Nina KalininaMar 14

OpenBSD adventures, day two. My MacBook with arm64 is running fine under OpenBSD, but there is no video acceleration, so it can't play full-screen videos.

I started to think what I can do about it, and I realised that we had a few e-waste Chromebooks bought for $20 apiece. It's 1.5GHz Celeron, and it is as dodgy as laptops get: it is spray-painted, it is made of cheap plastic, and the keyboard and the touchpad are both kind of only look like real ThinkPad but there were so many corners cut making it that I can't type "root" without it missing a letter or two every other time. This is what kids apparently were using in schools ten years ago or so?

Some things are glacially slow, but Xfce4 is quite usable, and it can play YouTube in 720p. Everything the laptop has to offer seems to be working (even webcam).

It works incredible for an ultra-low-end device from 2013.

Show threadellyMar 15
@nina_kali_nina you're lucky that this machine is so old that it has SATA, as eMMC is somehow broken on BSDs. I didn't have time to investigate, but last time I tried to boot OpenBSD on a newer model from 2018 (ApolloLake), it threw a kernel panic when I tried to modify the partition table.

I checked ACPI tables and they looked fine, so there must be something about intel's sdhci drivers in OpenBSD/NetBSD that's broken (whereas it works on Linux). I should try it on Picasso (Ryzen 3000) to see if amd sdhci works 
Show threadNina KalininaMar 15
@elly this one boots from nvme, no idea what driver it uses, I can check if you're interested
Show threadellyMar 15
@nina_kali_nina hold on, this can't be right. First Chromebooks that used NVME appeared with 10th generation of Intel CPUs, such as KOHAKU (Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, my personal daily-driver).

Pretty sure that you have a STOUT, I fixed one of those at FOSDEM ~3 years ago (and got nice Fedora gloves from RedHat's engineer as thanks, I'm still wearing them  )
Show threadNina KalininaMar 15
@elly I guess not every pcie ssd is nvme, huh! It is Stout, according to dmesg. Both disks - the "clearly SATA" and the "pcb with the flash" - are detected as SATA by the system. I had no idea SATA had a slot version 🤯
Show threadellyMar 15
@nina_kali_nina oh, then it must be mSATA
Show threadNina KalininaMar 15
@elly it seems to be, yeah! I'm sorry, I know almost nothing about computers made in this century
Show threadellyMar 15
@nina_kali_nina no need to apologize  
Me and my friends are just *perfectly normal* about Chromebooks
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 15
@elly @nina_kali_nina there will be some sort of matter-annihilation event if the chromebook polycule ever links up to the linux polycule
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 15
@elly @nina_kali_nina (AWESOME stickers)
Show threadellyMar 15

@ireneista I don’t know what a “polycule” is (and at this point I’m afraid to ask), but we upstreamed support for all Chromebooks over the past 4 years. As of 6.19 you don’t need any downstream patches for x86_64 anymore.

One sticker on my current daily-driver (almost) got me in trouble with airport security in Frankfurt 

(I stopped using ELDRID due to instability issues, there’s something wrong with PCIe power circuitry that causes random freezes. I should be able to debug it now since I have an oscilloscope, but didn’t have time to work on it yet).

Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 15
@elly nice!!!
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 15
@elly and yeah we'd expect the molotov cocktail art to raise eyebrows
Show threadNina Kalinina
@ireneista @elly it'd be funny if it actually was the "cyber" sticker đź«Ł people are scared of hackers
Mar 15 at 9:18amWeb