Three days ago, I got an email from abuse department, it says that I have been storing to many files. I have about 300 thousands files, and their limit (that they just set on May) is 50 thousands file. You may think that 50 thousands file is a lot, but in reality it is not. Many software uses thousands of small files, for example there are more than 1800 files on gallery2 (typical install, english only), there are more than 1000 files for wordpress. Joomla with virtuemart will use more than 6000 files. I think this new limit has something to do with their new UNLIMITED HOSTING offer.

That is only the default install. Many web applications uses more files. For example, gallery2 will cache the resized sizes (thumnail, normal view, full view, etc) so if you upload 1000 pictures, it may end up becoming 3000 files or more. I got quite many blog entries (because I have been blogging in my Indonesian blog for 3 years), so I need to install wp-cache to speed things up. The cache is file based, so in just one of my blog, I use about around 4000 files.

The worst part is Hostmonster also counts their configuration files, empty directories, log files, and emails in the total. So if you have several email account, and you haven’t pop your email for a while, your file count will be high. If you use IMAP, then you can not have many messages, because every message is a file.

After cleaning up my files, removing my photos, uninstalling gallery, I finally lowered down my file count to around 44000. Now I only use about 1.7 GB of the disk space. So much for unlimited space hosting

Here is the current FreeBSD port status:

1. Timer is now working, previously the timer tick works, but the time counter was too fast.
2. EHCI and OHCI is working, but there is still some caching problem, so i need to modify usb_busdma.c, this modification is not clean. I can access USB disks, and USB network adapter.
3. Network driver works, but it is still very slow . I am still trying to understand better the DMA handling in FreeBSD. There is still one bug: you can not stop the interface and start it again. The stopping part works, ifconfig ece0 down, but the starting again part doesn’t.
4. Multi user works. I can also activate network services, such as sshd.

I am still waiting for my perforce account. But anyone willing to test it can contact me. I still don’t know the best method to release a patch against CURRENT for people to try, because changes happens very quickly.

Here is the latest boot log: bsd-24-may-2009.txt

The remaining drivers that needs to be written are the OHCI and network. The OHCI shouldn’t take too much time, but I think the network will take quite a long time.

I was planning to clean up, and release the code today, but I was busy with something else, so may be I will release the code in the next few days. For those of you who are curious about the boot log, here it is:

