Sorry this was delayed. Wilko, I'll spare you the detailed explanation of exactly why I wasn't especially hungry for easter eggs. :) FreeBSD cvs-src summary for 04/04/04 to 11/04/04 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This is a regular weekly summary of FreeBSD's cutting-edge development. It is intended to help the FreeBSD community keep up with the fast-paced work going on in FreeBSD-CURRENT by distilling the deluge of data from the CVS mailing list into a (hopefully) easy-to-read newsletter. This newsletter is marked up in reStructuredText_, so any odd punctuation that you see is likely intended for the reST parser. .. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html You can get old summaries, and an HTML version of this one, at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/. Please send any comments to Mark Johnston (mark at xl0.org). For Lukasz Dudek and Szymon Roczniak's Polish translations of these summaries, which may lag the English ones slightly, please see http://mocart.pinco.pl/FreeBSD/. .. contents:: ====== Errata ====== Last week, I claimed that Maxime Henrion (mux) had imported_ the Ezm3 Modula-3 compiler. A few people e-mailed me to point out that he had, in fact, not; that was actually an April Fool's joke. I hope some other people were fooled too. :) I also mentioned_ that Roman Kurakin (rik) MFC'ed the driver for Cronyx Sigma WAN adapters, claiming that the cards were used for T1, T3, and other WAN interfaces. Roman explained that the Cronyx Sigma card is a low-end ISA adapter, running up to 384 kilobit per second, and so it is too slow for a T1. The other cards are the Cronyx Tau, which supports E1, among other interfaces, and the Cronyx Tau-PCI, which supports T3, E3, and others. The Cronyx Tau driver was MFC'ed this week, as mentioned below. .. _imported: http://excel.xl0.org/FreeBSD/04-04-04.html#ezm3-imported-into-base-system .. _mentioned: http://excel.xl0.org/FreeBSD/04-04-04.html#new-driver-for-cronyx-sigma-wan-adapters-mfc-ed .. _below: ============ New features ============ Major PCI changes ----------------- M. Warner Losh (imp) committed a major update to the PCI code, especially in the area of power management. The updated code powers up and powers down PCI devices as appropriate, rather than leaving it to the device driver. These changes should improve support for suspending and resuming, and simplify device drivers, but they need strenuous testing; please test the code and notify Warner if you run into bugs in it. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404091544.i39FiYDY061986 Initial Bluetooth human interface device support ------------------------------------------------ Maksim Yevmenkin (emax) committed the first parts of support for Bluetooth HIDs (human interface devices - mice, keyboards, and the like). So far, the bthidcontrol and bthidd programs have been added. Kernel support and documentation will follow. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404100018.i3A0I02o096339 Specialix I/O8+ and I/O4+ serial controller support --------------------------------------------------- M. Warner Losh (imp) committed the sx driver, written by Frank Mayhar, for older Specialix I/O8+ and I/O4+ serial controllers. This hardware is unrelated to the Specialix SI/XIO and SX cards supported by the si driver. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404111932.i3BJWKIp066656 Polling support for Via Rhine Ethernet driver --------------------------------------------- Ruslan Ermilov (ru) committed an update for the vr Via Rhine Ethernet driver which fixed a bug, cleaned up some code, and added support for `device polling`_. Polling allows the kernel to poll network devices for data rather than having them generate interrupts all the time, lowering system load when network traffic is heavy. .. _`device polling`: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=polling&manpath=FreeBSD+5.2-current http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404051739.i35HdvhV051240 Per-interface polling control ----------------------------- Ruslan Ermilov (ru) updated all the interfaces with polling support so that polling can be controlled on an individual interface level. Interface polling can be turned off and on with the /polling/ parameter to ifconfig. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404111336.i3BDarMA080143 tar and libarchive improvements ------------------------------- Tim Kientzle (kientzle) reworked ACL support in libarchive, a library for reading and writing archive formats, making it compatible with the star_ archiver's ACL handling. He also introduced bsdtar, a new tar archiver using libarchive, and performed some other libarchive cleanups. .. _star: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/star.html libarchive: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404052112.i35LCUpg004974 libarchive pt 2: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404120116.i3C1GHaT055268 bsdtar: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404052132.i35LWIgJ009519 Cronyx Tau driver MFC'ed ------------------------ Roman Kurakin merged the Cronyx Tau driver to 4.x. The Tau is an ISA card supporting E1 WAN connections and RS-232 or RS-530. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404070811.i378BviB036567 =============== Notable changes =============== 4.x frozen for 4.10 release --------------------------- Scott Long (scottl) announced that the -STABLE branch (RELENG_4) is frozen in preparation for 4.10 to be released. Any commits to RELENG_4 must be approved by the re team. