The irony of writing a links post containing a bunch of links about productivity as a form of procrastination isn't lost on me.

• Mission Statement | Revue
• How To Not Suck At Writing | Defector
• Fifty Fizzbuzzes | Vi Hart
• Work with the Garage Door Up - Wild Rye
• Structure | The New Yorker
• The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan | WIRED

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.

• Castor and Pollux/samd21g18a.ld at main · wntrblm/Castor and Pollux
• Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?
• MIPS Assembly Programmming
• A Dual Processor VAX*11/780

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.

Some Sunday evening reading about keeping old computers alive.

• A Continuous Integration Pipeline for the PDP-11 (2.11BSD) - Aaron S. Jackson
• Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network – Matt's Tech Pages
• Mac SE/30 odyssey
• Internet Access with System 6

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 :

• LISA21 - Computing Performance: On the Horizon ( also a blog post
• Pocket POCSAG Transmitter | SOLDIERX.COM
• Vintage Apple
• The Home Office Eudaimonia Machine
• BLIT - a short story by David Langford

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