My cross chain fails when trying to build libgcc.a How annoying but I already have one, so I bypass it, and GCC then tries to build the crt (c runtime library startup code) and that fails too!

../binutils-990818-bulid/gas/as-new crtstuff.S -o crtstuff.o
Segmentation fault

I’m using GCC 12.2.0 on Debian 12. Ok maybe I’ve finally hit drift, so let me try some other binutils. binutils-2.10.1, binutils-2.14. I had originally been lying saying I’m a Dec Alpha running either OSF or Linux as it matches the size & endian alignment, but no dice. I found out about the ‘linux32’ command that’ll fake it’s environment as an i686 processor to fake out a lot of builds. But the same result over and over. So, I break down and fire up GDB.

(gdb) r
Starting program: /root/src/xmach/binutils-2.14-bulid/gas/as-new crtstuff.S -o crtstuff.o
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000555555592ef0 in md_estimate_size_before_relax (fragP=fragP@entry=0x555555668fa8, segment=segment@entry=0x555555668730) at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/config/tc-i386.c:4441
4441      return md_relax_table[fragP->fr_subtype]->rlx_length;
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000555555592ef0 in md_estimate_size_before_relax (fragP=fragP@entry=0x555555668fa8, segment=segment@entry=0x555555668730) at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/config/tc-i386.c:4441
#1  0x000055555558bce2 in relax_segment (segment_frag_root=0x555555668f30, segment=segment@entry=0x555555668730) at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/write.c:2266
#2  0x000055555558c39c in relax_seg (abfd=<optimized out>, sec=0x555555668730, xxx=0x7fffffffe960) at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/write.c:659
#3  0x000055555559b01f in bfd_map_over_sections (abfd=0x55555565e030, operation=operation@entry=0x55555558c370 <relax_seg>, user_storage=user_storage@entry=0x7fffffffe960)
    at ../../binutils-2.14/bfd/section.c:1101
#4  0x000055555558b501 in write_object_file () at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/write.c:1565
#5  0x000055555556e288 in main (argc=2, argv=0x5555556302d0) at ../../binutils-2.14/gas/as.c:924
(gdb) quit

The whole issue revolves around md_relax_table! I’d seen a ‘fix’ where you add in a pointer, and it’ll satisfy GCC and sure it’ll compile. Years ago, I had #ifdef’d it out until when I needed it, but the real answer is to embrace 1989 and set the compiler flags to “-std=gnu89”

I can’t help but think at some point soon 1989 will be removed as it’s only wierdos like me building this stuff.

Just as the old Unix error status of sys_nerr has been removed for ‘reasons’ so may as well amputate all the old code:

-  if (e > 0 && e < sys_nerr)
-    return sys_errlist[e];

Nothing much you can do about it, Linux isn’t trying to be Unix anymore.

64/32

In the end it doesn’t seem to matter. OSkit fails to build:

i586-linux-gcc -c -o base_multiboot_init_cmdline.o -MD -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -DOSKIT_X86 -DOSKIT_X86_PC -DINDIRECT_OSENV=1 -I. -I../../oskit-20020317/kern/x86 -I../../oskit-20020317/kern/x86/pc -I../../oskit-20020317/kern/x86/dos -I../../oskit-20020317/kern  -I- -I../../oskit-20020317/oskit/c -I.. -I../../oskit-20020317 -nostdinc -Wall  -O2 -g  ../../oskit-20020317/kern/x86/pc/base_multiboot_init_cmdline.c
i586-linux-gcc: Internal compiler error: program cc1 got fatal signal 11
make[1]: *** [../../oskit-20020317/GNUmakerules:124: base_multiboot_init_cmdline.o] Error 1

And surprisingly mig does build, but Mach does not.

i586-linux-gcc -c   -MD -DLINUX_DEV=1 -DHAVE_VPRINTF=1 -DHAVE_STRERROR=1  -Di386 -DMACH -DCMU -I- -I. -I../../../kernel/libmach/standalone -I../../../kernel/libmach/c -I../../../kernel/libmach -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/../kernel/generic/libmach/standalone -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/../kernel/generic/libmach/c -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/../kernel/generic/libmach -I../../../kernel/include/mach/sa -I../../../kernel/include -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/../kernel/generic/include -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/include -I/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/../kernel/generic/include/mach/sa -nostdinc  -O1 /root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach/bootstrap_server.c
/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach/bootstrap_server.c: In function `_Xbootstrap_privileged_ports':
/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach/bootstrap_server.c:90: `null' undeclared (first use this function)
/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach/bootstrap_server.c:90: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/root/src/xmach/xMach/object-kern/libmach/bootstrap_server.c:90: for each function it appears in.)