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404071235.i37CZ5A8001446 Advertising clause removed from licenses ---------------------------------------- M. Warner Losh (imp) and Mark Murray (markm) made a sweeping removal of the advertising clause, as approved_ by UC Berkeley, from many files with a UC Berkeley copyright. If there are BSD-licensed files in FreeBSD with your personal or business copyright on them, and you're willing to eliminate the advertising clause from those, please get in touch with Warner or core. .. _approved: ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change (many commits) getvfsent API removed --------------------- Maxime Henrion (mux) removed the getvfsent API, since it has been replaced by getvfsbyname() and the vfs.conflist sysctl. All of the programs that use the old API have already been updated. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404112136.i3BLaVxM099406 /dev/umodem phased out in 4.x ----------------------------- Shunsuke Akiyama (akiyama) removed the MAKEDEV code to make /dev/umodem* devices, since /dev/ucom* has replaced them. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404051402.i35E2vTE097113 ================= Discussion topics ================= Option ordering in bsdtar ------------------------- Tim Kientzle (kientzle) modified pkg_install to call tar with the x option first. Andrey Chernov (ache) suggested that bsdtar should accept options in any order, rather than changing pkg_install to put x first. Tim responded that requiring the mode first improves error reporting, complies with the SUSv2_ specification, and improves compatibility when getopt_long is not available. Mike Silbersack (silby), Stijn Hoop, and Roman Kurakin (rik) responded, saying that each had his own accustomed order and changing it would be traumatic. Tim agreed to make bsdtar more forgiving in its option ordering, and did so. .. _SUSv2: http://www.unix-systems.org/version2/ Discussion: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404080606.i3866g3q063716 bsdtar made forgiving: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404081937.i38Jb2IF061977 How random is random enough? ---------------------------- Those not concerned about the hairy details of cryptographic-quality randomness may find this entry a long slog, with no tidy conclusion at the end; don't feel bad about skipping over it. Mark Murray (markm) modified the entropy device code to use hardware entropy sources, when available, instead of the Yarrow_ pseudo-random-number generator (PRNG). This spurred a huge thread about the relative security of different pseudo-random-number generators. Nate Lawson (njl) began by saying that the change was a huge mistake and a security regression, referring Mark to a `white paper`_ on the Via Nehemiah random-number generator, which suggests that the output from the chip's be put through Yarrow. Mark responded that the output of the on-chip RNG is OK, and Yarrow would be overkill. Colin Percival (cperciva) suggested a rc.conf variable to toggle use of Yarrow; Mark responded that he didn't want to introduce that complication. In a subthread, Bruce M. Simpson (bms) asked whether Mark had any independent tests of the VIA RNG. Mark responded that the white paper mentioned above gave the chip a very good rating, and if whitening (further randomizing) of the random data is needed, it could be provided by a small hash function instead of the heavyweight Yarrow. Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) suggested having randomness available in different levels, which spawned some threads about the different levels of randomness and their uses. Richard Coleman asked what hash function Mark had in mind, pointing out that AES (as used in FreeBSD's Yarrow implementation) is already one of the faster ciphers. Mark suggested using the chip's integrated AES; Nate asked whether designing a duplicate of Yarrow with only one entropy source would make a good PRNG. In another subthread, Sam Leffler (sam) agreed with Nate that hardware entropy sources should not be trusted without post-processing. Mark responded that he'd look into low-overhead post-processing, to which Nate followed up, asking why he wanted a separate PRNG instead of using Yarrow. Mark explained that Yarrow accumulates random bits and generates random numbers separately, making it good for low-entropy environments, but not for whitening high-entropy random data. .. _Yarrow: http://www.schneier.com/yarrow.html .. _`white paper`: http://www.cryptography.com/resources/whitepapers/index.html http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040409103618.A48723 ================= Committer changes ================= Bruce M. Simpson (bms) introduced Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) as a new src committer. Daniel is the original author of OpenBSD's pf_ packet filter, which has also been imported into FreeBSD. He will be helping with the maintenance of pf in FreeBSD. Bruce and Max Laier will be Daniel's mentors. .. _pf: http://www.benzedrine.cx/pf.html http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404060950.i369oVUw090483 =================== Important bug fixes =================== KVM mouse support improved -------------------------- Mark Murray (markm) modified the debugging output of the PS/2 mouse support code to be less verbose by default, which corrects a problem with some KVM switches. The symptom of the problem was that the mouse would jump all over the screen and click randomly when switching consoles. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404041636.i34GaMQT060045 =============== Other bug fixes =============== John Baldwin (jhb) fixed the filesystem code to avoid a panic during installation that had appeared recently. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404061920.i36JKOSr037228Received on Mon Apr 12 2004 - 18:00:05 UTC
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