cynicalsecurity @cynicalsecurity@bsd.network

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Just to be clear before this turns into an unwanted OpenBSD flamewar:

1. I knew that OpenBSD 7.9 does not support hardware power states (HWP) on the latest Alder Lake stuff,
2. I knew that OpenBSD 7.9 does not support PCI Active State Power Management (ASPM)
3. I did not know that Intel I226-V are a pile of smouldering bovine excrement and their interaction with ASPM is such that they look like they have been removed from the system when they power down…

The *combination* of the above means that OpenBSD 7.9 is unsuitable for the Protectli VP2430 and other Intel N150+I226-V platforms.

I still think that you should run nothing else on a firewall

The bottom line is that FreeBSD supports the Intel N150 perfectly whereas OpenBSD sticks to 800MHz and does cope with the vagaries of this weird processor.

From there, the other problems are just dependencies because the whole SOC is not properly initialised, I suspect.

I am sad to report that the fix for the I226-V on the Protectli VP2430 is to move from #OpenBSD to #FreeBSD

Configuring FreeBSD to be a firewall like my OpenBSD configuration was a lot of hours of blasphemy: the old PF, needing a custom kernel for altq, the PPPoE configuration using tun, the lack of “egress” in PF meaning I was back to $ext_if which I had long forgotten all about…

Anyway, I now have a 5ms better RTT over PPPoE over VDSL, packetloss is gone, etc.

More on the #macOS 27 upgrade woes… turnes out #Parallels is now slow as treacle (yes, latest version running).

I am virtualising macOS 26 in macOS 27 and, well, I am still waiting for it to finish booting.

What an unmitigated pile of smouldering bovine excrement.

Caveat: if you are updating to #macOS 27 there is this lovely fscking Apple Stupidity "feature" which starts quantising *all your disk* so that Spotlight can give you "better answers".

It has been going for over 24hrs for me and it is at 7.1% … the I/O is floored and you simply cannot run any I/O intensive tasks (e.g. Parallels).

To find out the state of affairs you can use:

plutil -extract SpotlightKnowledgeV2.embeddingGenComplete raw ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlightknowledge.plist | awk '{printf "%.1f%%\n", $1 * 100}'

Whoever at #Apple thought this is up is a complete and utter cretin, especially because it is clearly running with a high priority and takes over all disk I/O.

I still have not found a way to stop it so I can actually do some work.

Update: figured out a fix… note that it blocks Apple Stupidity as a side-effect:

UID=$(id -u)
# Disable Apple Intelligence search daemons
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistantd
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistant_service
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistant_cdmd
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.siriknowledged
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.siriinferenced
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.Siri.agent
# Disable system-wide AI search components
sudo launchctl disable system/com.apple.contextstored
sudo launchctl disable system/com.apple.modelmanagerd
# Stop the running hybridsearchd process immediately
sudo launchctl bootout gui/$UID/com.apple.hybridsearchd 2>/dev/null || true
sudo pkill -9 hybridsearchd 2>/dev/null || true