Needless to say, this is why I don’t use OS X anymore. Not having a 32bit userland basically killed it for me.

I guess the next step is to go ahead with qemu-user mode wrappers to fake it.

Sorry if you were hoping for some great conclusion.

I’m sure if you google around you can easily find it.

To install you apparently need an early AMD 64 processor, otherwise it’ll trap on the installer. Back in 2004, I got a newly refurbished AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor, from Tiger Direct. The machine was only a few months old, and I was able to get an early XP build for it. Oddly enough it’s simple enough to install on Qemu. I was able to use 0.90 & 7.20, jumping at extremes, although the PCI NIC IRQ’s do jump around on 0.90 preventing the networking from working.

I had a LOT of trouble getting a bootable hard disk image out of this for some reason. So I’ve found keeping C around 2,000 Megabytes, and installing MS-DOS 5/6 got me a bootable system. Also preserving the FAT disk. Not sure why but doing formats of FAT or NTFS always seemed to result in a non bootable disk

qemu-system-x86_64w.exe -cpu Opteron_G1-v1 -hda 2g.vmdk -m 512 -M pc-i440fx-2.0 -net nic,model=rtl8139,netdev=f00 -netdev user,id=f00,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:3389 -usb -usbdevice tablet  -accel tcg,thread=multi

Special thanks to RoyTam for the suggestion of the USB tablet & turning TCG multithreaded for v7+ of Qemu

Setting up is pretty normal.

You do get 360 days to use the beta. More than enough for simple testing. I’ve seen that the timebomb doesn’t work correctly so it may work forever. But it’s so rough around the edges, I can’t see anyone trying to run this native in 2023.

Notice it’s all AMD branding. Intel officially didn’t have their EMT64 Pentium 4’s, although IBM was pushing Intel hard to get them out the door. And I think they held off on a larger x86_64 launch as Intel had not publicly caved.

And in no time you are up and running. I find the mouse really weird on Qemu, so I always enable the remote desktop function and find it much easier to deal with.

One of the advantages of RDP is that audio redirection does work, so you can play pinball!

One annoying thing (to me) is that the SysFader process will hang all the time locking explorer.exe . Along with that it’ll leave phantom UI elements haning around like the Run… above. Yes, its annoying!

The solution is of course System Properties, and Performance, and either disable the Fade elements, or just turn off all the ‘eye candy’ which basically doesn’t really exist for this release anyways.

While there is some DirectX support, it is most likely just simple GDI passthrough, and of course no acceleration as the OpenGL screensavers run incredibly slow.

As mentioned, hardware support is VERY limited. The single audio driver is a MPU401 port. This obviously was meant for an exceptionally limited audience.

The one thing I cannot find, is any version of a Platform SDK that targets AMD64 so early. The earliest I can find is version 14 from 2005.

The 2005 compiler does have this note:

The Microsoft® C/C++ AMD64 Processor Family-targeting compiler is a cross-compiler targeting the AMD64 processor family. The compiler runs on an x86 or AMD64 computer running Microsoft Windows® XP or Microsoft Windows® Server 2003. It is the compiler used for Microsoft® internal development and is used for building Microsoft Windows NT®, Microsoft SQL Server®, and other major applications. For debugging we suggest the use of WinDbg for AMD64. Visual Studio Whidbey will support the use of the Visual Studio debugger for debugging AMD64 applications.

2005-06 – 2944.0 – Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 SP1 (April 2005 Edition)

With the compiler being:

Microsoft (R) C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 14.00.40310.41 for AMD64
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

If anyone knows of anything earlier, I’d love to know! If only for the sake of messing around with it.

With the collapse of my vpsland archive, Neko has become lost once more again. Thankfully I had some fragment backups so I have been able to bring Neko back from the grave. again.

First I dumped everything I had over on sourceforge. With a bit more digging I found the old RISC versions as well. I even found the Itanium version, although I lost the ARM version. Im not sure I have an 8gb pi4 anymore, but I’d like to get one when/if prices stop being insane. Anyways I also uploaded the source to github, since it’s more hip and acceptable for zoomers. I do have to say the git mirror command was everything I’d hoped it’d be.

git push --mirror https://github.com/neozeed/neko98.git

It literally was that easy.

I put a binary built with Visual C++ 2010 SP1 over there too. Although if you need Visual C++ 2010 runtimes, I put them on sourceforge.

