gentoo

Well, been some time now since I announced the start of some µClibc stages.  So far, not much has happened there other than the fact that I’ve successfully hard-locked the Fulong 2E system that I tried compiling on.  This is despite compiling with binutils-2.21 and using -Wa,-mfix-loongson2f-nop… which is usually enough to prevent lockups.  Clearly there’s further erratum that I’m hitting, I might try later on the Qube and see where that gets us, agonisingly slow might be better than the current pace.

Generic N32 MIPS-III little endian continues to remain unavailable due to an issue compiling Python 2.7, and unfortunately my N32 chroot on the Yeeloong broke when I upgraded glibc (the primary reason why I began doing a generic MIPS3 build on the Qube using Matt’s MIPS4 build).  I will get back onto this eventually.

On other news since the purchase of the MacBook I’ve been able to leave my Yeeloong sit at home running continuously to update the entire system.  Qt 4.7.2 gave me some grief — it seems at least on mipsel, qmake segfaults during the initial build of qt-core …

mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-g++ -o "/tmp/portage/x11-libs/qt-core-4.7.2-r1
/work/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.7.2/bin/qmake" project.o property.
o main.o makefile.o unixmake2.o unixmake.o mingw_make.o option.o winmak
efile.o projectgenerator.o meta.o makefiledeps.o metamakefile.o xmloutp
ut.o pbuilder_pbx.o borland_bmake.o msvc_vcproj.o msvc_vcxproj.o msvc_n
make.o msvc_objectmodel.o msbuild_objectmodel.o symmake.o initprojectde
ploy_symbian.o symmake_abld.o symmake_sbsv2.o symbiancommon.o registry.
o epocroot.o qtextcodec.o qutfcodec.o qstring.o qtextstream.o qiodevice
.o qmalloc.o qglobal.o qbytearray.o qbytearraymatcher.o qdatastream.o q
buffer.o qlist.o qfile.o qfsfileengine_unix.o qfsfileengine_iterator_un
ix.o qfsfileengine.o qfsfileengine_iterator.o qregexp.o qvector.o qbita
rray.o qdir.o qdiriterator.o quuid.o qhash.o qfileinfo.o qdatetime.o qs
tringlist.o qabstractfileengine.o qtemporaryfile.o qmap.o qmetatype.o q
settings.o qlibraryinfo.o qvariant.o qvsnprintf.o qlocale.o qlinkedlist
.o qurl.o qnumeric.o qcryptographichash.o qxmlstream.o qxmlutils.o  -Wl
,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed                           
floatmath auto-detection... ()                                         
/tmp/portage/x11-libs/qt-core-4.7.2-r1/work/qt-everywhere-opensource-sr
c-4.7.2/config.tests/unix/compile.test: line 71: 25542 Segmentation fau
lt      "$OUTDIR/bin/qmake" -nocache -spec "$QMKSPEC" "CONFIG+=$QMAKE_C
ONFIG" "CONFIG-=debug_and_release" "LIBS*=$LFLAGS" "LIBS+=$MAC_ARCH_LFL
AGS" "INCLUDEPATH*=$INCLUDEPATH" "QMAKE_CXXFLAGS*=$CXXFLAGS" "QMAKE_CXX
FLAGS+=$MAC_ARCH_CXXFLAGS" "QT_BUILD_TREE=$OUTDIR" "$SRCDIR/$TEST/$EXE.
pro" -o "$OUTDIR/$TEST/Makefile"                                       
gmake: *** No targets.  Stop.                                          
floatmath disabled.                                                    
... etc for numerous other modules.

qt-4.6.3 builds without issues, but this is not sufficient for KDE 4.6.  I’m still investigating.  hyperestraier also fails to build, but only if you have USE=debug set, disable that USE flag and it builds without issues.

Fingers crossed, I can get Qt 4.7 and KDE 4.6 to build, and that there aren’t any issues.  Previously libkjs used to be quite unstable which is one of the main reasons I have not keyworded any release of KDE 4 for MIPS.  Yes, you could dodge around it and have a usable desktop, but I didn’t consider it working well enough for keywording.

Mozilla stuff will need some loving too.  I hope to upgrade to Firefox 4.0 on MIPS, see how that goes.  One of these days I’ll get onto tackling Thunderbird.  Sadly my life away from Gentoo intervenes and thus my plans frequently get put on the backburner as work demands my attention elsewhere.

Well, I’ve done some tinkering with Gentoo/Prefix on MacOS X.  Not bad so far, although there’s a lot of packages not keyworded… (a bit like MIPS) and some packages I miss from regular Gentoo (e.g. crossdev).  However, we can work on sorting this out over time.

For those of you who aren’t particularly fond of going on a copy/paste fest from the documentation, I decided rather than sit there all night and manually do it, I’d code up a script to do it for me.  Behold: Gentoo MacOS X bootstrap script.

