Void Linux Bhyve Image on OmniOS

Posted by Dave Eddy on Sep 19 2022 - tags: tech

This guide will show how to install Void Linux as a guest on OmniOS using hardware virtualization with bhyve.

Configure the system

To get started, first install zadm on OmniOS inside the global zone. This tool makes creating and managing zones simple and is reminiscent of the vmadm command on SmartOS.

Install zadm:

pkg install zadm
pkg install zones/brand/bhyve

I personally use this config for zadm (shoutouts to @papertigers for this), but feel free to customize this as you like.

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Programmatically Generated Piano Music

Posted by Dave Eddy on Dec 17 2021 - tags: tech

I wrote a computer program to generate piano music on the command line. The generation is done with a simple algorithm to create patterns in MIDI format, which is then imported into my DAW to process the data and turn it into music. There is no AI or Machine Learning in this algorithm - the music is programmatically generated and this video covers the algorithm that I created in detail.

I Made a Computer Program to Generate Piano Music

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New Album - Inspired

Posted by Dave Eddy on Jun 01 2021 - tags: music

I released my latest album on June 1st, 2021!

My 5th album (4th full-length). Inspired consists of songs mostly written during 2020 and 2021 - when I decided to quit my job and focus more on music creation. It’s comprised of piano and instrumental tracks.

Download or stream Inspired.

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sshp Rewrite from JavaScript to C

Posted by Dave Eddy on May 20 2021 - tags: tech

In 2013, I wrote a program in Node.js called sshp. This was right around the time I was investing heavily into learning node, and honestly having a blast doing it. Node is quick and fun to write, and with only a couple hundred lines of code, I was able to write node-sshp.

node-sshp is a command line utility that acts as a parallelizer for ssh. It works by taking in a file containing a list of hosts to connect to and looping over each host firing off an ssh command in parallel (with a configurable maximum number of concurrent processes). The tool’s description is:

sshp manages multiple ssh processes and handles coalescing the output to the terminal. By default, sshp will read a file of newline-separated hostnames or IPs and fork ssh subprocesses for them, redirecting the stdout and stderr streams of the child line-by-line to stdout of sshp itself.

Writing this tool in Node was an obvious choice at the time: the company I was working for was using Node heavily, and this tool was written specifically to be used at my job. Managing multiple concurrent child processes and IO streams also made Node the obvious choice.

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Super Mario 64 Decompilation on Void Linux

Posted by Dave Eddy on Sep 09 2020 - tags: tech

Super Mario 64 is one of my all-time favorite games. Last year, the source code for the decompilation project was made available to the public. I won’t go into detail on the decompilation project itself (see this post here for more information), but instead will focus on getting Super Mario 64 compiled on Void Linux.

Getting Started

A couple of dependencies will need to be installed that will be used throughout the installation process. Note that root privileges are only required in commands where sudo is used - the rest of the commands can be run as an unprivileged user.

sudo xbps-install git
sudo xbps-install make
sudo xbps-install wget

mkdir ~/dev ~/src

For this guide, the sm64 source code will be checked out into ~/dev, and the required dependencies that are installed manually will be in ~/src, of which there are 2:

  1. qemu-irix
  2. binutils-mips64

qemu-irix

To install this package, I found it easiest to take the qemu-irix release as a .deb file from the n64decomp GitHub organization and extract the deb myself.

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Pump It Up Pad Refurbishment and Upgrade

Posted by Dave Eddy on Feb 06 2020 - tags: diy

In 2018 I created my own DIY Pump It Up Pad Platform With Bars - it was a combination of Precision Dance Pads and a platform with bars I created myself. This setup was… decent at best. I wanted the full arcade experience, and knew that nothing was going to satisfy that except for the real arcade pads.

Luckily for me, my friend Kate added me to a buy/sell/trade Facebook group for arcade rhythm games, and within the first week there was a post for used Pump It Up pads for sale about 8 hours away from my house. I jumped on that opportunity immediately!

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DIY Wooden Long Desk

Posted by Dave Eddy on Dec 17 2019 - tags: diy

In 2016 I built an Overwatch Themed Desk for my bedroom to use with my gaming machine. Recently, I’ve been getting really into streaming on Twitch and I needed more desk space. I want to do more tech related streams, and gaming in general, and need more desk space for multiple computers.

I decided I should build a new longer desk to replace the desk I currently use. I wanted it to be the same height and depth, but this time make it 6 feet long.

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SmartOS COAL on Linux KVM with Virt Manager

Posted by Dave Eddy on Feb 12 2019 - tags: tech

COAL, or Cloud-on-a-Laptop, is an easy way to run and test SmartOS and the Triton Stack in a self-contained VM meant to be run on a laptop. The sdc-headnode repository makes a lot of assumptions when building a COAL image about using VMWare for virtualization on an OS X laptop. However, with some modifications it is possible to run COAL on Linux via KVM managed through virt-manager.

To get virt-manager setup and running on Void Linux, you can follow my guide KVM Virtualization with virt-manager on Void Linux.

Nested Virtualization (optional)

Before getting started with the COAL building process, you can choose to enable nested virtualization if your hardware supports it. This is required if you would like to run bhyve zones on your COAL setup. Note that this setup assumes an Intel CPU.

You can check if your CPU supports nested virtualization by running:

$ grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c ' vmx '
8

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KVM Virtualization with virt-manager on Void Linux

Posted by Dave Eddy on Feb 11 2019 - tags: tech

Running and managing virtual machines on Linux is very easy using the virt-manager GUI program. Under the hood, the virtualization technology takes advantage of KVM (Kernel Virtal Machine) in the Linux kernel. The result of both of these together is fast and efficient hardware virtual machines with a really easy and straightforward GUI to manage them.

For this post, I’ll be using the following tools I’ve talked about in my blog post Using Void Linux as my Daily Driver:

  • vsv - Void Service Manager
  • vpm - Void Package Manager

Installation

Install the following packages to get started:

sudo vpm i virt-manager libvirt qemu

Start the services that are created by these packages:

sudo ln -s /etc/sv/libvirtd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlockd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlogd /var/service

Use vsv to check the status of the services:

sudo vsv status virt

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