Also I should add in the settings make sure you click “Always On Top”, otherwise Neko will be hidden to the desktop surface and you won’t see him.

I hope you enjoy!

While everybody is busy buzzing about Windows 11, I wanted to commemorate the finest operating system ever made by Microsoft – Nano Server.

For most of people Nano Server was esoteric, distant and unapproachable. It had a rather high entry barrier, requiring you to build it on a Windows Server 2016 host using PowerShell magic spells. You couldn’t just simply download and run it. Even if you managed to get it running, there wasn’t anything you could actually do with it for fun. People didn’t bother to even check it out. My goal is to demystify this a bit, lower the entry bar and made it easy for people to hack it.

Background info (you can skip it)

Nano Server was an interesting attempt at creating a datacenter grade OS that’s not managed via local GUI, keyboard and mouse, but rather full automation, remote tooling and code. It went one step further than Server Core or Windows PE by completely removing GUI components and local shell. Hence it’s not actually called “Windows” or “Windows Nano” but rather simply “Nano Server”. Rumor has it, it started as MinWin. The OS has a rudimentary text mode console with functionality similar of VMware ESXi console. However Nano was much more than a bare metal hypervisor. It was a fully fledged operating system. Unlike ESXi you can develop and install services/apps for it and hypervisor wasn’t even it’s default role.

Ever since I first saw a demo on Microsoft Ignite (previously known as TechEd) I wanted to run aclock on the text console. Much like the WinNT BSOD edition. This article started around my efforts to run (or port if needed) aclock to this platform. At the time of writing, the technology has been dead for several years now. However all the artifacts and documentation are still available on Microsoft’s website. Probably not for long, so a good moment to do it now, before everything gets deleted in to oblivion.

How to quickly deploy Nano Server and run command line apps on the console

The hard way: you need to download Windows 2016 Server (eval) and run a PowerShell command to produce a bootable VHD file.

Microsoft provides (soon to be deleted) Nano Server Quick Start. However the steps are trivial so you can totally skip that and just do this:

• Launch PowerShell terminal window on the WS2016 host.
• Run: Import-Module D:\NanoServer\NanoServerImageGenerator -Verbose
  (D:\ drive being where Windows Server CDROM is mounted)
• Run: New-NanoServerImage -DeploymentType Guest -Edition Standard -MediaPath d:\ -BasePath c:\nano -TargetPath c:\nano.vhdx -ComputerName nano -Development
  (c:\nano folder and c:\nano.vhdx image will be created for you)

Done! This will build a .vhdx image that can be run under Hyper-V as “Gen-2” VM. For Gen-1 or to run it on any other hypervisor change .vhdx to .vhd in -TargetPath while running the PowerShell command.

The easy way: you can just download a pre-built VM image from here. There are VHD for Hyper-v Gen-1 and VHDX for Hyper-v Gen-2 and OVA for everything else. There also is VMDK.

First Boot

Once you boot it up you will be greeted with a PowerShell prompt. Just like that! You can type cmd to launch the good old cmd.exe shell. MS-DOS 2016?

Keep in mind, this is a developer mode (see -Development flag). Normally you would be greeted with a login prompt and a boring menu that allows to change some networking settings and not much beyond that. In production mode you need to resort to hacks (or this) to get stuff running, fortunately nothing like that needed here.

So what can you run on it?

Firstly in order to get some external utilities going, you can mount a SMB share using net use in cmd or New-SMBMapping in PS world. Nano being a server and all, you can also share out a folder via net share or use C$ (you may need to create a user by using either net user /add in cmd or New-LocalUser in PS). Alternatively you can install Posh-SSH and use SCP to transfer files. If you don’t have working network you can just shut it down, mount the vhd image on the host and copy stuff in to the image then detach the VHD.

Aclock worked on the first run, no issues, using standard win64 exe:

Wow! So looks like Nano console does have basic terminal controls. That opens quite a lot of possibilities. But can you run more complex apps? Text editors? Web browsers? GAMES?

Well, yes…, but likely not, but it really depends – on dependencies (read: DLLs).

From all the editors I tried XVI is probably the best:

Everything else has a variety of issues:

• The font is lacking line drawing characters. Some editors like YEdit allow to use ASCII drawing characters fortunately.
• There is no reverse video. This manifests mostly in menus, etc. however it also applies to the cursor.
• There is no cursor, or rather the cursor is an underscore and not transparent cell. Moving arrow left in the CLI doesn’t actually move the cursor it erases characters. There is no line editing.
• Also related to reverse video, it appears Nano console has some weird issues with colors.
• Missing DLLs. Nano Server not being a “Windows” OS is missing a lot of Windows DLLs and it has its own nano DLL hell. This has actually been acknowledged in MinWin. As such a lot of apps will not launch due to dependencies.