Usage:

$ export EPREFIX="${HOME}/.gentoo/amd64"
$ export CHOST="x86_64-apple-darwin10"
$ mkdir -pv "${EPREFIX}"
$ sh do-bootstrap.sh

Well, one thing I’ll need to investigate… I’ve been battling a slightly broken bzip2 which when compressing some files, would cause the whole machine to lock up.  Environment is µClibc-0.9.31 based, using gcc-4.5.2.

Everything compiled with the CFLAGS: “-Os -pipe -mips1 -Wa,-mfix-loongson2f-nop”.  The latter flag is really for Loongson 2F but I find it helpful on 2E as well.  Things seemed to go well, except that I had no end of problems with the machine locking up when running bzip2 on some files.  I found it reproduceable while building autoconf within Catalyst stage 1.

It would appear it’s a compiler issue, as when I rebuilt bzip2 using the CFLAGS: “-O2 -march=loongson2e -Wa,-mfix-loongson2f-nop”, it worked fine.  I will have to investigate this further.  I don’t think it’s a MIPS-I vs Loongson 2E issue, my hypothesis is that -Os generates some instructions that Loongson 2E doesn’t like, as I normally don’t have any problems running MIPS I binaries… the thing that’s significantly different is -Os vs -O2.

Well, it seems I might have µClibc stages going again, at least for little endian initially, then I might fire up one of the SGI boxes and see about a big-endian version.  For a long while, Gentoo/MIPS support for this lightweight C library was all but missing ever since an ABI change broke the µClibc port back around 2006.

I’ve tried on several occasions to build a new environment, and often I was met with technical difficulties which prevented me from producing a working environment.  Recently, I downloaded Rob Landley’s Aboriginal Linux distribution, both big and little endian variants, and took it for a spin.  Having done that, I’m pleased to report that I now have a µClibc chroot that’s merrily compiling various components of the Gentoo system, and will soon be sufficient to make a seed stage for bootstrapping the port once again.

This should mean new netboot images in the medium term for all little-endian ports (and proper ones too, not glibc-based hacks) and new images for SGI Indy (R4000) and O2.  In theory, support for Octane and Indigo2 R10000 is possible, however the systems I have are no longer functional, only my Indy and O2 still work, thus it’s impossible for me to test media for other systems.  Fingers crossed this initial build will go to plan, and we’ll have shiny new stages shortly.

Amongst playing with the YubiKey, I also had a look at DHCPv6.  As people well know, IPv4’s days are numbered, and given we’re all going to have to jump across to IPv6 fairly soon, I figured I had better get acquainted with the newer protocols that come with it.

I’ve had my network running dual-stack for some time now.  This has been achieved using stateless autoconfiguration and router advertisments, which work fairly well.  Today though I decided I’d give DHCPv6 a crack.  For this, you will need the latest ISC dhcp package, net-misc/dhcp-4.1.0, which is hard-masked.

I hope to get something more mature going, but here are some notes who may wish to try this at home.

Setting up DHCPv6

Start by installing the net-misc/dhcp-4.1.0, on both server and clients…you will need to unmask it first:

# echo =net-misc/dhcp-4.1.0 | tee -a /etc/portage/package.unmask >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge -a dhcp

The -4 and -6 flags

Now, that will install the DHCP server and client.  The catch that initially caught me is that ISC dhcpd cannot run on IPv6 and IPv4 simultaneously. Neither can the client, but we’ll get to that.  Both server and client are put into IPv4 mode by running with -4 in the options, or -6 for IPv6 mode.  Documentation says it defaults to IPv6 mode, but my experience has been the opposite (maybe a Gentoo patch does this).

Server set-up

Needless to say, if you’ve got your network running IPv4, at most you might have to edit /etc/conf.d/dhcpd to add -4 to the start-up options (DHCPD_OPTS to be exact).  Easy.  It’ll work as before. If you want IPv6, okay, make that -6 in DHCPD_OPTS, no sweat. But what if you want both? Ohh fun, we need a second dhcpd instance.

My solution; copy each /etc/init.d/dhcpd and /etc/conf.d/dhcpd to /etc/init.d/dhcpd-v6 and /etc/conf.d/dhcpd-v6 respectively.  Make the necessary changes to /etc/init.d/dhcpd-v6 and /etc/conf.d/dhcpd-v6.  So that the two don’t clash, I thought it wise to substitute DHCPD with DHCPDV6 using a text-editor (replace all).

You’ll also want to rename the leases file (dhcpd.leases, I chose dhcpd-v6.leases) and the PID file.  In addition the init script calls dhcpd to check the configuration in checkconfig(), so add -6 there too.  To save you going back and adding it in /etc/conf.d/dhcpd-v6, you can also add the -6 flag to the start-stop-daemon call in in start().  Do similar manipulations to /etc/conf.d/dhcpd-v6.

