“Blink and you'll miss it! 4096 colours and flashing text on the console!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
Tropical days| research.exoticsilicon.com
Website terms of use| research.exoticsilicon.com
Last month we showed you how, with a few kernel patches, it's possible to use softraid volumes on read only disk devices. But what about CD-R discs and other write-once optical media? Well, that's possible too! But since the process doesn't really follow any of the same steps as we did last time, it deserves it's own completely separate write-up. So here we go with 'using the softraid subsystem on optical media'.| Exotic Silicon research department news feed
“Assembler code broken by pinsyscalls()? Let's fix it!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
Italic text, double underlining, 256 colours and more - on the console!? Yes! Regular visitors to our research department will know that we maintain a local patchset with code to implement all sorts of visual enhancements to the OpenBSD framebuffer console. Occasionally a few of these patches have even crept in to the official CVS, but if you want to play around with some of the extra features we use on a daily basis here at Exotic Silicon, you'll need to apply our patchset. It's now availabl...| Exotic Silicon research department news feed
SCSI device read-only flag reporting mechanism| research.exoticsilicon.com
Introduction| research.exoticsilicon.com
SMS functionality alongside bridged data on the RUT-240. When Jay kindly showed us how to bridge a 4G LTE data connection to our OpenBSD machines last year, we noted that the RUT-240 is capable of a lot more than just acting as a gateway to the WAN. Some of this useful functionality remains accessible even though the device is in bridge mode. The main topic of today's write-up is SMS, both sending and receiving text messages from the same machine that it's bridged to for IP data connectivity.| Exotic Silicon research department news feed
Optical boot discs for modern X86 machines? Let's look at how that works. Boot code on media that can't be modified or overwritten has always been pretty useful, and of course there are plenty of pre-prepared disc images available that you can write to a suitable disc. However, if you want to prepare your own bootable disc image and have it work reliably across different machines then there are some things to watch out for. Today, Crystal shows us where to shove our boot code and which bits t...| Exotic Silicon research department news feed
Jay has been busy writing up some notes about running inbound and outbound SMTP over an IPSEC tunnel. If you want to run your own SMTP server, but are stuck with a dynamic IP address, check it out for ideas and inspiration.| Exotic Silicon research department news feed
Annotated source code| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Obvious oversights. Textbook mistakes. Surely not in the OpenBSD console code?”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Avoiding the need to pull it out, only to push it in again!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“VT220 is so 1980s! Let's replace it with... Something just as old!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Hand tuned assembler is still a thing in 2022”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Night mode for the framebuffer console”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Enlarge your RAID with ease”| research.exoticsilicon.com
At this point, I must admit that I've never really liked the overall design of spamd and the way that it interfaces with pf. Nor do I particularly like the greylisting feature in general, because it can easily and subtly break genuine mail delivery.| research.exoticsilicon.com
The framebuffer console on OpenBSD stores the displayed data in two different ways:| research.exoticsilicon.com
“New firmware - bug fixed!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Now you can have both!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Stuck in a rut without broadband? We shine the spotlight on the RUT-240.”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Arghhhh! My eyes! They've never seen anything so beautiful❣”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Jumping down the /dev/null rathole to see what's inside”| research.exoticsilicon.com
Installing OpenBSD on the Pinephone might seem straightforward, as the hardware is essentially just an arm-based SBC with a built in screen and modem. The Allwinner A64 SoC is supported by the OpenBSD kernel, so we can at least expect it to boot.| research.exoticsilicon.com
Executing 'builtin_dd if=image.enc of=/dev/rcd0c obs=32k seek=0'| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Get it down on wax! Or paper. Or a PPM file.”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“Enhancing, tweaking and adding features”| research.exoticsilicon.com
“How to do it! How often is too often? We're talking backup, of course!”| research.exoticsilicon.com
Introduction| research.exoticsilicon.com
DPB| research.exoticsilicon.com