project is to provide a linux compatibility layer that Linux device drivers can use to be compiled (and work) as loadable kernel modules under FreeBSD.
  We have reached the point where unmodified 'gspca' and "ov' linux drivers can be built and run with full functionality. See the linux_bsd_kld web page for more details, code and binary modules.
• [2007.01.17] enhanced kernel driver for usb cameras
  I am trying to link the pwc kernel driver for usb cameras with other (available) userland programs that support more cameras. See details in the linked page.
  Note, this is somewhat superceded by the linux_bsd_kld project above, which supports a lot more cameras.
• [2007.01.15] pwlib patch
  pwlib is a library used by the Ekiga (formerly gnomemeeting) videoconf package. One of its shortcomings is that it fails to detect video devices on FreeBSD because it checks for the device type using major/minor device numbers in the filesystem, which have no meaning anymore with devfs.
  The patch above fixes this behaviour letting pwlib detect /dev/videoX devices.
  Now committed to the FreeBSD port devel/pwlib
• [2007.01.01] Fix burncd termination
  Apparently many DVD drives do not return a valid progress indication as a response to the ATAPI_READ_CAPACITY command. This causes burncd to not terminate. This patch does two things: 1. in the kernel, disables the check for the ATA_SENSE_VALID bit, thus enabling non-conforming drives to return progress information (although it might be bogus); 2. in burncd, uses TEST UNIT READY to check for termination.
• [2007.01.01] DRM support for i915/dell X1
  The i915 video chip has two PCI IDs, and the code in the DRM driver only looks for the second one. This patch adds it to the list of recognised identifiers.
  With this, the Options "drm" and "dri" in xorg.conf, and graphics/dri installed, hardware acceleration works on the card.
• [2006.12.13] Patch to enable agpgart on the i945 [committed to RELENG_6, 2006.12.30]
  This patch (against a FreeBSD RELENG_6 kernel of 2006.12.23) enables agpgart on i945 video cards. It touches only one file, /sys/pci/agp_i810.c, and it is essentially a backport of the code already in RELENG_7.

Old stuff (before 2001)

Many of these things are now part of the standard FreeBSD distribution. When this is the case (marked in the list), check there for their most up-to-date version (the versions present here are just for reference or use on other platforms, and possibly out of date).

Some others are just obsolete, either because they were not interesting, or because the hardware/software they control is not in use anymore.

Multimedia

• A Multicast-enabled version of mgp
• X11 grabber for VIC (already in FreeBSD)
• command-line internet telephone(doesn't really work well)
• RTP transcoder with audio format conversion
• Simple teletext decoder (uses the SAA5246)
• Software-based Teletext decoder (obsolete)
• bt848 video player & jpeg grabber (obsolete)

Networking stuff

• dummynet, a flexible IP bandwidth manager (in FreeBSD)
• SACK and TSACK code for FreeBSD (only for 2.1.X)(note, FreeBSD has SACK support as of 2006).

Misc. device drivers and utilities

• A control program for the Artec AS6E parallel port scanner (userland, only tested on 4.x)
• hpscanpbm, a program to control SCSI HP scanners (sorry, no docs on this, it is a locally modified copy of a program I found on the net).
• Discussion on how to configure a diskless lab
• The "pcm" FreeBSD audio driver (was in FreeBSD, now replaced by a better one)
• PnP support for FreeBSD (already in FreeBSD)
• g3-to GIF/Postscript converter
• Driver for Mustek Color Hand Scanner (was in FreeBSD 2.x, now removed)

Detailed description

PnP support for FreeBSD

Dump status of PnP devices

g3-to GIF/Postscript converter

Simple teletext decoder

Decode Teletext info using a Bt848-based Frame Grabber.

The code programs directly the frame grabber to acquire a number of frames, then does the appropriate resampling and sync extraction, and tries a crude decoding of Teletext info. On a P5/133 it runs slightly slower than realtime, but the current code is -- I estimate -- 4..8 times slower than it should be because it does a lot of unnecessary operation in the resampling process.

Driver for Mustek Color Hand Scanner

New version of PCBRIDGE

Live video player & jpeg grabber for the Matrox Meteor

SACK and TSACK code for FreeBSD

Enhanced netboot and Kernel bootp support