Update on all the activity that happened so far

First status update will report on everything that i went through so far in my project.

I started to work with OpenSSH-portable version CVS tree under Mac OS X. But since my work will be on OpenBSD-current OpenSSH tree, I started the effort to install OpenBSD-current on my only computer, an Apple Powerbook G4 17" 1,67 Ghz.

I'm using OpenBSD macppc port, and due to a lack of PowerPC virtualization software , I decided to install the latest snapshot of OpenBSD natively on my Mac.

After all data was safely backed up, I managed to live resize my Mac OS X partition to make room for OpenBSD and installed it without any significant problems. It turned out later the disk space allocated (3 Gb for / and swap) wasn't enough for recompiling the whole system, xenocara, and install some ports, so i proceeded to downsize Mac OS X partition again, and reinstall OpenBSD.

I had one recurring problem since the beggining of running OpenBSD on my Powerbook, that is the constant kernel messages about wd0 disk timeouts, and mode downgrade, from Ultra-DMA mode 4 all the way down to PIO mode 4, exactly like described in this bug report March 2008 on OpenBSD-bugs ML. In PIO mode 4, any heavy access to the disk, like a CVS update, will cause an interrupt storm and the CPU will be 75% of the time handling interrupts, as shown by top.

This causes the whole system to run very slow, and after i updated kernel, userland and xenocara to -current, the bug remained, with either GENERIC kernel, or a slimmed down version. I also tried disabling bwi driver, reseting NVRAM in Open Firmware bootup prompt, but nothing helped.

In the meantime i also installed some packages available in the snapshots/ directory of mirrors, and compiled the remaining from ports -current , to run vim, cscope, and Gnome desktop, to be able to be more productive.

Unfortunately, under Gnome, the keyboard goes crazy and some keys fail to show up in the terminal, and every time i use Gnome (2.24) the keys seem to get 'stuck', like, after pressing one Enter/Return, Gnome continuously gets Enter/Returns, as If i'm still pressing the key. Any attempt at using the keyboard under Gnome is useless. xev shows key press/release normally tho.

This behavior rarely happens in FVWM, so that's what I've been using mostly to work on OpenSSH's code.

I had to fight some more days with Xmodmap to get key recognition of my Powerbook's portuguese keyboard and be able to type basic programming characters like {} and [] . I also spent some more time getting a useful xorg.conf.

So right now, i am going to try an hackish workaround for the Powerbook hard disk timeouts, until the issue is sorted in -current, and I will soon get a virtual machine on a computer running VMWare and install OpenBSD i386 to do most of my development there remotely with ssh.

I expect to submit the first patch really soon now.