For example YEdit works remarkably well except for the menus, which use reverse video:

Update: Malcolm has fixed it in latest version of YEdit! Thank you!

Update: thanks to Ron Yorston you can also run BusyBox on Nano! All you need to do is get the 64bit version and before you run it set an environmental variable to disable ANSI emulation. In CMD set BB_SKIP_ANSI_EMULATION=0 in PS $env:BB_SKIP_ANSI_EMULATION=0. Done!

You even get ls colors and vi editor works flawlessly! Unix shell on Nano, thats awesome!

So what about games?

Initially nothing worked as expected. Either due to line drawing, colors or previously mentioned DLL hell. There was one game that actually worked – PowerShell adaptation of snake:

But I wanted something better. I had high hopes for ascii-patrol, which is pure text mode and they build it for win64. Unfortunately the game requires a bunch of multimedia / sound DLLs from Windows which are not present in Nano.

Thankfully Neozeed has stepped in, took the source code, amputated all the multimedia stuff, borrowed the Unix clock code and gettimeofday, and used an older Visual Studio to build it. But he managed to produce a fully working and playable version!!!! Truly amazing stuff!

The binary is available here. To play the game scroll down one screen to start a mission. If you enter profile customization simply press ESC to get out. Thanks again Neozeed!

I’m hoping readers can find more text mode/ascii apps and games that will work on the console. Please comment and send links!

In another dimension, having a working text editor, Yori shell, smb/scp, maybe with help of mingw64, sdk tools or borrowed compilers from Visual Studio, one could have a self hosted developer workstation with this.

For now please just download the pre-build image, or make one yourself and run it in your favorite hypervisor and have some fun with it!

With this, goodbye Nano Server! You will be always remembered. I know folks at Redmond tried really hard to make it such beautiful gem.

Update: Running Nano Server on VMware ESXi

If you want to run Nano Server on VMware ESXi, you need to do following: extract drivers from VMware Tools using setup64.exe /a . You will need PVSCSI and VMXNET3. Then point New-NanoServerImage ... -Drivers c:\path to include them in the image. Use VHD instead of VHDX (Gen1) then finally convert the image like so
qemu-img convert -f vpc -O vmdk -o subformat=monolithicSparse nano.vhd nano.vmdk and finally on ESXi host
vmkfstools -i nano.vmdk nanot.vmdk -d thin. When creating new VM set it to Server 2016 but make firmware type BIOS as opposed to EFI. More details can be found here.

The VMDK file can also be downloaded here.

Update: TTY Sokoban for Nano!

Download here

Don’t get me wrong, the original 32bit exe runs fine under emulation, but who wants emulation when you can have NATIVE CODE?! You’d have to try to find the source code (lol good luck!) or reverse engineer the program. And that’s what happened, enter:

k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball: Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet (github.com)

I’m using Visual Studio 2019 to build this, and it was great it *just worked*. Hurray!

There is also a rebuild going on for SDL to bring Space Cadet Pin Ball to Linux and beyond. The only downside is that it uses a number of ‘new C++ features’ locking out older platforms. I’d done some work to dumb it down although there is a bit of this new fangled C++ I’m unsure of what is going on. So that means, unfortunately Itanium users are left in the dark, as Visual Studio 2010 is too old.