KDB: debugger backends: ddb
KDB: current backend: ddb
Copyright (c) 1992-2009 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
	The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #169: Sun May 10 01:25:55 WIT 2009
    yohanes@cameron:/usr/home/yohanes/freebsd/freebsd/src/sys/arm/compile/CNS11XXNAS
WARNING: DIAGNOSTIC option enabled, expect reduced performance.
Preloaded elf kernel "elf kernel" at 0xc12d30b8.
unknown CPU (ID = 0x66015261)
  WB enabled LABT
  16KB/16B 2-way Instruction cache
  16KB/16B 2-way write-back-locking-B Data cache
real memory  = 67108864 (64 MB)
Physical memory chunk(s):
00000000 - 0xffffff, 16777216 bytes (4096 pages)
0x1337000 - 0x3eaefff, 45580288 bytes (11128 pages)
avail memory = 61718528 (58 MB)
ULE: setup cpu 0
nfslock: pseudo-device
null: <null device, zero device>
random: <entropy source, Software, Yarrow>
mem: <memory>
econaarm0: <ECONA device bus> on motherboard
econa add children
econa add child econa_ic addr 7d000000
econa add child uart addr 78000000
econa add child timer addr 79000000
econa add child ehci addr f8000000
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000008
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000008
econa_alloc_resource start 78000000 end 78ffffff, count = 01000000
sys_res_memory
Alloc OK
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000008
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000008
econa_alloc_resource start 78000000 end 78ffffff, count = 01000000
sys_res_memory
Alloc OK
uart0: <Non-standard ns8250 class UART with FIFOs> mem 0x78000000-0x78ffffff irq 10 on econaarm0
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000008
econa_alloc_resource start 78000000 end 78ffffff, count = 01000000
sys_res_memory
Alloc OK
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000001
econa_alloc_resource start 0000000a end 0000000a, count = 00000001
sys_res_irq
Alloc OK
uart0: [FILTER]
uart0: fast interrupt
uart0: console (38461,n,8,1)
timer0: <Econa CPU Timer> mem 0x79000000-0x79ffffff irq 0,1 on econaarm0
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000001
econa_alloc_resource start 79000000 end 79ffffff, count = 01000000
sys_res_memory
Alloc OK
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000001
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end 00000000, count = 00000001
sys_res_irq
Alloc OK
STR9100 CPU Clock: 200 MHz
HZ = 100
reload value = 500000
IRQ Timer1 at int #0x0 clock 100000000(Hz)
timer0: [FILTER]
DONE timer
done00000000
ehci probe
ehci probe
ehci0: <CNS11XX USB EHCI> mem 0xf8000000-0xffffffff irq 24 on econaarm0
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000001
econa_alloc_resource start f8000000 end ffffffff, count = 08000000
sys_res_memory
Alloc OK
econa_alloc_resource start 00000000 end ffffffff, count = 00000001
econa_alloc_resource start 00000018 end 00000018, count = 00000001
sys_res_irq
Alloc OK
add USB device
setup intr
ehci0: [MPSAFE]
ehci0: [ITHREAD]
init ehci
usbus0: EHCI version 1.0
probe and attach
usbus0: <CNS11XX USB EHCI> on ehci0
done
initcloks
enabling timer
Timecounter "CPU Timer" frequency 50000000 Hz quality 1000
Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
usbus0: 480Mbps High Speed USB v2.0
WARNING: DIAGNOSTIC option enabled, expect reduced performance.
ugen0.1: <Cavium> at usbus0
uhub0: <Cavium EHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
ugen0.2: <Kingston> at usbus0
umass0: <Kingston DataTraveler 2.0, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 2> on usbus0
umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000
register sim 0
scanning the sim
umass0:0:0:-1: Attached to scbus0
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): TEST UNIT READY. CDB: 0 0 0 0 0 0
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: Check Condition
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): UNIT ATTENTION asc:28,0
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Not ready to ready change, medium may have changed
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): (probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): TEST UNIT READY. CDB: 0 0 0 0 0 0
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): UNIT ATTENTION asc:28,0
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Not ready to ready change, medium may have changed
Retrying Command (per Sense Data)
(probe0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying Command
pass0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
pass0: <Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
pass0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 1906MB (3903578 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 242C)
GEOM: new disk da0
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1a is ufsid/4a01b053676144f3.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1a is ufs/FreeBSDonUSB.
root_mount_prepare 100

Manual root filesystem specification:
  <fstype>:<device>  Mount <device> using filesystem <fstype>
                       eg. ufs:/dev/da0a
  ?                  List valid disk boot devices
  <empty line>       Abort manual input

mountroot> ufs:da0s1a
Trying to mount root from ufs:da0s1a
warning: no time-of-day clock registered, system time will not be set accurately
start_init: trying /sbin/init
Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:
# ls /
.snap		dev		media		root		usr
COPYRIGHT	etc		mnt		sbin		var
bin		lib		proc		sys
boot		libexec		rescue		tmp

My wife just bought Nokia 5800, a Nokia series 60 5th edition phone. It means that i need to finish my SymbianBible port for 5th edition (mostly done, beta version is on symbianbible google groups). My wife also asked me to port MultiCounter to her new phone (done, not yet uploaded).

I have cleaned up the 2.6.29 port of STR9104 Soc, but i will need to clean up again, because of the new documentation from www.cnusers.org. I have also started the freebsd port, but the progress is not much yet.

When the NSD Emprex 100 arrived, i realized that I need more network ports. I only have 4 ports on my WRT54GL and all of them have been used. After looking at hubs and routes prices around chiang mai, they are in 500-1000 baht range, that is not cheap so I decided that I should just buy something a little bit more expensive that I can hack. I saw DLink DIR-300 sold at relatively cheap price 1490 baht (43 usd, cheap for Chiang Mai price), this is 700 baht (20 usd) cheaper compared to WRT54GL, with almost same hardware spec (4 Mb ROM, 16 Mb RAM). I spent some time installing openwrt on this router, because I was so confused with the factory built interface.

I am planning to go to Indonesia for 10 days, so during that time, I don’t think I will be able to do much hacking, but I want to still continue studying freebsd. So I decided to install FreeBSD on our EEE PC 901. This was not difficult, but it took quite some time to setup everything.

Here are some of the things that i’ve done on the EEE PC: setup FreeBSD ARM cross compile, setup Linux ARM cross compilation, setup LXR for FreeBSD current sources. Unfortunately WIFI is still not supported on EEE 901, and all (I only have 2) of my USB bluetooth doesnt work.

