I recently had access to a Surface Pro 4 and tried to boot OpenBSD on it. It did not go well, so I am just putting this here for posterity.
The 2016 Surface Pro 4 is basically just a keyboard-less x86 (Core i5 on the model I had) tablet with some tightly integrated (read: not upgradeable) components. Its optional Surface Type Cover is just a USB-attached keyboard and trackpad, which magnetically secure to the bottom of the device.
I've been using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary computer for six years. It's a great computer that satisfied a lot of requirements I had for a laptop: thin, lightweight, small form factor, excellent keyboard and touchpad, mostly silent, but not an Atom or Core M processor.
I've done a lot on this little computer, like compiling and maintaining an Android ROM, writing the Rails, iOS, and Android apps for Pushover, creating Lobsters, recording and editing 40 episodes of Garbage, and lots of OpenBSD development.
Since I will never be interviewed for The Setup, I have interviewed myself.
Update Feb 2015: Okay, I was interviewed for The Setup.
Update Feb 2023: I have a What I Use page that I keep up to date with my current setup.
Friday afternoon I decided to install a package on one of my OpenBSD servers,
but it was from a recent snapshot and the snapshot I was running on the server
was too old to run it.
No problem, I'll just upgrade the server. a usually quick task; just drop a new
kernel into /, reboot, untar the new disk sets over /, run mergemaster and
reboot again.
Remotely rebooting servers that are 350 miles away is always a nerve racking experience. You reboot it, your SSH connection drops, you start a ping waiting for it to reply as you visualize it booting up and thinking about how long each piece usually takes. Occasionally something takes longer than normal and you start to panic, but before you reach whoever you need to reach, it starts responding and suddenly a wave of relief comes over you and you resume your work.
I bought a Sharp Zaurus and put OpenBSD on it with the intention of making a lap timer for my car. I tried to use this timer on my Treo in my R32, but it's so buggy and would crash the phone all the time, and trying to reboot a phone while racing around a track is not something I'd recommend.
There are of course some commercial timers but they are expensive and usually require a laptop running windows to be able to see the gps-acquired data. What's the fun in that?
My new 12" PowerBook arrived yesterday. I've been wanting to switch (back) to a PowerBook for a while to have working niceities such as Bluetooth, Firewire, iMovie, Automator, etc. The 15" PowerBook i had before was too big for me to carry around everywhere, so I figured a 12" would be somewhat comparable to my X40.
The first thing I did when it arrived was re-partition it to make a 6GB
partition for OpenBSD and reinstall Mac OS on the large partition.
I played around in Mac OS and got everything setup, but when I tried to install
OpenBSD in its partition, the disklabel was occupying the entire drive space
(even though the OpenBSD partition was only 6GB in fdisk) and it decided to
format the entire drive.
By the time I realized what it was doing it had already screwed everything up.
Since I've gotten my X40, I've been conversing with
markus@
about OpenBSD support since he also owns one.
I've since
ported
a driver for the TCPA/TPM security chip and one thing I always wanted to do was
hook into the blue "Access IBM" button to run
xautolock -locknow for one-touch locking.
The
tpb
program can hook into this button on Linux, but all of the work is handled by an
NVRAM driver in the Linux kernel.
Apparently the X40's BIOS toggles various bits in the CMOS RAM (NVRAM)
when certain buttons are pushed, like the volume buttons, ThinkLight, and of
course, the blue "Access IBM" button.
Last night I started looking into making an NVRAM driver for OpenBSD, which
turned out to be relatively easy, since the i386's clock code already has
functions for reading and writing to the NVRAM.
I put together a simple driver to provide user-land read-only access to the
NVRAM through a /dev/nvram device:
This morning, I woke up early and stumbled over to the computer. My VT510 was blank, which is never good. It either means I lost power or rt.fm is down. I hit a key and see this scrolled over and over:
Which all stop at around 5:30.
sd1 is the new /mirror drive which I just upgraded to a month or so ago.
After a shower I went to DLS with the old /mirror drive to bring the server
back up, but my keycard wouldn't open any of the doors at the NOC.
Maybe i'm being fired…
Someone on the ppc@ list posted about a
CVS tree
containing drivers for a lot of macppc hardware that hasn't been committed to
NetBSD yet.
I took his snapper and i2s drivers and whacked them into shape to link into
OpenBSD.
The snapper0 and audio0 drivers attach, but the kernel panics in the DMA
code when trying to play audio.
My iMic finally arrived, so I kind of stopped working on making the internal snapper work. With functioning sound, I've been able to boot into OpenBSD at work. konq-e sucks, though, but Mozilla doesn't work so I'm stuck with it for now.
So now that X works on my PowerBook, I've been running OpenBSD when I get home
from work to continue making other things work so I can eventually run OpenBSD
all the time.
The awacs audio driver seems to be for older chipsets and doesn't support the
new "snapper" chip on my machine, so I'll need to port something from Linux or
use an external USB audio system.
Neither sound appealing.
While playing around in OpenBSD, I've found the keyboard to be very annoying.
At random times a key will appear to be stuck and continue repeating until some
other keys are mashed to get it to stop.
I was rdesktop'd into a Windows machine when this happened with the Enter key,
so after clicking on the Start Menu, it immediately selected "Shut down" and
then hit Enter on the confirmation screen.
Luckily the drop down was on "Reboot" and not "Shut down"
I finally got X working on my PowerBook!
After reviewing
Linux kernel
and
XFree86
code for weeks, hacking the hell out of radeon_base.c adding random debugging
everywhere, searching mailing lists for clues, and lots of guessing, I finally
did the make && startx that resulted in a clean display coming up.
Someone e-mailed me asking for a review of my 15" PowerBook, so here she be. I tried to write it like a magazine columnist, using many "colorful words" and over-analyzing everything.