As for the server configuration file itself, I called my IPv6 config file /etc/dhcp/dhcpd-v6.conf to differentiate it from v4.  The two will need separate configuration files.  At the top of the v6 configuration file, you’ll want to point it to new PID and leases files:

pid-file-name "/var/run/dhcp/dhcpd-v6.pid";
lease-file-name "/var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd-v6.leases";

Adding that to the top of dhcpd-v6.conf will take care of this.  If you’ve done everything right, you should be able to start the DHCPv6 daemon, and add it to your runlevels as per normal.  DHCPv6 listens on port 547/UDP — look for it in netstat.

Client set-up

Client set-up isn’t too difficult, the fun bit is integrating dhclient into the init scripts.  OpenRC knows how to drive dhclient in v4-mode, but not v6.  It too, cannot run in both v4 and v6 mode simultaneously.  The solution: a new net module.  Copy /lib/rc/net/dhclient.sh to /lib/rc/net/dhclientv6.sh.

Rename all the functions changing dhclient to dhclientv6 (don’t use replace-all this time), and change the “provide” line in dhclientv6_depend to dhcpv6.  In dhcpclientv6_expose, do likewise, rename the variables dhclientv6 and dhcpv6.  Finally,  in each  call to the dhclient binary itself, add -6 to it to put it in IPv6 mode, and rename the PID file to add -v6 to the file name.

Save the new file.  Now in /etc/conf.d/net, use the following:

config_eth0=( "dhcp" "dhcpv6" )

Things that I have not yet figured out

Dynamic DNS

This is one of the reasons why I wanted DHCPv6 in the first place.  Remembering IPv4 addresses is bad enough.  IPv6 is a pain.  I have more success citing Pi than remembering the IPv6 address of all my computers.  The statically assigned ones aren’t too bad since the prefixes are all the same, it’s the autoconfigured ones that are a nuisance.

It should be doable, but I haven’t yet worked out how to make dhcp update the nameserver with AAAA records.  This is still in its infancy though.  Lots of rough edges.  I note dhclient doesn’t seem to be passing on the hostname of the computer, which could be part of the problem.

Address pools and class-based assignment

Address pools are handy things.  In ISC dhcpd, I can classify each of the computers I have by their MAC address and assign each class an address pool.  Or at least I could when it’s in IPv4 mode.

I have a nice set-up on IPv4 where if the DHCP server knows the MAC address, it’ll put that computer on the right subnet.  We have three IPv4 subnets here; one for my computers, one for my father’s and a “de-militarised zone” where any foreign computers get put (along with the web server, well actually it exists on all three).  Below is an example:

subnet 192.168.64.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  pool {
    range dynamic-bootp 192.168.64.32 192.168.64.254;
    allow members of "stuartslan";
  }

  ddns-domainname "redhatters.yi.org.";
  ddns-rev-domainname "in-addr.arpa.";
  ddns-updates on;
  update-conflict-detection off;
  allow client-updates;

  /* ... */
}
/* ... */
subclass "stuartslan" 1:6c:f0:49:ef:84:7c; # beast eth0
subclass "stuartslan" 1:6c:f0:49:ef:84:7e; # beast eth1
subclass "stuartslan" 1:08:00:27:ab:7c:b9; # Win2K VirtualBox
subclass "stuartslan" 1:08:00:27:27:bf:55; # uClibc VirtualBox
subclass "stuartslan" 1:00:08:0d:5c:08:51; # Laptop "vk4mslp2" ethernet
subclass "stuartslan" 1:00:12:f0:bd:de:06; # Laptop "vk4mslp2" wireless
/* ... */

I haven’t figured out how to replicate this in DHCPv6.  The following does not work:

subnet6 2001:388:d000:1153::/64 {
  pool {
    allow members of "stuartslan";
    range6 2001:388:d000:1153::1000 2001:388:d000:1153::ffff:ffff;
  }

  ddns-domainname "redhatters.yi.org.";
  ddns-rev-domainname "ip6.arpa.";
  ddns-updates on;
  allow client-updates;
  /* ... */

I plan to keep researching these things, and I’ll see what I can do about getting the updates into Gentoo’s init scripts so that DHCPv6 is handled.  A lot of what I did today were quick hacks that will likely make people shudder, but it’s working for now, we’ll see how it goes.

Recently, a new version of binutils was released.

I had reported earlier about some patches needed to work around errata bugs in the Loongson CPUs.  There were also some other big updates since.  GCC 4.5 and Perl 5.12 have both been unmasked, enough has changed to warrant a rebuild before things get too far out of date.

This release will come with binutils-2.21 which incorporates many fixes for linker issues on MIPS, as well as the Loongson errata.  I have successfully compiled KDE 4.5 using a CVS HEAD version of binutils snapshotted around the time that the 2.21 branch was created, and found that it has fixed quite a few issues.

If you haven’t upgraded just yet, hold on a few weeks and I’ll have new stages up for all to try out.  MIPS-I Little-Endian is building now as I type this, I’m in the process of building seed stages for big-endian builds.  MIPS-III and MIPS-IV little endian builds will begin very soon too (before noon AEST).

I expect I should have most of the little-endian builds up before new year, and the whole release out in early January 2011.