expand f:\amd64\font.da_ font.dat
expand f:\amd64\pinball.da_ pinball.dat
expand f:\amd64\pinball.ex_ pinball.exe
expand f:\amd64\pinball.in_ pinball.inf
expand f:\amd64\pinball.mi_ pinball.mid
expand f:\amd64\pinball2.mi_ pinball2.mid
expand f:\amd64\sound1.wa_ sound1.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound104.wa_ sound104.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound105.wa_ sound105.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound108.wa_ sound108.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound111.wa_ sound111.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound112.wa_ sound112.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound12.wa_ sound12.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound13.wa_ sound13.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound131.wa_ sound131.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound136.wa_ sound136.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound14.wa_ sound14.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound16.wa_ sound16.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound17.wa_ sound17.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound18.wa_ sound18.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound181.wa_ sound181.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound19.wa_ sound19.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound20.wa_ sound20.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound21.wa_ sound21.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound22.wa_ sound22.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound24.wa_ sound24.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound240.wa_ sound240.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound243.wa_ sound243.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound25.wa_ sound25.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound26.wa_ sound26.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound27.wa_ sound27.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound28.wa_ sound28.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound29.wa_ sound29.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound3.wa_ sound3.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound30.wa_ sound30.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound34.wa_ sound34.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound35.wa_ sound35.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound36.wa_ sound36.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound38.wa_ sound38.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound39.wa_ sound39.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound4.wa_ sound4.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound42.wa_ sound42.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound43.wa_ sound43.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound45.wa_ sound45.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound49.wa_ sound49.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound49d.wa_ sound49d.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound5.wa_ sound5.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound50.wa_ sound50.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound528.wa_ sound528.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound53.wa_ sound53.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound54.wa_ sound54.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound55.wa_ sound55.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound560.wa_ sound560.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound563.wa_ sound563.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound57.wa_ sound57.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound58.wa_ sound58.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound6.wa_ sound6.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound65.wa_ sound65.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound68.wa_ sound68.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound7.wa_ sound7.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound713.wa_ sound713.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound735.wa_ sound735.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound8.wa_ sound8.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound827.wa_ sound827.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound9.wa_ sound9.wav
expand f:\amd64\sound999.wa_ sound999.wav
expand f:\amd64\table.bm_ table.bmp
copy f:\amd64\WAVEMIX.inf WAVEMIX.INF

Naturally you’ll want to substitute F:\ with whatever drive letter your CD-ROM/ISO file is mounted on.

And thanks to a long needed feature in Windows 10 you can verify that yes indeed it is a 64bit version.

Or skip the pain, and download the first currently available AMD64 version here: pinball-3790-1069.7z

Isn’t that awesome?! Obviously ARM64 users are left out in the dark, as far as I know there was no ARM64 versions of Windows XP. As a matter of fact, was there any public versions of Windows XP for ARM? Naturally the Surface RT shipped with 8.0

Anyways at long last we can have our 64bit pinball despite the weird bugs, and how the plunger is mostly hidden no doubt due to yet more weird floating point/integer size inconsistencies

It’s crazy how crypto went from being an obtuse tool, to suddenly being in the hands of normal people with a public web of trust, and widely available source. And of course it was that widely available source that led to the first real people of trying to geofence on the internet, and it was naturally impossible to contain, even in the era before VPN’s people were able to circumvent any and all “protections” and download away. Strong cryptography went from being something considered ‘weapons grade’ and thusly requiring a munitions license to produce and distribute to suddenly being available to the world at large.

Investigations were launched, agencies contacted, and in spite of it all people had signing parities to exchange public keys, and sign the trust building the web. Try as some people may have demanded ‘back door access’ or black box crypto chips, the cat was out of the bag, and all you needed was a C compiler and a zip file small enough to easily fit on a low density 5 1/4″ diskette. It is 1991 after all, and there is still a sizable amount of XT/AT class machines out there, along with the 68000 Amiga/Atari/Macintosh (upgraded QL’s? 128kb really isn’t enough).

PGP 1.0 is from another era, originally written in the late 80’s cleaned up and released in 1991 where mass produced 64bit machines were still a bit off, and thusly PGP 1.0 really supports 16bit & 32bit OS’s. For the purpose of this ‘revival’ I went with the Unix port, the aptly named unix_pgp10.tar.gz. And from the MS-DOS version I extracted the test data to make sure it works in the file pgp10-test-data.tar.gz

$ file pgp
 pgp: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=cd9ecbf51fab24abbb7153a2cc04bb01bbf2ae91, not stripped
$ ./pgp testfile.ctx
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 File is encrypted.  Secret key is required to read it.
 Key for user ID: Bond, James (007)
 288-bit key, Key ID A27A1F, created Sat Oct 19 23:56:24 3006391
 You need a pass phrase to unlock your RSA secret key.
 Enter pass phrase:

While it was simple enough to build, sadly on x64 WSL instance it doesn’t work. There is no pass phrase for the test data.

Normally I have one of usual two choices a) try to fix PGP to be 64bit friendly or b) run it under a 32bit environment. Normally I would do b, but I went digging into some porting strategies for the a choice and ran into this totally underused tech x32.

Long story short you keep your 32bit integers, you run like it’s a 32bit process but you are mapped into a 64bit address space. Even better -static works!

