Headlines
FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook (https://unrelenting.technology/articles/FreeBSD-and-custom-firmware-on-the-Google-Pixelbook)
FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook
Back in 2015, I jumped on the ThinkPad bandwagon by getting an X240 to run FreeBSD on. Unlike most people in the ThinkPad crowd, I actually liked the clickpad and didn\u2019t use the trackpoint much. But this summer I\u2019ve decided that it was time for something newer. I wanted something..
lighter and thinner (ha, turns out this is actually important, I got tired of carrying a T H I C C laptop - Apple was right all along);
with a 3:2 display (why is Lenovo making these Serious Work\u2122 laptops 16:9 in the first place?? 16:9 is awful in below-13-inch sizes especially);
with a HiDPI display (and ideally with a good size for exact 2x scaling instead of fractional);
with USB-C ports;
without a dGPU, especially without an NVIDIA GPU;
assembled with screws and not glue (I don\u2019t necessarily need expansion and stuff in a laptop all that much, but being able to replace the battery without dealing with a glued chassis is good);
supported by FreeBSD of course (\u201csome development required\u201d is okay but I\u2019m not going to write big drivers);
how about something with open source firmware, that would be fun.
I was considering a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from an old generation - the one from the same year as the X230 is corebootable, so that\u2019s fun. But going back in processor generations just doesn\u2019t feel great. I want something more efficient, not less!
And then I discovered the Pixelbook. Other than the big huge large bezels around the screen, I liked everything about it. Thin aluminum design, a 3:2 HiDPI screen, rubber palm rests (why isn\u2019t every laptop ever doing that?!), the \u201cconvertibleness\u201d (flip the screen around to turn it into.. something rather big for a tablet, but it is useful actually), a Wacom touchscreen that supports a pen, mostly reasonable hardware (Intel Wi-Fi), and that famous coreboot support (Chromebooks\u2019 stock firmware is coreboot + depthcharge).
So here it is, my new laptop, a Google Pixelbook.
Conclusion
Pixelbook, FreeBSD, coreboot, EDK2 good.
Seriously, I have no big words to say, other than just recommending this laptop to FOSS enthusiasts :)
Porting NetBSD to the AMD x86-64: a case study in OS portability (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/bsdcon02/full_papers/linden/linden_html/index.html)
Abstract
NetBSD is known as a very portable operating system, currently running on 44 different architectures (12 different types of CPU). This paper takes a look at what has been done to make it portable, and how this has decreased the amount of effort needed to port NetBSD to a new architecture. The new AMD x86-64 architecture, of which the specifications were published at the end of 2000, with hardware to follow in 2002, is used as an example.
Portability
Supporting multiple platforms was a primary goal of the NetBSD project from the start. As NetBSD was ported to more and more platforms, the NetBSD kernel code was adapted to become more portable along the way.
General
Generally, code is shared between ports as much as possible. In NetBSD, it should always be considered if the code can be assumed to be useful on other architectures, present or future. If so, it is machine-independent and put it in an appropriate place in the source tree. When writing code that is intended to be machine-independent, and it contains conditional preprocessor statements depending on the architecture, then the code is likely wrong, or an extra abstraction layer is needed to get rid of these statements.
Types
Assumptions about the size of any type are not made. Assumptions made about type sizes on 32-bit platforms were a large problem when 64-bit platforms came around. Most of the problems of this kind had to be dealt with when NetBSD was ported to the DEC Alpha in 1994.