on Linux distros you can get a gdb-multiarch - do we have something equivalent?

jbo: I mean there's lldb.

fatalnix, I need GDB.

fatalnix, need to debug some RISC-V target that is using GCC to build

Hey, is this channel a good place to ask for newbie help, or is it better to ask my questions on Discord?

I don't know about Discord, but this channel is a good place for all levels, including newbie. We all were one, once.

<3

Cool. I'm gonna start with question 1. I installed 13.2-RELEASE on my pi (aarch64) and I'd like to read the handbook, but there's no /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd

You have to install it

You can either read it online at docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook or install en-freebsd-doc via ports or packages as explained in docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports .

Title: FreeBSD Handbook | FreeBSD Documentation Portal

At install (well, if it is same procedure as x86) you can select to install it, but it isn't in default

so, tl;dr

pkg install en-freebsd-doc

Oh got it. I thought had installed en-freebsd-doc, but there was an error with pkg that I overlooked. My DNS server was misconfigured, so after fixing that and rerunning pkg install en-freebsd-doc fixed it

😎

I take it back. It's not solved. The package reinstalled successfully, but the docs don't show up still

Is there another path that they could be located in?

Nope. I am an idiot 😂. I kept omiting the `share` from the path

Neat, FreeBSD has RAIDz expansion.

Time for everyone to throw everything including the kitchen sink at it, please.

it's not a good time to relinquish my sink right now, thanks

freshbsd.org/freebsd/src/commit/d09a3bf72c0b even with four paragraphs of technical explanation, this is one heck of a doozie to grok

Title: FreeBSD / src / d09a3bf / fflush: correct buffer handling in __sflush - FreshBSD

I'm looking for a usb-c dongle or usba since i have a hub that can output speaker and be used as a mic also. I don't like headphones. anyone mind helping me look

i actually don't even know what it would be called so i don't know what to look for

This is for a chromebook i want to put freebsd on and use it as my main laptop

Hi. Until the problems w.r.t. QEMU are fixed for the current "FreeBSD-13.2-RELEASE-arm-armv7-GENERICSD.img" image, could someone with write access **please** add a link to the relevant forum discussion (forums.freebsd.org/threads/kernel-p…-armv7-with-qemu.89016[/post-609775]) to the wiki.freebsd.org/QemuRecipes wiki topic? I can't have been the only one who had difficulty finding a solution.

Title: QemuRecipes - FreeBSD Wiki

bashing my head against audio (on 15.0-CURRENT)

I have an external USB DAC for output, works great

and an external USB mic for input, works great, but also says its an audio-out device too

but I haven't figured out how to have both working at the same time

Title: Snippet | IRCCloud

Title: Snippet | IRCCloud

so pcm1 is an output-only device, and pcm0 is both input and output?

yes pcm1 is the fancy DAC - audio out

but you want to use pcm1 for out and pcm0 for in at the same time?

and pcm0 is the microphone that thinks it is also an output

RhodiumToad: precisely

if the microphone *actually* played audio I'd be fine with that for webrtc meetings and just switch in between

since they're physically separate devices, that probably means that you need to configure whatever software you're using to use two separate devices rather than just the default

webrtc thus firefox or chrome, not much luck I expect

ooh I *can* get audio out of the microphone

so I will go down the stupid but working path of just disconnecting the fancy DAC during meetings

what does about:support show in firefox for the audio devices?

nobody going to need my 140BPM in hi fidelity anyway

heh

about:support shows absolutely nothing in firefox (using a fresh profile)

oh, is it still broken? I thought it got fixed

I'm running ESR again until firefox 121 which has a fix for crashing on startup, at least for me

it turns out the microphone has a little 3.5mm jack plug on the bottom which I can use

after a bit more testing it appears that firefox will *always* pick the USB audio device that has a microphone, for both.

so long as I do the audioconf and use the "microphone" 3.5mm jack for output via headphones, its all good

guys, is it ok to use swap on zfs ?

I've used in the past and had performance problems when swap was hit

(when memory was full)

IIRC, last time someone asked it, the answer was "not safe due to possible deadlocks".

Title: 199189 – SWAP on ZFS can crash server

V_PauAmma_V: thank you, I think I'll use swap outside of zfs

one more question regarding swap, if I have a machine with 16 GB ram and two nvme drives (that will be used on a zfs mirror), what is the recommended size of the swap partition (outside of zfs) ?

is it ok to use 4-8 GB swap partition, or should I go for 2x of ram size (32 GB swap partition)

the nvme drives are 1 TB in size, but I think 32 GB is too much for a swap partition

Look at the swap recommendation on the wiki bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199189

Title: 199189 – SWAP on ZFS can crash server

Oops. Wrong paste. wiki.freebsd.org/SystemTuning

Title: SystemTuning - FreeBSD Wiki

and one more question, regardin my setup, if I have those two nvme drives, should I create two swap partitions on each drives?

The wiki recommendation for 16GB RAM would be 16GB swap. But honestly I am old-school and have terabytes of disk so allocate 32GB of swap in that case as I will never miss it from the storage pool.

rwp: thank you, so I should create a 16 GB of swap partition

I see

For people with 256GB of RAM obviously they are not going to allocate that much swap space. But if I am on a 256MB Raspberry Pi then I would allocate a gig of swap space.

I have a lenovo x230 with 16 GB of ram (freebsd 12.x) and swap on zfs zvol, when I open many tabs in firefox and the memory is full, the machine is almost unresponsive if I do not exit firefox quickly

As noted above swap should never be on zfs since zfs itself uses memory and the combination will often deadlock.

Title: philipp schmid - FreeBSD 10: does SWAP work on a ZVOL?