On Debian 10 the environment can be installed with the following:

apt-get install gcc-7 lib32gcc-7-dev libgcc-7-dev libx32gcc-7-dev gcc-7-multilib

Then to invoke it, use gcc-7 -mx32 . It’s that easy.

WSLv1 vs WSLv2

$ ./pgp
 -bash: ./pgp: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
$ file pgp
 pgp: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=2aa5f030603018ca1dc6c5c10aa979751b006aca, for GNU/Linux 3.4.0, not stripped

Notice it is now a 32-bit LSB executable, but also in the x86-64 address space! However under the WSLv1 environment it won’t work. Time to update to v2

   wsl --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 2
   Conversion in progress, this may take a few minutes…
   For information on key differences with WSL 2 please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2
   WSL 2 requires an update to its kernel component. For information please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2kernel 

And now with the instance converted:

$ ./pgp
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 For details on free licensing and distribution, see the PGP User's Guide.
 For other cryptography products and custom development services, contact:
 Philip Zimmermann, 3021 11th St, Boulder CO 80304 USA, phone (303)444-4541
 Usage summary:
 To encrypt a plaintext file with recipent's public key, type:
    pgp -e textfile her_userid      (produces textfile.ctx)
 To sign a plaintext file with your secret key, type:
    pgp -s textfile your_userid     (produces textfile.ctx)
 To sign a plaintext file with your secret key, and then encrypt it
    with recipent's public key, producing a .ctx file:
    pgp -es textfile her_userid your_userid
 To encrypt with conventional encryption only:  pgp -c textfile
 To decrypt or check a signature for a ciphertext (.ctx) file:
    pgp ciphertextfile [plaintextfile]
 To generate your own unique public/secret key pair, type:  pgp -k
 To add a public or secret key file's contents to your public
    or secret key ring:   pgp -a keyfile [keyring]
 To remove a key from your public key ring:     pgp -r userid [keyring]
 To view the contents of your public key ring:  pgp -v [userid] [keyring]
$

And we are in business! Now we can run the example crypto test:

$ ./pgp testfile.ctx
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 File is encrypted.  Secret key is required to read it.
 Key for user ID: Bond, James (007)
 286-bit key, Key ID A27A1F, created (null)
 Advisory warning: This RSA secret key is not protected by a passphrase.
 Just a moment-- .
 File has signature.  Public key is required to check signature. .
 Good signature from user "Smart, Maxwell (86)".
 Signature made Thu Jun  6 05:28:52 1991
 Plaintext filename: testfile

And there we are!

PGP 1.0 suffers from 2 real defects of the era the first being the home brew bassomatic that is apparently full of all kinds of flaws, and the second lurking in rsalib.c

 The RSA public key cryptosystem is patented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S. patent #4,405,829).  Public Key  Partners (PKP) holds the exclusive commercial license to sell and  sub-license the RSA public key cryptosystem.  The author of this  software implementation of the RSA algorithm is providing this  implementation for educational use only.  Licensing this algorithm  from PKP is the responsibility of you, the user, not Philip Zimmermann, the author of this implementation.  The author assumes no liability for any breach of patent law resulting from the unlicensed use of this software by the user. These routines implement all of the multiprecision arithmetic necessary for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key cryptography.

And it ignited so much of a war about licensing the RSA cryptography base. It wasn’t until 1992/1993 that the RSA released their own aptly named rsaref that at least clarified and addressed their licensing restrictions. As we found out later it wasn’t the DOJ shutting down encryption, nor wild acts of congress instead it was US Patent 4,405,829 which finally expired in Sept 21, 2000, along with US patent 4,200,770 Hellman Diffie Merkle, public-key cryptography which expired in September of 1997. So in the end it was the lawyers who were to be feared, not the the US Government.

Another source of annoyance was the public/private key files are stored in a binary format (hence the 16/32/64 issues I’m sure!).

C:\temp>pgp -v jason.pub
 Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 - RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
 (c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software.  5 Jun 91
 Key ring: 'jason.pub'
 Type bits/keyID   Date     User ID
 pub  990/F7CAD5 12-Jun-21  Jason Stevens
 1 key(s) examined.
 C:\temp>type jason.pub
 °ü½╟╓iº½tHï╜Æ(↑ªα&E☼lKL$*⌠=└¥╒[׊s,â•”kÃ¥r~▐MFBv≥≡╫Eâ”´â•ŸTÿ║µó â•¨6,â—„Ermo▼æ▄;± ùî
 C:\temp>

So naturally you have to use uuencode which led to MIME collisions and other fun stuff down the road. yay!

begin 666 jason.pub
MF9,`$!C$8`U*87-O;B!3=&5V96YSW@/5RO>TFV)_9@%49RW3NYGD<8*H`3X1
MZ>D'/F/D7$)OKD9&K+>A<@4<,$RV.+M?9VR;17)M;Q^1W#OQ()>,#?B!J\?6
M::>K=!)(B[V2*!BFX"9%#VQ+3"0J]#W`!YW56]>*<RS):X9R?MY-1D)V\O#7
/1<''5)BZYJ+_T#8L!0`1
`
end

Even though today we have widespread SSL, and all kinds of apps that encrypt by default, but Operation Trojan Shield shows that that an app is simply not enough, and you cannot trust anything.

Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural flaws, operator mistakes, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed and “turned the tide” in the Allies’ favour.^[15][16]

-Wikipedia

And just like the spy movies good crypto is tedious, bulky and rarely used properly*.

Yes please don’t seriously rely on pgp 1.0!

I updated to Catalina and kind of forgot about the break with the ‘awesome world of home 32bit computing’ as it’s all 64bit now.

Needless to say none of my favourite stuff runs.

I’ve been maintaining a subscription to Crossover for a while, as I really like to support the future of Wine. I know a while back they too had the 64bit freakout, but they apparently found some shim to keep on running Win32 apps. And sure enough I loaded up my old Fortran Power Station bottle and it actually run!

Sadly SQL Server 4.21 seems to lock up, but it has been doing that under Wine when I last gave up on OS X a few years back. I tried some Win16 games (SimCity) and it bombed out. Looks like there is no support for Win16 apps. Pitty.

Steam is 64bit now, however none of Valve’s hits that have 64bit versions for Windows have made the 64bit leap for OS X. I have a feeling it’ll never happen as OS X users are so few and far between they are literally outnumbered by Linux users.

I did fire-up Subnautica, and of course the PC with the RTX 2070 blows this thing away. Although it’s hardly a fare competition. But who wants to play fare?

It’s far too early to really tell, and who knows I might just wipe this thing and install Windows. In my opinion OS X 10.6 was the greatest release ever bridging the divide from PowerPC to x86, just as 10.2.7 on the G5 was the greatest PowerPC version to bridge that 68000 divide. I still have that G5, but now my 2006 machine is dead. I’ve seen them in the used stores for around $100 USD. Although I don’t know if I can be bothered as they are incredibly heavy. And I’m pretty sure 10.6 will run on VMWare thanks to hackintosh efforts.

Also I should add as a personal note, my 2006 MacPro 1,1 died. I let someone else use it, and she broke it in one day. I’ve had it for years, several moves in the USA, then to Canada, then to Hong Kong. It died with only one day on the job. Sad.

I got this email yesterday :

If you use CrossOver for macOS, this information is VERY IMPORTANT for you.

Earlier today, Apple released the new macOS Catalina. Catalina does not support 32-bit applications. Currently, CrossOver still uses pieces of 32-bit code for every function and will not launch or install any Windows apps in Catalina. If CrossOver is critical to you macOS experience, we ask that you wait on upgrading to Catalina until we release a Catalina compatible version.

At this time, we anticipate that an alpha version will be available sometime in the next 30 days. We will continue to update you as development progresses.

So I picked up this board on AliExpress for about $200 USD. Natrually the x79 chipset is NOT a dual CPU chipset, so yeah it’s one of those ‘not exactly 100% legit’ Chinese motherboards.

One thing about Chinese companies that many don’t sell directly to consumers, instead they sell on Tao Bao, Alibaba, or to foreigners, AliExpress. The company’s site is http://www.huananzhi.com, as they had written on the box. Yes you need the www. portion of the name, as again many things are… well dated on the Chinese internet.

The product page is currently http://www.huananzhi.com/html/1/149/150/256.html, if anyone cares. It lists the technical specs as:

• Support for Xeon E5 series processors
• High-speed DDR3 four-channel memory slot: support 1333/1600/1866MHz, maximum capacity 128G memory slot
• Desktop general purpose memory
• X79 dual motherboard supports 5.1 channel ALC887 chip
• 8-layer PCB backplane, 7+7 phase power supply
• High-speed USB3.0, SATA3.0 interface transmission speed is increased
• PCI-E expansion slot*4
• RJ45 Gigabit LAN interface
• North Korean heat sink with HUANAN logo

Yes, I don’t get the whole Korean heat sink thing either. Anyways I thought it’d be fun to try so I ordered the thing. It took 3 days to get to my office in China, and an additional week to get from China to Hong Kong. I hear these things can take upwards of a month to arrive in North America.

