Vax vs X11

[Björn Johannesson]

Hello yet again.

--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 12/20/14, Mattias Nordlund <***@xanthos.se> wrote:

Subject: Re: Vax vs X11
To: "Björn Johannesson" <***@yahoo.com>
Date: Saturday, December 20, 2014, 11:31 AM

On

However the keyboard is completely fubar in X11, since I do not own a
mouse for my vax I'm not feeling really motivated to investigate. :)
User "mathew" on #netbsd.se did some checks with xev(1) on his /90A and
it was not good. Perhaps he will chime in here.

X11 starts just fine, and it does not feel too slow on my /90A, but as we
discussed before on GIMPnet/#netbsd.se the keyboard was totally fubar,
using xev I could see that it did send input but not many keys had the
correct keymap, also keys “stuck”, if pressing a key that keycode was
sent to X until the next key was pressed.

Well your vax is several leagues faster than the VLC you sent me... :)
And lots more memory to boot!

Anyways, gleening at the openbsd code I have now un-fubar'd the keyboard
in X11. \o/ (I'm hoping Jochen still will send me the mouse he promised :P)
A testkernel can be found at (7.99.3):
http://2.248.109.164/netbsd.generic

This involves changing three files in sys/dev/dec
dzkbd.c, lk201_ws.c and lk201var.h

However... this also effects other users of the LK-keyboards (pmax).
I do not own a suitable machine for testing.
This looks suspiciously like the vax code. X11-kbd in pmax fubar too?
Does anyone know the state of affairs for pmax? Someone said that the pmax
port is totally broken.
Fwiw i put a kernel up (7.99.3):
http://2.248.109.164/pmax.generic

Patches are at (sys/dev/dec):
http://2.248.109.164/dzkbd.c.diff
http://2.248.109.164/lk201_ws.c.diff
http://2.248.109.164/lk201var.h.diff

And pmax (sys/dev/tc):
http://2.248.109.164/zskbd.c.diff

Btw, I was looking at the old Xhpc and Xmacppc servers and they do not look
trivial to get compiling in the current X11 tree.
Saw that hpcsh ships with Xorg too nowadays. It used Xhpc when I last
used it. So no help there. :/

Anyone familiar with Tiny-X?
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=16299.0
Perhaps a better option? Of course, someone would have to write the wsfb
code to hook into it.

Thoughts?

/Björn


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[David Brownlee]

Post by Björn Johannesson
Anyways, gleening at the openbsd code I have now un-fubar'd the keyboard
in X11. \o/ (I'm hoping Jochen still will send me the mouse he promised :P)
http://2.248.109.164/netbsd.generic
This involves changing three files in sys/dev/dec
dzkbd.c, lk201_ws.c and lk201var.h

Wonderful stuff!

Post by Björn Johannesson
However... this also effects other users of the LK-keyboards (pmax).
I do not own a suitable machine for testing.
This looks suspiciously like the vax code. X11-kbd in pmax fubar too?
Does anyone know the state of affairs for pmax? Someone said that the pmax
port is totally broken.

I think some of the MI mips changes may have caused some pmax issues,
and I think it is still waiting on someone with the combination of
time, inclination and access to hardware to fix :/

Last I checked pkgsrc/emulators/gxemul emulated a few DECstations
enough to test NetBSD.

I would say if the changes fix VAX keyboards & mice at this point it
would probably be worth going ahead and committing them (unless you
have the time and inclination and someone would like to ship you a
little DECstation to go with your VAXen? :)

Post by Björn Johannesson
http://2.248.109.164/pmax.generic
http://2.248.109.164/dzkbd.c.diff
http://2.248.109.164/lk201_ws.c.diff
http://2.248.109.164/lk201var.h.diff
http://2.248.109.164/zskbd.c.diff
Btw, I was looking at the old Xhpc and Xmacppc servers and they do not look
trivial to get compiling in the current X11 tree.
Saw that hpcsh ships with Xorg too nowadays. It used Xhpc when I last
used it. So no help there. :/
Anyone familiar with Tiny-X?
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=16299.0
Perhaps a better option? Of course, someone would have to write the wsfb
code to hook into it.

If any X11 variation is picked someone will probably need to go
through all the recent X11 security announcements and check the old
code :)

Another option might be to look at what compile options are available
with the current code and see how much could be compiled out and if
the rest could be built into a single large binary.

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[Björn Johannesson]

Hi!

Post by David Brownlee
I would say if the changes fix VAX keyboards & mice at this point it
would probably be worth going ahead and committing them (unless you
have the time and inclination and someone would like to ship you a
little DECstation to go with your VAXen? :)

Agreed. And if someone would want to send a suitable DECstation
to me (Sweden) I would certainly have a look. :)

Post by David Brownlee
If any X11 variation is picked someone will probably need to go
through all the recent X11 security announcements and check the old
code :)

And fun will be had all around. >_>

Post by David Brownlee
Another option might be to look at what compile options are available
with the current code and see how much could be compiled out and if
the rest could be built into a single large binary.

So I downloaded xsrc.tgz from nyftp but I don't really know where to start...
Just doing a 'sh configure' in /usr/xsrc/external/mit/xorg-server/dist
errors out with "config.status: error: cannot find input file: test/xi1/Makefile.in"
Anyone got any pointers?

/Björn


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[David Brownlee]

Post by Björn Johannesson
Hi!

Post by David Brownlee
I would say if the changes fix VAX keyboards & mice at this point it
would probably be worth going ahead and committing them (unless you
have the time and inclination and someone would like to ship you a
little DECstation to go with your VAXen? :)

Agreed. And if someone would want to send a suitable DECstation
to me (Sweden) I would certainly have a look. :)

Hmm, I've had good luck finding interesting hardware on some of the
retrocomputing email lists. I'll have a poke to see if anyone has a nice
little DECstation 2100 spare :)

Post by Björn Johannesson
If any X11 variation is picked someone will probably need to go

Post by David Brownlee
through all the recent X11 security announcements and check the old
code :)

And fun will be had all around. >_>

Post by David Brownlee
Another option might be to look at what compile options are available
with the current code and see how much could be compiled out and if
the rest could be built into a single large binary.

So I downloaded xsrc.tgz from nyftp but I don't really know where to start...
Just doing a 'sh configure' in /usr/xsrc/external/mit/xorg-server/dist
test/xi1/Makefile.in"
Anyone got any pointers?

The standard way to build xsrc on NetBSD is to extract it (default
/usr/xsrc), then run ./build.sh -m vax -x

If xsrc is somewhere else, then you will need to add -X /path/to/xsrc or
add X11SRCDIR to /etc/mk.conf

Once you have an initial build you can tweak setup and rerun the generated
nbmake-vax in appropriate directories.

I'm assuming this is being run on a relatively fast modern box, or you have
significant patience :-p