Title: Swap deadlock in 0.7.9 · Issue #7734 · openzfs/zfs · GitHub

7734 – update atari800 - upgrade to the latest version bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7734

Poor confused VimDiesel.

I don't know how FreeBSD handles suspend and hibernate on a laptop but on Linux systems I always allocate a little more swap than I have RAM so that I can guarantee hibernation to disk works trivially without things like zram compression and such. Again I have terabytes of storage and I will never miss the small amount of swap needed to store my ram.

I note that how much swap is needed is one of those things that people for some reason unknown to me have a strong emotional reaction to and fights break out discussing it. It's worse than an editor war! Which is why I cited the wiki page rather than my opinion on the subject.

rwp: "As noted above swap should never be on zfs since zfs itself" It seems many ppl don't know that, I was reading this thread: forums.freebsd.org/threads/is-swap-on-zfs-safe.27855

Title: Is swap on zfs safe? | The FreeBSD Forums

now it is clear for me, no more swap on zfs (thanks again)

ZFS has so many other useful benefits that I just accept as a compromise that I give up having swap there as part of the tradeoff. It's worth it!

meandrain, Also people have recently told me when I was using Firefox as an example of a memory hog that Firefox dynamically uses all available memory by default but can be configured to use less. I don't know the configuration option to tell it to do that however. But knowing that one exists means one could tell Firefox to use no more than some smaller limit and that should avoid Firefox consuming all memory.

rwp: that make sense. I also have swap on zfs on two servers (nginx+php) and had no such problem like on desktop

If one never hits being out of memory then they would never trigger any problems.

But... On a server... If that reacts to external influences, like Apache servicing web requests, and it gets hit with abuse from the network as always happens, then when it does get hit under stress that's also a bad time to hit a deadlock on top of the original attack/abuse.

hello ;) I'm trying out freebsd on a system that has RTL8125B network cards. can I install the drivers for these (realtek-re-kmod...pkg) on the system booted from the usb stick and get the network cards running, or do I have to reboot? I tried just running `pkg install ./...`, but ifconfig doesn't show any new interfaces after that :-/

sorry, I'm very new to freebsd, not sure whether I need to do something like modprobe on linux

rwp: no amount of swap guarantees that hibernation to the swap partition always works correctly, as you potentially have to save ramsize + swapsize on the swap partition

Not familiar with that card, but you're probably looking for the kldload command (which has a manual page available with "man kldload").

nimaje, My "weasel words" did say on a Linux system and on Linux it is only ram not ram+swap. On FreeBSD it is RAM+swap?

I have not really worked through the problem of hibernation on FreeBSD. I also assume that using an ephemeral key for encrypted swap would cause the stored contents to be lost which would also cause things to not work.

V_PauAmma_V: thanks, I'll try `kldload if_re` ;)

maybe this helps? forums.freebsd.org/threads/if_re-fo…module-loads-no-device-output.89372

Title: Solved - if_re for RTL8125- module loads, no device output | The FreeBSD Forums

rwp: how can they just ignore to save swap? when a program needs more than fits in ram, then that has to be saved to for hibernation; I didn't really look into it, but afaik freebsd doesn't have hibernation support

Well... I guess I have avoided all of those problems by generally using 2x RAM for swap on Linux machines with up to 32GB of RAM. And never had a problem with hibernate to disk that way. Because I will never have that much swapped out. And then if it is RAM plus a small amount of swap then it all works.

I need to get back to debugging why my laptops with FreeBSD the graphics will not resume from ram suspend. I just get a black screen. Can log in with ssh but so far don't know the cure. Thinkpad X201 series with the radean graphics. Life and time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

yeah, it probably works for most situations like that, but "guarantees" is just wrong there

meandrain thanks

rwp: hm, I formed a habit of makeing sure swap is empty before suspending because I sometimes had problems with resume too and it seemed to work only when swap is empty, so I do swapoff -a && swapon -a

That's a clever good hint to empty out swap. I like it.

not sure if swap really is the problem, but I hadn't problems since I started doing that

thanks again, this solved the problem, now I can load if_re and things work on the odroid h3+ :D

ecraven, What steps were needed? Did you need to use a different network to bootstrap to get the port module installed?

gotta run bbiab

rm /boot/kernel/if_re.ko; pkg add re-...pkg ; kldload /boot/modules/if_re.ko

the first might not be necessary if giving the full path to kldload anyway

I used a *second* usb stick with just the pkg on it. I tried but couldn't mount the UFS filesystem on linux in order to just put the pkg directly on the "main" usb stick

sorry, this is opnsense, they don't package the if_re module by default :-/ maybe "normal" FreeBSD works fine here anyway

Probably removing the in-base module is somewhat problematic as it will be returned on an update, would break things in the future.

Probably better to load the desired ports module by full path if needed. Seems more robust that way. And I have no idea about details of opnsense but just commenting upon likely trouble.

rwp: yea, normally things are loaded via /boot/loader.conf (I think?), so this wouldn't happen, this is just because I wanted to try it from the usb stick *without* rebooting

normally stuff is loaded automatically or via kld_list in rc.conf and only via /boot/loader.conf if that is nessesary

thanks, I'll go and read up on how freebsd works some more. thank you all for the kind help!

I think when you setup your interfaces via the ifconfig_* variables in rc.conf needed kernel modules should be loaded for that automatically, but not sure how well that works if you have two with the same name

Is HardenedBSD just FreeBSD with extra packages?

Zyxer: no. It's FreeBSD with lots of patches

So FreeBSD repo/packages are not available?

meena

Zyxer: they rebuild our ports with different flags. I think they started building with PIE a much longer time ago for example.