Also worth noting is that they will not ship with a CMOS battery, so you need to supply your own CR-2032 battery, otherwise the board will not operate correctly.

The contents of the box are VERY minimal, but they did include 2 SATA cables, some CPU thermal paste, a very bare and … well not very good manual, a CD which I haven’t even tried to read, along with an IO shield.

Oh and for visitors of the future, here is a poorly scanned copy of that manual. It really is 2 pages. For what it’s worth it makes as much sense in English as it does in Chinese.

I decided to pair this with a pair of E5-2620 v2‘s that I got for $40 USD shipped, as I didn’t want to initially spend a lot of money in case all of this just exploded or something. These were the ‘widest’ and cheapest processors I could find, I wanted a v2 E5 as they are faster then the first generation.

Also worth noting is that the board is only capable of driving v1 & v2 E5’s. And they need to be the E5-2 type, which support operating in pairs, unlike the E5-1 set. I have no idea if the E5-4’s aka 4-way part would work in a pair. Although it may be an interesting experiment to try.

The board apparently doesn’t support overclocking or anything that fancy.

Although it reports itself as an x79 based motherboard, it is in reality an Intel C602, based chipset. I don’t know if they are harvesting them off of recycled servers, or if they have located a giant cache of repair parts that have been pushed beyond 5 year warranties, so they are prime candidates for being re-purposed as end user motherboards. Nice things about these boards vs standard server boards is the inclusion of a Realtek HD Audio chip, VIA USB 3.0 controller, and even the nice spacing out of the slots so you could really use all the slots.

Since this is a dual processor board you really want a PSU with dual 8 pin power connectors, however as mentioned in the poorly translated manual, you can take a PCI-E 6 pin adapter, and place it into the 8 pin socket, just position it backwards so that the 12v+ pins are facing inwards.

It may look strange (well more so as I’m using an extension cable that is sadly more focused on aesthetics than function, but heh it was cheap), but rest assured it works!

Another thing to keep in mind is that since this board uses a server chipset, not a consumer one, just as it is using server processors, you will need server grade memory. In this case it’s REG ECC DDR3 based memory. I went with 1833Mhz parts, which are the fastest DDR3 parts they made. Although the processors I chose have a maximum frequency support of 1600Mhz, but the memory works fine when underclocked.

Another gotcha is the CPU fans. These need to fit the Intel Xeon 2011, but have support for the 2011 motherbards. Which unlike the consumer versions don’t have a separate plate to bolt to the underside, rather they screw in all from the top. I had purchased a pair of cheap heatsinks that were about the right size, but didn’t include any of the mounting hardware for a 2011 board. I picked up these GELID Phantom Black CPU’s for about $80 for the pair.

They are quite big, and include a pair of fans for each processor which will make the end build look a little crazy.

I didn’t want to spend a lot, and went with the cheapest PSU I could find to output more than 450 watts. Although it did turn on and run with the lower PSU the machine did shut off overnight for no apparent reason. I’ve been okay with the larger and cheap Antec NX 650 PSU.

Although, this is the older style ‘bundle o cables’ type of PSU which I’m not such a fan of.

If I had charged up a cordless screwdriver this would have taken a few minutes, but screwing in the heatsinks was a chore, and they really do dominate the boards real estate.

I thought I had a case, but it turns out that it was for normal ATX sized boards, and this is an E-ATX board so it simply will not fit.

Another nice server like feature is that the board has an LED readout for early post codes, as booting this board will take some time. I think with 32GB of RAM it’s almost a minute.

I took the SSD & Hard disk out of my MacPro 2010 and put them into the new machine, and it booted up right away. Once connected to the internet Windows 10 picked up the new hardware and downloaded and installed the board drivers as needed. Interestingly enough Windows 10 also wanted a new activation code as the CPU/Motherboard was changed, although it didn’t complain about it.

When it comes to jobs that can run in parallel this is an incredible build. Obviously single core performance at 2Ghz is. well. terrible. I know going to a 4Ghz max E5-2667 v2 won’t be exactly magic either, but there is something nice about having 32 threads. Running stuff like parallel compiles, compression and video encoding is a dream on these massively parallel machines.

Games, are ‘okay’. I get 60fps with Fallout 76 on this current 2Ghz build on medium settings with the 1050 video card.

I do plan on getting faster CPU’s after the Chinese New Year, as right now basically everything is shut down (it sucks being the only person in the office building, literally), and shipments wont’ resume for at least another week.