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NVMe Health on OpenBSD

yucetekol@gmail.com (Yüce Tekol) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:00:36 +0300

I’m using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 7 as my OpenBSD laptop. This laptop has a 256GB NVMe drive, and today I got curious about the health of it. It’s not a young machine, and on top of that, I bought it used, so I have no idea how it was treated in its previous life. If the drive is getting bad, I want to know about it sooner, rather than later.

Smartmontools is a software bundle that consists of the smartctl and smartd utilities. Smartmontools supports a wide variety of disks, but I am after using it with my NVMe drive.

There’s a nice OpenBSD package (like almost always) for smartmontools. Installing smartmontools is just:

doas pkg_add smartmontools

And you have smartctl and a service that runs smartd installed (but not enabled).

Using smartctl could not be easier. First, get a list of drives:

$ doas smartctl --scan
/dev/sd0c -d nvme # /dev/sd0c, NVMe device

Then, use the -H flag to check the health of the drive:

$ doas smartctl -H /dev/sd0c
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [OpenBSD 7.7 amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Phew, it seems the drive is healthy!

Using the -a flag prints all information about the drive, including its health:

$ doas smartctl -a /dev/sd0c
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [OpenBSD 7.7 amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       KXG6AZNV256G TOSHIBA
Serial Number:                      XXXXXXXXXXXX
Firmware Version:                   5108AGLA
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x1179
IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x8ce38e
Total NVM Capacity:                 256,060,514,304 [256 GB]
Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0
Controller ID:                      0
NVMe Version:                       1.3
Number of Namespaces:               1
Local Time is:                      Fri Jul 11 21:12:05 2025 +03
Firmware Updates (0x14):            2 Slots, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x001f):   Security Format Frmw_DL NS_Mngmt Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005f):     Comp Wr_Unc DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Log Page Attributes (0x0e):         Cmd_Eff_Lg Ext_Get_Lg Telmtry_Lg
Maximum Data Transfer Size:         512 Pages
Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     78 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     82 Celsius

Supported Power States
St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
 0 +     8.00W       -        -    0  0  0  0        1       1
 1 +     3.90W       -        -    1  1  1  1        1       1
 2 +     2.00W       -        -    2  2  2  2        1       1
 3 -   0.0500W       -        -    3  3  3  3     1500    1500
 4 -   0.0050W       -        -    4  4  4  4     6000   14000
 5 -   0.0030W       -        -    5  5  5  5    50000   80000

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        43 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
Percentage Used:                    2%
Data Units Read:                    3,844,077 [1.96 TB]
Data Units Written:                 3,099,013 [1.58 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 43,110,455
Host Write Commands:                52,819,996
Controller Busy Time:               153
Power Cycles:                       272
Power On Hours:                     439
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   106
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      2
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Temperature Sensor 1:               43 Celsius

Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 256 entries)
No Errors Logged

Self-test Log (NVMe Log 0x06)
Self-test status: No self-test in progress
No Self-tests Logged

There are more about smartctl, but those were the most useful stuff for me at the first glance.

Typst Workflow on OpenBSD

yucetekol@gmail.com (Yüce Tekol) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:00:36 +0300

Recently I had to write a paper with scientific vibes. Of course, the first tool that comes to mind for writing papers is LaTeX. I used quite a bit of LaTeX in the distant past, but the problem is I forgot everything about it! I could probably re-learn it easily, but I decided to search for alternatives first. The first tool that sprang up was Typst with over 40000 Github stars!

Typst is an open source project written in Rust. It provides a nice CLI tool with a single binary, and it has a pretty nice language. The example they put out on their Github is very convincing (good sign for an open source project). I decided it to give it a try, and after a short time I was already feeling quite a bit of comfortable with it!

I used Typst for a couple of weeks now, and there’s absolutely no friction using it. These are what I like about it in no particular order:

The language is nice and consistent. To be frank, my first reaction was, “Nooo, not another markup language!”. But I like it quite a bit now!
Their documentation is very good.
It has a fairly big community. There was never a situation I needed help but couldn’t find it. Up until now, any questions I had were already asked and answered.
Although it’s still a 0.x project, their CLI tool is very robust. I didn’t encounter any bugs.
The error messages are very accurate and descriptive. It was trivial to fix the few mistakes I did.

