I purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon recently and I immediately noticed that the screen's contrast and white balance were not very accurate at all. This system does not have and excellent IPS screen like the ThinkPad X230 but it does have a slightly higher resolution TN display at 1600x900 instead of 1366x768. I wondered how I might solve this problem on OpenBSD. A few searches and I found the answer.
Read moreNotes on OpenBSD in QEMU on OpenBSD
Although performance is not its strong point, QEMU can be a pretty useful tool for running OpenBSD instances on OpenBSD. Some years back, kqemu support allowed for much better OpenBSD performance but, unfortunately, kqemu support was removed quite some time ago. While we are waiting for bhyve to support OpenBSD guests and eventually maybe OpenBSD as a host, qemu will have to do.
Read moreBSDCan 2013 Coming up in May →
If you haven't, like me, been to a BSDCan Conference before, this might be the year to go. The schedule looks great with lots of excellent presentations. This is also the 10th annual conference and the schedule looks excellent. All the details are available from the BSDCan web site. I'm not sure if we will be there yet but we shall see how the next few months pan out.
Lenovo ThinkPad X230 for OpenBSD and Linux
Back at the beginning of September, I ordered a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. I have been using mostly desktop systems but decided to get back to using laptops more due to some changes coming next year. I chose the X230 for a few different reasons. I also picked exactly the options I wanted since this laptop will be used for OpenBSD and Linux and will not see Windows at all.
Read moreEncryped Root Filesystem using softraid(4) on OpenBSD with an SLC SSD
On Monday, my ThinkPad X230 arrived. One of my goals for the system is to run OpenBSD with an encrypted root filesystem. Fortunately, the support exists in softraid(4) but it wasn't immediately clear how to accomplish this and allow the system to boot properly. Through a bit of trial and error, I figured it out and it works very well.
Read moreThe Trouble with USB 3.0 →
An OpenBSD developer by the name of Ted Unangst recently wrote a post entitled USB 3 back compat in which he refers to how it is difficult or impossible to use USB 3.0 ports if the operating system does not yet have an XHCI driver. (OpenBSD lacks an XHCI driver at this time.)
The confusion partially stems from there being multiple different XHCI host controllers. The ones by ASMedia and other third parties do not function at all without an XHCI driver. The new Ivy Bridge chipset native Intel USB 3.0 controller is a different story.
On my Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe Mini-ITX board there is a BIOS option to set the Intel USB 3.0 XHCI controller to several different modes. As long as legacy USB is still enabled those ports usually function just fine as USB 2.0 ports. Although this varies from operating system to operating system, the default setting of Smart Auto may work just fine for USB 2.0 only operation if there is no XHCI driver taking control of the USB 3.0 ports. If Smart Auto doesn't work, try the other three XHCI settings and see if one works for you.
Watch out for the Sandy Bridge motherboards with USB 3.0 ports because they are always a third party controller that does not operate as USB 2.0.
OpenBSD/sparc64 and root on softraid(4)
I came across a puzzling dilemma today as I was provisioning some Sun Fire V120 servers for some tests. Although somewhat old now, a 650MHz Sun Fire V120 with 3GB of memory does just fine for a lot of tasks like DNS, some basic mail processing, and static web content. One of the dilemmas I have faced in the past was running two disks in a RAID mirror. OpenBSD has had softraid(4) for quite a while but OpenBSD 5.1 adds support for the root filesystem on softraid(4) for amd64, i386, and sparc64 systems. There was only one problem.
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