Last year in Japan I bought a Cowon iAudio D2 player, which have proven to be quite good. But a few days ago, I thought I’d try to upgrade the firmware of it. I then discovered that there are four different types of firmware depending on where you bought it. As I bought it in Japan, my firmware was not compatible with other firmwares. The reason for this are mostly due to small differences in hardware. In my case, I have the possiblity of watching Japanese television (not really useful in Norway).

Therefore, I thought I would try and upgrade to the european firmware (a lot more fixes get through to this firmware it seems), but I was a bit afraid I would brick it if it was the case. I looked around at the iaudiophile forums, and finally I found someone with the same attempt, and they succeeded. The procedure was easy, but to be able to use the european firmware, I had to rename them to have the same file name as the Japanese, in order for the player to pick them up. Luckily, it worked for me too. Phew!

As I usually have a few classes at school which requires special software, I wanted to be able to run some of this software on my own computer, as there are student versions of some of the software. One of these is ModelSim from MentorGraphics. ModelSim is basically a simulator for hardware designs, and I use it to simulate VHDL. Unfortunately, ModelSim only comes for Windows, Linux and Solaris. As I only run FreeBSD on my laptop, no software for me :( But wait, FreeBSD have the linuxulator!, which allows Linux binaries to be run unmodified on a FreeBSD host (It is basically an implementation of Linux syscalls within the FreeBSD kernel). The steps I needed to go through to install the Linux version of ModelSim was pretty easy.

First of all, one of the emulators/linux_base* ports needs to be installed. I chose linux_base-fc6, as I’d like the Linux 2.6 support (although I’m not sure if that is actually needed). After installing the port, a linux userland appears in /compat/linux. To make sure I don’t get any problems with programs needing procfs, I mount linprocfs(5) as well.

There, easy! Ready to run linux programs. Now, ModelSim comes with its own installer, which needs a few additional files that you can get at their web-site. However, programs may depend on additional libraries, and this is IMO the most tricky part about the linuxulator. In my case, I got some errors complaining about not finding libXsomething. Luckily, there are a few ports that you can install for the most common libraries. In this case, I had to install x11/linux-xorg-libs. Although a very old version, I was able to run the ModelSim installer and the installed binaries afterwards. Awesome!

Today, I’m sitting in a café in Oslo, waiting until we’re leaving for Gardermoen and our flight back to the Netherlands after one week vacation in Norway. The weather was nice, and I got to do some skiing at least. However, I was actually supposed to be in the Netherlands already. The reason that I’m not, is that we (my girlfriend and I) missed the flight on Sunday. We actually missed it by one day, as we were 100% sure that we were leaving yesterday, so when we showed up at the airport, we were shocked to learn that we were 24 hours late! This was a silly mistake, as neither of us really looked at the date, we always assumed that we were leaving on Monday. Unfortunately, to be able to board the flight that we assumed was our flight, we had to pay 3000 NOK extra per ticket! In other words, we had to find other ways of getting back. Luckily, we got to stay at my sister place last night, and got new tickets for today’s flight at approximately the same price as our original tickets (700 NOK per ticket). Hopefully, we’ll be back in our apartment tonight :)

After Arnar Mar Sig posted his patchset for an initial skeleton of the AVR32 port almost a year ago, things started to catch speed in the beginning of this year. The work is done in perforce, and is progressing well. Currently, the system boots and recognizes most of the hardware, but linker work is required to be able to run init.

So far, I’ve been working on busdma support, grabbing the source from the mips port and adjusting it as well as implementing support for cache operations on the AVR32. It seems to work for now, as Arnar was able to get the ate(4) device driver to work with it.

The last work have been to design and implement a generic device clock framework. This is supposed to be used with devices in an architecture independent way, so that devices can be associated with a clock without knowing what clock it is (assigned internally for each architecture). This is necessary for a few devices to avoid #ifdefs all over the place. For instance, the at91_mci device is identical to the one used in AVR32, and it gets the clock frequency based on at91 machine dependant defines. Another property of this would be to export clocks using this interface to userland (AVR32 have a set of generic clocks as well).

Last weekend I imported gvinum into HEAD, and I hope many users (and old users) of gvinum will try it out, as it have some nice improvements. Moving it into HEAD now, means it also will become part of 8.0-RELEASE which is coming later this year, and since it is a lot of changes, the intention is to have it in HEAD now for a while before the release process begins. Among the most interesting updates for users are:

• Support more of the old vinum command set
• Less panics :)
• Rebuilding and synchronizing plexes can be done while mounted.
• Support for growing striped or raid5 plexes while mounted, meaning that you can just add a new disk to your gvinum configuration, and grow it to cover the new disk.