Wrong OS version in pkg

If FreeBSD’s pkg refuses to update because of a wrong OS version, for example because you are in a FreeNAS jail and version mismatch are bound to happen, then you can always try to force the OS version in pkg (which you can find with uname -UK. Either put OSVERSION={{version}} in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf or start it with pkg -o OSVERSION={{version}} where {{version}} is the target version, for example 1101001.

Linuxulator ist kaputt

Since a few weeks I’m running RELEASE on a custom kernel to use a patch that I made for a missing feature in the IPv6 stack (namely icmp_may_rst).

But a few minutes ago I had the surprise to find that the Linuxulator was no longer working. Trying to run a Linux binary failed with the following error:

ELF binary type "0" not known.
exec: test: Exec format error

Actually looking at kldstat, the Linux kernel module wasn’t even loaded. Trying to load it manually gave me the following error:

link_elf_obj: symbol kern_sched_setscheduler undefined
linker_load_file: Unsupported file type

OK so what is this sched_setscheduler you are talking about? Well there you go!
Now the Linuxulator depends on that syscall, but for some reason the necessary option disappeared from my custom kernel configuration. All I had to do was to add it again and recompile:

options _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING # POSIX P1003_1B real-time extensions

And now I can run Linux binaries again!

Data signing failed

I got the following error while trying to send a signed (GPG) e-mail using claws-mail:

Signature failed: Data signing failed, General error

Turns out it was a path problem. The GPG agent uses pinentry to ask for your private key password. The agent was configured with the absolute path to pinentry-gtk-2 on Linux. But this happened on FreeBSD and executables are located in /usr/local, not /usr.

So I changed in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

- pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
+ pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-gtk-2

Intel NIC connection problem

PCIe ASPM is an hardware power management protocol for PCI express devices. It allows a far better power management than what can be done with software power management at the price of an increased latency to the device. However some hardware don’t advertise it properly. And this was in fact the origin of the power regression case of 2.6.38 which was later fixed in 3.3.

It may also cause some Intel NIC (such as e1000e) to fall asleep unintentionally. So if you have an Intel NIC on Linux and it even fails to acquire an IPv4 address then you might try to add this option to your kernel command line : pcie_aspm=off. On Debian you can add this option to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub and issue an update-grub.

You may also want to change the link-state of one specific device to L0/L1 at runtime. For this I’ll point you there : http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/ASPM.