Centroid.EU Blog

Registered EnhancedRISC.de

As I'M a fan of RISC architecture (had a Mac G4 Cube a while back) I registered this domain. Another piece of news is that I may be going to Embeddedworld in Nuremberg February 27th, to view their RISC-V presentations. I'M looking to take a vacation day that day.

Freifunk, 1043's seem to be the next 841's

I took a look at Freifunk Stuttgart today and noticed they recommend 1043 routers because the 841's are not supported anymore. The 1043's are about twice the cost of a 841 but coming down. They dropped the USB port in newer versions so that would prevent playing with chaoskeys on this hardware. But there is another model the C7 Archer that has dual 5GHz/2.4GHz modes. Those are almost twice as much as a 1043, but would cut hardware if one is going into the 5GHz spectrum. That's something that interests me a lot. We'll see how it works out.

Mid-January Rainbow

I sighted this rainbow out of my east side windows.

I made a few more pictures about a minute later it started to sleet/snow.

How to build riscv-qemu on OpenBSD

As you know I lately became interested in RISC-V. Here is the webpage on how to build riscv-qemu so that you can simulate the RISC-V processor:

• riscv-qemu

$ git clone https://github.com/riscv/riscv-qemu
$ cd riscv-qemu
$ git submodule update --init dtc
$ git submodule update --init pixman
$ ./configure --target-list=riscv64-softmmu,riscv32-softmmu \
	--extra-cflags=-I/usr/X11R6/include \
	--extra-ldflags=-Wl,-z,wxneeded \
	--prefix=/usr/local/riscv
$ gmake
# [gmake install]

# uname -a
Linux ucbvax 4.6.2-00041-g030e817-dirty #2 Mon Dec 19 08:48:07 PST 2016 riscv64 GNU/Linux

qemu-system-risc(23987): mprotect W^X violation

Starting to buy books for 2018

I have ordered:

• The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas - Patterson & Waterman
• Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware Software Interface: RISC-V Edition - Patterson & Hennessy

OpenBSD was not notified of Meltdown

This is where OpenBSD is currently:

• OpenBSD official message

Intel, Meltdown and Insider Trading?

If you read the Acknowledgements of the meltdown paper found at the meltdown and spectre website, it is said that Jann Horn informed Intel of the bug in June of 2017. In late November of 2017 the CEO of Intel sold all his stocks, which to me is highly suspect of insider trading... (Intel Inside?). The story about the selling of the stocks (worth 11 million $) is here. I don't know if this is good on Intels part. I'm very mad that we've been ripped off since 1995! So my 486 DX/2 was likely already vulnerable.

Delphinusdnsd 1.2.1 Released

This is a small bugfix to allow delphinusdnsd to start up after signing the zone with a 4096 bit key. I haven't tried any higher, I have a few unsigned zones still and will be able to use them for testing....eventually. Didn't think I'd have a minor release this quickly after the 1.2.0 release. The download is here.

Digitally signed two domains

I have signed two domains, freifunk-schweinfurt.de and delphinusdns.org for DNSSEC. The signing of the 4096 bit keylength RSA-512 went eventless. However the delphinusdnsd server did not want to load those zones due to the increased length of the signed text. I finally found the bug and will be making a correction to delphinusdnsd later. I will probably release 1.2.1 in the next few days.

10 USD/year per domain on average

This morning I renewed and paid for 8 domains of mine, around 160 USD. I have enabled privacy options as well. Interesting is that the lions share went into the .net and .org domains (around 90 USD for those two). Somehow it seems the .de domains that I have are really cheap. I renewed for two years. Next is DNSSEC'ing more domains and looking at letsencrypt for centroid.eu.