Not so much a tutorial, but a pointer to setting up Tribblix with a Bhyve VM running FreeBSD to act as a wifi bridge for laptops with unsupported 802.11xx chips.
Tribblix is a retro Solaris-like operating system developed by Peter Tribble and based on Illumos, the continuation of the OpenSolaris kernel.
It's not the only Solaris/SVR4-like Distribution based on Illumos in active development, there's also OpenIndiana which is more of a fork of the original OpenSolaris, OmniOS - a server and VM-oriented OS though can be used as a workstation too, and a few other projects dotted around for specific use-cases, but those are the main three hobbyists tend to look to.
Unlike OpenIndiana, which uses a modern, heavier packaging system (Image Packaging System / IPS, as in Solaris 11), Tribblix uses its own custom SVR4-ish packages similar to what was used in Solaris up until around 2010/2011 (there was a transitional period with the release of Solaris 11 Express where both SVR4 and IPS systems were supported, the latter in alpha/beta phase), with added features such as overlays which allow for more flexibility and better dependency management than the original system but without the complexity and slughishness of IPS.
Tribblix can be used as a headless server or full retro workstation, with packages for pretty much every window manager you could ever want for, including the original Common Desktop Environment, though xfce is the default and mate is there for those whom are that way inclined.
There are currently two flavours of Tribblix - the standard version and a version that incorporates developments from OmniOS. I used OmniTribblix because the guide I was given for the wifi bridge was written for OmniOS, which has newer Bhyve features than the vanilla Tribblix bhyve overlay. When installing either, I recommend you don't connect to the network as it seems to mess things up a bit with packages being fetched from the remote repo. You can update everything once you have a stable system installed.
The bridge uses FreeBSD which has decent support for Intel 802.11 cards
Installing Tribblix
- Install Tribblix - http://www.tribblix.org/install.html (
kitchen-sinkordesktop developrecommended) - Reboot
- [optional] Using a wired ethernet connection update the system with
zap refresh,zap verify-overlay -a,zap update-overlay -a-- See Docs - [bonus]
zap install-overlay cdeas root thensetxsession cdeas your user to enjoy CDE!
Using Bhyve PCI passthrough
Study and follow the guide by Thomas Merkel / drscream at https://www.cyber-tec.org/2019/05/29/using-bhyve-pci-passthrough-on-omnios/, noting the following differences:
- Instead of
pkg install ..., usezap install-overlay bhyveif it hasn't been installed already.
Everything else should 'just work', though you may need to run ipadm enable-if -t uplink0 before configuring the Bhyve VM.
Make sure you can ping the VM, and add it as the default route then try pinging 9.9.9.9 or another external IP. Once you're done with the FreeBSD ISO, just remove the CDROM from the vm config with zonecfg -z gw remove attr name=cdrom
Of course, there are times when you won't need this router VM and its current configuration isn't setup to auto-start, so you could use a small script to start it:
#!/bin/sh
ipadm enable-if -t uplink0
zoneadm -z gw boot
route add default 10.1.1.1
Performance
wget -O /dev/null https://proof.ovh.net/files/10Gb.dat
- Over ethernet (I2I9-v / e10000g) I got ~2.90MB/s
- Over the Bhyve FreeBSD bridge: ~1.70MB/s
- From a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen6 running Arch GNU/Linux on the same network (AX201): ~11.1MB/s
So the difference between the e1000g and the wifi bridge isn't a big deal, browsing is fine and most other things you'd do on a retro UNIX workstation are too - it's about convenience and it, along with the extra RAM+CPU usage, are reasonable sacrifices to be able to use Tribblix (or OmniOS!) on a laptop with Wifi.
Many thanks to Peter Tribble for this awesome OS, drscream for the guide, and @zolaris@illumos.cafe on Mastodon for highlighting this tutorial as well as the suggestion of a potentially Thinkpad+Illumos-compatible card for 802.11bgn: Intel 6205-based cards with Lenovo 04W3769 FRU (NGFF).
I would love to contribute to Illumos and Tribblix but it has been a number of years since I even used Solaris/SVR4 properly and have never developed on it; hopefully I'll remedy that soon with some tutorials on development, including driver development, so we can all help preserve and improve these amazing open source operating systems.