A few days ago, I read an article about the TK method: TK, or the secret to effortless writing. If I am not sure about how to write the next sentence, I would usually just write XXX or maybe TODO, or even TBC. But using TK consistently makes much more sense! I decided to add a #TK() command to my Typst manuscript. Here is what I came up with first:

#let TK() = {
    highlight[TK]
}

This just writes a highlighted TK in yellow, whenever I use #TK() in text:

= Section 1

I'll continue with #TK()

I ended up with just a bit of a more complex TK function which makes the text stand out more and allow me mention what’s missing:

#let TK(..what) = {
  underline[
    #highlight[
      #text(weight: "bold", fill: red, [TK])
      #text(
        weight: "bold",
        what.pos().join(", ")
      )
    ]
  ]
}

This is how I use it in my manuscript:

= Section 1

I'll continue with #TK("something", "ref")

Here’s a screenshot from the resulting PDF:

Anyway, I was using Typst on Linux by compiling it myself. I write the manuscript using Visual Studio Code + the extension from their Github (under typst/tools/support directory). The extension provides only syntax highlighting, which is sufficient to me.

These days I enjoy OpenBSD a bit more than I do Linux, so I decided to use Typst on my OpenBSD laptop. (Unsurprisingly) it’s trivial to get going on OpenBSD. It’s just:

$ doas pkg_add typst

The latest version of Typst, together with a Vim plugin is installed, and everything works as expected. OpenBSD package maintainers always do a great job, kudos!

Here’s how I use Typst on OpenBSD:

I use a two window layout with i3. On one-side there’s Vim with the Typst manuscript. On the other-side I have MuPDF (installed with doas pkg_add mupdf) running with the output PDF.
I make changes in the manuscript and run :make in Vim. I have set autowrite in my ~/.vimrc, so the :make command automatically saves the file (the Vim plugin knows how to build the manuscript).
Once the PDF is built (at most a second), I switch to the MuPDF window and press r which reloads the PDF. It would be great if MuPDF supported auto-reloading (like KDE’s Okular), but typing a single letter is not too bad. (MuPDF also supports the SIGHUP signal for a reload, but I didn’t yet bother to write a script to build the manuscript and raise that signal.)

That’s all! If you are looking for a tool to produce nice documents without frictions, I would highly recommend Typst.

Artificial Ants to Crack the Code of the Prisoner's Dilemma

yucetekol@gmail.com (Yüce Tekol) — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 21:51:36 +0300

Have you tried NotebookLM from Google already?

It has a few fantastic tools, but its Deep dive conversation generator absolutely blew my mind.

The Deep dive conversation generator creates realistic podcast conversations from the provided sources.

The generated conversations are engaging, funny, and they augment the provided source in unexpectedly good ways.

NotebookLM is one of the best AI tools I’ve ever tried.

📼 Here’s one example conversation generated from my paper Ants Can Play Prisoner’s Dilemma.

NotebookLM was able to explain technical concepts like Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ant Colony Optimization and Genetic Algorithms in a very clear, comprehensible way.

PySwip v0.3.0 is Released

yucetekol@gmail.com (Yüce Tekol) — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 11:51:36 +0300

After 4 years, there’s a new version of PySwip. I’ve released v0.3.0.

PySwip is an open source library that enables running Prolog queries in Python via a foreign language interface to SWI-Prolog. It has no dependencies, and it works wherever SWI-Prolog runs, Linux, Windows, MacOS, OpenBSD, and elsewhere.

Here are some of the highlights from the change log:

SWI-Prolog 9.x is supported.
Dictionary support is addded,
Improved list representations, unicode support and multiple threading usage,
Refactored SWI-Prolog discovery.

If you have a recent version of SWI-Prolog installed, the following is sufficient to install PySwip in most cases:

pip install pyswip

You can also check the INSTALL documentation.