GSoC 2013 [flashrom] blog post #7

Nothing too fancy to report this week. I have added NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD support to our buildbot, which took quite a while: I have never set up a VirtualBox VM on a headless machine. It is quite easy actually, but there are lots of options one can configure with the CLI so that the most important/unconditional ones are not obvious at all. For example, storage controllers need to have a user-defined name given to address it in later commands, one has to specify the bus and device number when attaching a hd to an IDE storage controller (even if you don’t care at all) etc. It does not sound very problematic, but…
$ VBoxManage | wc -l
495
That’s quite a wall of text. Luckily there is good documentation and lots of howtos online.

In general it wasn’t too bad and the RDP console support of VirtualBox in conjunction with Remmina made up for it: I did not want to set up port forwarding on the remote host nor ssh tunnels myself, but Remmina can do the latter automatically on connect which is really handy.

Configuring the BSDs was way worse. Mostly because I was completely unfamiliar with them and pkgsrc, but also because they have a long way to go regarding usability. Not only that the DragonFly installer does not even try to set a correct keymap, even after installation I could not get that to work and the installer has a few other quirks that thwarts some functionality completely.

Anyway, build testing works on these hosts now and will hopefully prevent future breakage when tinkering with OS-dependent preprocessor #ifdefs (unlike before…). Next: some refactoring of the build bot and fixing issues with getrevision’s use of date on BSDs. Then back again to layout patches and libflashrom.