Note: I haven’t made tha 64 Mb Linux Kernel Image. I was affraid that someone made a mistake flashing it to 32 Mb device, which will made it unusable. Of course serial port can still save it, but not every one can make a serial port. With the new documentation I found, I will be able to make kernel image that can autodetect the memory size.

and the config file:

http://tinyhack.com/agestar/config-2.6.29-star

or if you want the image that i already compiled and test (image is compiled with 32 MB memory). This is NOT a FIRMWARE

http://tinyhack.com/agestar/zImage-2.6.29

when i have the time, i will work on creating a new firmware image.

Some changes:

• The machine ID is now registered in http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/machines/
• The network problem instability has now been fixed
• Added new configuration option to select memory size based on your board memory (16, 32, or 64 mb). Note: selecting values larger than the supported size will cause crash.

The other news is that Bruce M Simpson has donated me an Emprex NSD 100 for porting FreeBSD to it. I have started my work, but the progress will be slower from the Linux at the beginning, because:

1. I am more familiar with Linux kernel compared to FreeBSD kernel
2. Currently FreeBSD kernel itself doesn’t support many ARM devices yet, so to find an exmple of something I need to look at NetBSD, (and it helps, for example the Faraday 526 processor support is already in NetBSD).
3. I am rather busy this and coming month (planning to go to Indonesia for about 10 days)

My wife was happy with her Asus EEE 701, but she would like something better with the same size. We sold the old Asus 701 to my brother, and she bought Asus EEE 900A. Compared to EE PC 701, the EEE PC 900A has a faster processor (Intel Atom 1.6 ghz vs the 900 Mhz EEE), more memory (1 gb vs 512 mb), bigger disk space (16 gb vs 4 gb), higher resolution (1024 x 600 vs 840×400), and better graphic processors (Intel GMA 950 vs Intel GMA 900). The only problem is the 16 GB SSD is much slower than the EEE 701 4 GB SSD. You can really feel it when running almost any applications, especially the firefox browser.

My wife uses Windows XP on the new Asus. After reading several blog posts and many forums, the conclusion is: to make everything faster, try to reduce the number of disk access. Here is how to reduce the disk access in Windows XP:

1. Buy more memory, we bought 2 GB memory  (quite cheap, around 690 baht/20 usd) to replace the 1 GB default
2. Allocate some of the memory (384 Mb for RAM disk). I set the environment variables TEMP and TMP to point to the RAM Disk. I also point firefox cache to the RAM disk.
3. Turn off page file
4. Disable indexing on all drives
5. Disable System restore
6. Don’t install firefox on the SSD. Firefox 3 will try to write its history every few seconds. I use Firefox portable on SD Card, and it is much faster now.

- Wiimote only operation is possible. Not all things will work though. You can play point and click games that relies only on mouse. Press HOME to access the menu (change disk, change ROM, etc). To avoid wasting your time, you can test the game on Hatari for Windows/Linux to see if you can control everything using only mouse.

- I have included a simple flicker filtering to reduce the filtering. This is not the final solution to the problem. I will need to rewrite the SDL port to use GX.

Note:

- Mono mode still doesn’t work yet.

You can download it here:

http://tinyhack.com/wii/hatari/hatari-18-01-2009.zip

Sorry, forgot to update the mouse handling

http://tinyhack.com/wii/hatari/hatari-19-01-2009.zip

Some notes

1. You will need USB keyboard to use this emulator
2. Mouse is emulated using Wiimote (A for click), you can also use USB Mouse
3. Press F12 to access the menu (probably i should assign one of the Wiimote key for this),
4. Options can be saved to disk
5. Press home, or alt-q to quit
6. Floppy images can be placed in \hatari\fd
7. EmuTOS image have been included. With EmuTOS ROM, the green screen flickers a lot. It doesn’t happen with some real Atari ROMs that I tested.
8. Sound works (usually), jus enable it through the options

You can download the emulator from

http://tinyhack.com/wii/hatari/hatari-0.0.1.zip

Source code is in

http://tinyhack.com/wii/hatari/

The source code for the SDL port have been put into wiiapple SVN at

http://wiiapple.googlecode.com/

Someone already made an early SDL port to Wii, but it is missing threading support (which is needed by the emulator). After reading things at wiibrew.org and devkitpro.org, I decided to complete the threading part. The next problem is the input. I want to be able to write BASIC applications, so I decided that the SDL port must support keyboard input, someone already made LibWiikeyboard, so I can just plug it in SDL (actually this is a hack, to correctly handle SDL requirements, there are some things that needs to be changed, in LibWiikeyboard and in the SDL gamecube implementation).

