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Posts tagged “theokillsyourpony”

• August 12, 2006 Theo Kills Your Pony

  A few things.

  First, Arlo is doing well:

  

  Second, there's this.

  Third, work has started on the world's most useless project: Theo Kills Your Pony, the aggressively destructive Unix-like system. (Thanks to Zen Render for the name!). I'm attempting to do things semi-right, and that means I've had to learn a bit more about how OpenBSD (and BSD in general) is put together.

  Like what? Well, like the name for example. The OS is called TKYP, so that's what I want to show up everywhere. I figured I would start with the output of uname(1), since that's the most Thing is, this took a surprisingly long time to track down.

  uname(1) is, as you might expect, a simple wrapper around the uname(3) libc function, which is in turn a pretty simple wrapper around a sysctl call. Through paths that, frankly, I'm still tracking down, you finally get to sys/conf/newvers.sh -- a simple shell script that creates a file called vers.c and sets the variables ostype, osrelease and osversion within it. (Paths are relative to /usr/src, BTW.) After that, the different sys/arch/*/conf/Makefiles compile it -- sys/arch/i386/conf/Makefile.i386, for example -- and then include it in SYSTEM_LD. After that, <handwave>I think these values are simply returned by sysctl(3)</handwave>.

  Okay, so now I've tracked that down; I rebuild and install the kernel, then reboot. (QEMU rocks for this sort of thing.) And yay, it works:

  -bash-3.1#  uname -a
  TKYP tkyp-qemu 0.1 GENERIC#0 i386
  
  

  Now to rebuild world, right? Wrong: first, Apache kept refusing to compile with an error about not being able to find -ldbm. Trolling through the mailing lists only found one message mentioning a similar problem, and no reply. The CVS tree showed that, since 3.9, a couple minor changes had been committed to the httpd Makefiles mentioning that OpenBSD has used its own dbm library for a while. I tried making a few changes, but couldn't get it to work. So I cheated: I removed httpd from usr.sbin/Makefile and moved on with my life.

  Next problem: the GNU configure tools haven't heard of TKYP. (I'm sure I emailed RMS about this...). gnu/usr.bin/binutils is the first thing compiled in world that uses these tools, so that's where I'm looking first. A little judicious editing of config.guess (which guesses the OS and architecture), configure (which figures out what needs to be done for the OS/arch) and config.sub (which says it's a "configuration validation subroutine script"; I'm guessing a basic sanity check) takes care of thing. They're fairly simple changes, as it's pretty much just a matter of copying the OpenBSD entries.

  And all this before I can even throw in anything nasty! I got big plans, of course -- SIGKILL replaced with SIGHUP, rot13 encryption for passwords, and the RTM worm pre-installed -- but I haven't even had a buildworld finish yet. Plus, there's the cautionary tale of MicroBSD to keep in mind...whatever else I do, I wanna make sure I piss off Theo for the right reasons. :-)

  (Incidentally, the email to root is in etc/root/root.mail; etc/Makefile installs it in the right place. I thought for sure it'd be in share for some reason. newvers.sh mentions this file, plus a few others, that need to be changed to reflect new version numbers.)