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This is my attempt to get Vulkan going on NetBSD

81 points

by segaboy81

6 hours ago

| past

| 8 comments

| github.com

| HN

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Tiberium

5 hours ago

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Lavapipe is CPU rendering, it doesn't really prove much. But also, Vulkan on BSDs is totally possible and isn't something esoteric, FreeBSD has it.

> Build goal only: This targets compilation and linkage of the Vulkan stack. Runtime GPU acceleration is not available under VirtualBox; the software driver (Lavapipe) is the target.

I don't understand why this would ever be a problem, even without LLM assistance it's something that sounds like a weekend project?

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klibertp

4 hours ago

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Installation instructions:

    ftp https://raw.githubusercontent.com/segaboy/vulkan-netbsd/main/scripts/setup-env.sh
       !^^^^^!

That's... a bit unorthodox. FreeBSD has a `fetch`[1] utility for this, I wasn't aware NetBSD puts that in `ftp`[2].

Interesting choice. I wonder what led to it.

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?fetch

[2] https://man.netbsd.org/ftp.1

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yjftsjthsd-h

3 hours ago

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I dunno, that feels very BSD to me. Presumably, they had a ftp utility first, and then when somebody wanted to download files over http they looked around and decided that the obvious thing to do was to add it to the existing file transfer/download program. Same as continuing to add functions to ifconfig rather than inventing a new ip tool.

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iberator

4 hours ago

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Oldest supported machine for NetBSD is VAX 780 from 1978(!!!). One of the first system supporting mmu, 32 bit cpu, virtual memory etc etc

This machine is so slow that it takes a lot of time to generate ssh keys etc. We talking here hours hehe

NetBSD is known to support like 60 architectures - many of them low end embedded systems: so ftp AS A CHOICE (you have other options!) is very smart and easy

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spijdar

4 hours ago

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I think GP is confused why the ftp command also handles http(s) :)

I hate to imagine what a 780 running NetBSD would be like, too.

I tried netbooting NetBSD on my MicroVAX 3400, which is about 2.5x the performance of the 780. It did, literally, take 6+ hours to slog through making RSA keys.

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kevin_thibedeau

27 minutes ago

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Elliptic curve key gen is much faster on slow hardware. You're waiting around on primality tests that aren't necessary with modern keys.

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klibertp

4 hours ago

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> I think GP is confused why the ftp command also handles http(s) :)

Exactly - I even suspected for a second that `ftp` on NetBSD is something else entirely, not an actual FTP client with HTTP/HTTPS URLs bolted on. It's not - it still accepts a host as an argument and opens a CLI if there's an FTP server to talk to.

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qiu3344

5 hours ago

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> Vulkan is now available

looks inside:

> What this is NOT (yet): Running Vulkan programs

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LoganDark

4 hours ago

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Technically, it isn't wrong, if you consider Vulkan the technology rather than the service