Next part is the porting process itself. The difficult part is making sure all the endiannes conversion of 6502 (Apple II CPU) to Wii’s PowerPC is done correctly, because I don’t have a USB gecko to debug it. Currently the port works, but don’t expect too much from this first release. I can already play some games, but I haven’t tested many other things. Sound is not yet now supported.

Here are some screenshots (made using tvtime, captured through my USB TV Box)

This is the application that you can extract to your SD Card

http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/wiiapple.zip

The plan is: Everytime I update the application, I will still use the same file name, you can look at http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/ to look for older releases.

You will need to install Homebrew Channel to use it.

And the source codes are available at:

http://tinyhack.com/wii/wiiapple/
Update:

version 0.0.2:

- Fixed text overlay
- Disable saving options (dangerous for now, because you might overwrite your files)

version 0.0.3:

- Sound support
- Fix joypad problem
- Invalid disk image will not freeze the emulator (in case of invalid disk, Master.dsk will be reloaded)

January 6, 2009 (0.0.4)
- new keyboard driver, now work with most USB keyboards
Note: I am still working on the keyboard issue (some USB keyboard still  doesn’t work). I think this is because the limitation of Libwiikeyboard that can only do control transfer instead of interrupt transfer. Now I have rewritten the SDL keyboard part with my own code (part was based on the code from Guitar Fun).

January 6, 2009 (0.0.5)
- Support Gamecube controller (Wiimote support is planned for next version)
- updated some bug in keyboard handling

January 7, 2009 (0.0.6)
- Increased gamecube joystick sensitivity
- Fixed (most) crashing issue

January 8, 2009 (0.0.7)
- Support Wiimote as Joystick (Press A button in Gamecube controller to switch to gamecube joypad)

note: Mac USB keyboard works.

[ 3662.345631] em28xx #0: Your board has no unique USB ID and thus need a hint to be detected.
[ 3662.345634] em28xx #0: You may try to use card= insmod option to workaround that.
[ 3662.345636] em28xx #0: Please send an email with this log to:
[ 3662.345638] em28xx #0: 	V4L Mailing List 
[ 3662.345640] em28xx #0: Board eeprom hash is 0x00000000
[ 3662.345643] em28xx #0: Board i2c devicelist hash is 0xc51200e3
[ 3662.345645] em28xx #0: Here is a list of valid choices for the card= insmod option:
[ 3662.345647] em28xx #0:     card=0 -> Unknown EM2800 video grabber
[ 3662.345650] em28xx #0:     card=1 -> Unknown EM2750/28xx video grabber
[ 3662.345652] em28xx #0:     card=2 -> Terratec Cinergy 250 USB
[ 3662.345654] em28xx #0:     card=3 -> Pinnacle PCTV USB 2
[ 3662.345656] em28xx #0:     card=4 -> Hauppauge WinTV USB 2
[ 3662.345659] em28xx #0:     card=5 -> MSI VOX USB 2.0
[ 3662.345661] em28xx #0:     card=6 -> Terratec Cinergy 200 USB
[ 3662.345663] em28xx #0:     card=7 -> Leadtek Winfast USB II
[ 3662.345665] em28xx #0:     card=8 -> Kworld USB2800
[ 3662.345667] em28xx #0:     card=9 -> Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 90/DVC 100
[ 3662.345670] em28xx #0:     card=10 -> Hauppauge WinTV HVR 900
[ 3662.345672] em28xx #0:     card=11 -> Terratec Hybrid XS
[ 3662.345674] em28xx #0:     card=12 -> Kworld PVR TV 2800 RF
[ 3662.345676] em28xx #0:     card=13 -> Terratec Prodigy XS
[ 3662.345679] em28xx #0:     card=14 -> Pixelview Prolink PlayTV USB 2.0
[ 3662.345681] em28xx #0:     card=15 -> V-Gear PocketTV
[ 3662.345683] em28xx #0:     card=16 -> Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950
[ 3662.685938] em28xx #0: V4L2 device registered as /dev/video0 and /dev/vbi0

So I tried modprobe em28xx card=0 and then card=1, and then card=2, thankfully it worked with card=2. I used tvtime program to see the output of the usb tv. To make it permanent, add this line:

options em28xx card=2

to your /etc/modprobe.conf, or create a new file (any name is fine) at /etc/modprobe.d and fill it with that line. Note: audio is not working yet, but I don’t really need it right now.