Paul Irofti (pirofti@) on hotplugd(8), math ports, xhci(4) and other kernel advancements

Here is a new p2k17 hackathon report from Paul Irofti (pirofti@), who writes:

There is plenty to do in the OpenBSD project, but not very much if you can not put a sustained effort of concentrating on a task for at least 4 hours straight for a period of at least a week. That is why, for us time-impaired people, hackathons are a great way of feeling involved in the project as a full-time employee putting in a lot of extra hours would.

I started off with extending hotplugd(8) to send data on a UNIX socket so that multiple clients can connect and fetch device events as they happen. This is mainly intended for the libudev library that I ported to OpenBSD before the hackathon with the end-goal of filling in for user-mount.

I now have a basic proof-of-concept model working that I want tested with different destkop managers to see what can be improved and what other use-cases I should cater to. All udev related work is being supported by M:Tier.

Afterwards I pushed for updating octave and related ports. Luckily steven@ tested again the octave update and noticed that the C++ library issues were gone since we switched to clang. So progress was made pretty quickly afterwards resulting in brand new shiny versions in the tree for both octave and gnuplot!

I continued playing with different small tasks like improving ddb(4) and adding user event support to kqueue(4), tried to look at adding the rest of the missing bits for full TLS support but realised it would take a lot more time and commitment then I can offer at the moment, so finally decided to jump back in to USB land once landry@ asked me to test the new firefox video capabilities with my laptop's camera and realized video(1) doesn't work on my machine.

After a bit of asking around, mpi@ and stsp@ soon explained to me that xhci(4) required isochronous improvements for uvideo(4) to work.

I started poking around and reading the specifications to understand what is going on. Currently I have a few fixes pending but more work is needed to have something proper.

All-in-all, it has been a great and productive hackathon hosted at a very cozy venue and I want to thank stsp@ and the local LUG for putting this together and the foundation for sponsoring the event!