The irony of writing a links post containing a bunch of links about
productivity as a form of procrastination isn't lost on me.
part of the process means doing sub-par work to get to the good work
There are a couple of themes in here, I have been writing a lot recently and
especially this year. I feel like I am starting to come across advice that
makes sense to me, if you want to do things you need to well, do things. There
is no substitute for practice.
While I am not going to write daily posts again, I miss the format I used
before. I will look at resurrecting the tools I used to generate the daily
posts before, maybe a weekly update post would be nice to do.
I plan to return to 'Work with the Garage Door Up', but I have also adopted a
policy of not talking about work in progress, so you will have to wait and see.
Here are some links on lower level stuff. I have only read the linker script
and the paper on the dual processor VAX. The other two are books that I want to
get to one day and this blog is as good a place as any to keep them stashed
away.
MIPS is going away in FreeBSD so this is a great time to read about MIPS
assembly.
The 1982 paper on the Dual Processor VAX is excellent and you should read it.
Papers aren't that interesting anymore.
Once a month for the podcast
I read through about 20 articles so I
know what to
talk about on the show
. This week when I was reading
the article I thought 'this is really easy, maybe I can do this for all my
browser tabs'
This isn't really a fair comparison because the articles for the show are
mostly short and the articles that fill out my tabs are the ones that were too
long to read immediately or I wanted to keep them around.
Instead of keeping them in firefox I am going to try doing
link
posts
again
:
I think they should have just left it alone and kept calling it eBPF.
My testbed
has Nvidia/Mellanox/Chelsio 10GbE network cards which
are quite old, but sit well in the price (super cheap) usability (they work
great on FreeBSD ond Linux) spectrum.
There is an issue on FreeBSD 14 -CURRENT where when you load the kernel module
for the card (mlx4en)
kldload
hangs. If you hit control C the process will
continue and the module will load properly. This is also an issue when you
load the module using
kld_list
in
rc.conf
and as my router machine can't be
managed with serial yet I have no way to press control C when it is booting.
On the bug report
I was asked if the firmware is up to date. It
wasn't and doing so was not fun.
You should follow the Mellanox instructions rather than my blog post to do a
firmware update, but
The Mellanox FreeBSD documentation for
(
Linux
) the cards is from 2015 and this is the process that
worked for me in 2021.
Mellanox have a tools package you can download, there is also a port called
mstflint
you can install:
# pkg install mstflint
The Mellanox tools need to know which card they are speaking to, you can find
the card with
pciconf
once you have loaded the kernel module:
# pciconf -lv | grep mlx4
mlx4_core0@pci0:9:0:0: class=0x020000 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x15b3 device=0x1007 subvendor=0x15b3 subdevice=0x000c
Downloading the firmware for card required a OPN and a PSID from the card. You
can use
mstflint
to get information about the card with the pci address and
the 'q' query command:
# mstflint -d pci0:9:0:0 q
Image type: FS2
FW Version: 2.40.5030
FW Release Date: 4.1.2017
Product Version: 02.40.50.30
Rom Info: type=PXE version=3.4.746
Device ID: 4103
Description: Node Port1 Port2 Sys image
GUIDs: ffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffff
MACs: ec0d9ae13420 ec0d9ae13421
VSD:
PSID: MT_1200111023
This didn't give me an OPN so instead I looked at
every entry on the download
page
until I found the correct PSID.
With the firmware downloaded and unzipped you can flash it using
mstflint
:
# mstflint -d pci0:9:0:0 -i fw-ConnectX3Pro-rel-2_42_5000-MCX312B-XCC_Ax-FlexBoot-3.4.752.bin b
Current FW version on flash: 2.40.5030
New FW version: 2.42.5000
Burning FS2 FW image without signatures - OK
Restoring signature - OK