Peter Wemm

Roaming FreeBSD/Linux/Kernel/Networking/Container/Security/CDN/Cloud/k8s/etc troublemaker. Long time FreeBSD developer. Ex-Yahoo! @[email protected]

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I am going to try something daring and outlandish.
I'm moving two icons on my phone's home screen.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I did something silly. I started backing up my #FreeBSD desktop after .. ~30 years. First installed in ~1996 and incrementally upgraded since. Hardware, OS upgrades, CPU, etc. Why? Because I'm working on some irritations with pkgbase/pkg and I've footgunned twice already.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Review of 2025: 1/5 stars, would not recommend
My wife is in hospital after about four months of struggling with health issues. It is unclear what is next. Ironically, this has given me some time to heal/decompress. I actually got stuff done that I wanted to do, vs had to.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

One of my cats is now (dangerously) radioactive. What could possibly go wrong?

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@freebsdfrau Unfortunately that doesn't help with https://t.co/X71x943qxV 😠

Huh, I just found https://t.co/QpB55G8fIk which points to https://t.co/H8LA32wud0
Well, that's exactly what I want, but as a setting rather than having to resort to a userscript.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Whoever thinks replacing useful timestamps with cute approximations like "recent", "1 day ago", "6 months ago" is a good idea:

STOP IT!

A painful slow hover tooltip is not an acceptable workaround. At minimum, let me turn that crap off in settings.

Looking at you github!

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Compiling...

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@cperciva Masks; too many absent friends; I'm needed elsewhere.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I've been using DuckDuckGo for something like 18 months but I was pointed to @KagiHQ search and decided to give it a try. While DDG is fine (especially compared to google search), it's nice using search where the top priority is actually finding what you want. I'm sold.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Step 1: Pet cat
Step 2: Cat purrs loudly
Step 3: Continue petting cat
Step 4: Suddenly, violence
Step 5: Antibiotics and bandages on arm and hand

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Guess who has been hunting for disk space? Also, did you know that 64-Bit Windows XP for AMD64 was a thing?
> 419M Feb 11  2004 srv03sp1_usa_1069_amd64fre_pro.iso

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

PSA for #FreeBSD folks: Always be on the lookout for phishing/social engineering attacks. We all remember the recent the xz incident. I've had a couple of high-effort and personalized approaches recently. All have had a FreeBSD angle of some sort. FYI.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@kaddourkardio No, firefox has a compiled-in block that you cannot bypass in about:config. It needs a code change to bypass. There's a firefox addon that force changes youtube's usage of VP9 to avc1/h264 as an alternative to recompiling the driver.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Getting #FreeBSD firefox working with hardware video decoding on AMD/radeon has been "interesting". Ranging from firefox having "if vendor == AMD then break" compiled in, through the ports leaving out the vp9 and vc1 decoders. Seems to work though.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@vermaden Change -Dvideo-codecs=".." to "all" in mesa-dri/Makefile and mesa-gallium-va. Patch Firefox widgets/gtk/GfxInfo.cpp to if-zero the unconditional blocklist for ATI hardware at around line 1113 for DeviceFamily::AtiAll and the FEATURE_HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@manuvadot Yes, but mesa-gallium-va and mesa-dri override -Dvideo-codecs to exclude VP9 and VC1.
Firefox's widget/gtk/GfxInfo.cpp test for DeviceFamily::AtiAll and force-block FEATURE_HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING in firefox for release builds. You can see the blacklist effect in about:support.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I'm still suffering from #FreeBSD bridge vs vlan vs LRO/TSO/etc fallout. The vlan driver doesn't sync changes from the bridge interface down to the driver. I am both:
1) amazed at how strange things got;
2) amazed that it worked at all.
This caused months of repeated head-desk.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I'd prefer to have an extra mains socket than to waste a bunch of enclosure space on cheap USB-A outlets that I won't ever use.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

Why does (almost) every power strip available these days have USB-A sockets?

My trust in USB power adapters is low, and I prefer to use higher performance ones where possible. I've seen both power strips and power adapters fail. Having both in the same cheap case seems unwise.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@Crest_ Hmm. I must be confused. The card is a PCIe 2.0 card. FreeBSD SR-IOV needs ARI enabled for more than some number of VFs. ARI was introduced in PCIe3.0 so its not enabled. Either the driver or bios is trying to configure for 64 VFs which can't fit without ARI.

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

I have some intel X520 cards in #FreeBSD machines - it's supposed to handle up to 64 virtual functions. This is with the ix/ixv ixgbe driver and sr-iov is enabled. I'd love to hear if anyone is actually using VFs with FreeBSD 14.x or 15.x with this driver. Have you seen it work?

[Peter Wemm @karinjiri]

@Crest_ Yes to all. I've been looking closer. It blows up in pci_iov_config(). rid_off=384, stride=2. In my case the card is on pci bus 45, the VFs on bus 46. It fails here: "/* We don't yet support allocating extra bus numbers for VFs. */"