-CURRENT news for 01/02/04

This is the second installment of the weekly cvs-src summary.  Again,
comments are solicited, though not as fervently as last time.  You
are encouraged to forward this to anyone that might be interested, or
reproduce it however you like.

Many thanks to all the people that sent comments, advice, and words of
encouragement.

Mark

FreeBSD CURRENT news for 24/01/04 to 01/02/04
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

By popular demand, this week's summary includes links to the appropriate
mailing list archives for discussion threads.  However, as noted at
http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/, the mailing list archive has been down
since January 26th, so some messages will not be available.

The format of this summary is based on Brett Cannon's python-dev
summaries, but it is subject to change.

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).

.. contents::

======
Errata
======

Last week, I reported that Ken Smith (kensmith) was introduced as a
committer; in fact, he has been a doc committer since August 2003, and has
just become a src committer.  Thanks to Dag-Erling Smorgrav (des) for the
correction.

I went on to claim that the TCP code merged from DragonflyBSD was the
first merge from Dragonfly to FreeBSD.  It was not; Jacques Vidrine
(nectar) pointed out that `FreeBSD-SA-03:10.ibcs2`_ was discovered in
DragonflyBSD by David Rhodus and forwarded to FreeBSD by Matt Dillon in
August.

.. _`FreeBSD-SA-03:10.ibcs2`: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-03:10.ibcs2.asc

Also, please see `CVS security update confusion` below.

=================
Discussion topics
=================
CVS security update confusion
-----------------------------
I was among the many people confused by the recent CVS security update.
The update does not actually prevent the CVS server itself from running as
root; it stops users from authenticating to the server as root.  Jacques
Vidrine (nectar) elaborated, explaining that before the fix, anyone able
to modify the CVS password file in CVSROOT/passwd could gain access with
the same permissions as the CVS server itself.

Jacques's original commit:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401260008.i0Q08cIl014780

The full explanation:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040126200556.GB76044

Where should environment variables be documented?
-------------------------------------------------
Last week, Wes Peters (wes) added documentation of the environment
variables used by fetch(1) into the fetch(1) manual page.  Several people
objected to the duplication of data, and there were suggestions that
the environment variable documentation could be removed from fetch(3)
entirely.  In the end, Wes reverted his original commit and modified the
fetch(1) man page to explicitly encourage users to read fetch(3) for the
information.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401230450.i0N4omSZ049990

Old disklabel code removed
--------------------------
David E. O'Brien (obrien) removed the old disklabel program, used for
dividing disk partitions into slices, since it has been replaced by
sunlabel (on Sun platforms) and bsdlabel (on others).  Ruslan Ermilov (ru)
suggested that the link from 'disklabel' to the appropriate program for
the current architecture should be removed, but Scott Long (scottl) and
David O'Brien (obrien) disagreed, arguing that the link should be kept for
compatibility purposes.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401381929.i0SJTGIP043858

==============
Bigger changes
==============

5.2.1-RELEASE preparation
-------------------------
This week saw many commits to the RELENG_5_2 branch, fixing a number of
problems that cropped up just after the 5.2 release.  So far, there have
been fixes for `USB CD-ROM drives`_, `SysKonnect`_ network cards, ATA_,
`large user groups`_, `mixing NFS protocols`, GEOM_, devfs_, and IPSec.
There were security-related fixes to the `CVS server`_ and the `filesystem
snapshot code`.

.. _`USB CD-ROM drives`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401250120.i0P1KaTH030836
.. _`SysKonnect`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401250506.i0P56mOh027095
.. _ATA: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401270553.i0R5rJ1O073050
.. _`large user groups`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401250600.i0P60gWC037807
.. _`mixing NFS protocols`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401260438.i0Q4cHGe081259
.. _GEOM: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401260518.i0Q5IZd2096393
.. _devfs: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401291932.i0TJWhgj078003
.. _`CVS server`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401260008.i0Q08cIl014780
.. _`filesystem snapshot code`: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401271933.i0RJX7eG080722

ULE becomes the default scheduler
---------------------------------
Jeff Roberson (jeffr) updated the GENERIC kernel configuration to use the
SCHED_ULE scheduler as the default, replacing the old SCHED_4BSD one.  The
scheduler is the kernel component responsible for allocating processor
time among running processes.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401242138.i0OLcqUU075119

PFIL_HOOKS added to GENERIC
---------------------------
Jacques Vidrine (nectar) added PFIL_HOOKS, a kernel API for packet
filtering, to the GENERIC kernel configuration file.  The main result
is that IPFilter can now be loaded into the stock kernel, rather than
requiring a kernel recompile.  This has been a frequently requested
feature for quite a while, and it will be present in 5.2.1-RELEASE.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401241459.i0OExpR5072268

Backtraces now saved in the kernel message buffer
-------------------------------------------------
Nate Lawson (njl) committed some code from Ian Dowse (iedowse) that causes
kernel debugging data to be saved to the kernel message buffer instead of
just output to the console.  This will make debugging much easier when a
serial console isn't available to capture the backtrace data.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401280651.i0S6pI7J052652

FireWire MFC
------------
Hidetoshi Shimokawa (simokawa) merged lots of FireWire-related code to
RELENG_4.  There were minor fixes for the master FireWire code as well as
SBP, the Serial Bus Protocol (used for mass storage devices) and fwe, the
FreeBSD-specific driver for Ethernet emulation over FireWire.

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401260451.i0Q4pGPn090201

===============
Smaller changes
===============
Peter Wemm (peter)'s work on the amd64 platform is progressing
steadily.  This week, he added support for the hardware debug
registers, as well as doing a few other merges from the i386 side.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401282046.i0SKkVEe063911

Scott Long (scottl) adapted the aac SCSI driver to use no locks
when handling an interrupt.  The driver is now significantly
faster than the 4.x one when running multiple tasks under SMP.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401300704.i0U74eDg051918

Andrey A. Chernov (ache) added the locale kk_KZ.PT154,
supporting the Kazakh language of Kazakhstan.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401291628.i0TGSMA0027146

Ruslan Ermilov (ru) overhauled the Kerberos 5 makefiles, cleaning
up and tightening the code and making many minor enhancements.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401310815.i0V8Fwu2036171

Mike Makonnen committed a fix to libthr, one of FreeBSD's threading
libraries, which prevents some applications (especially Mozilla) from
occasionally hanging.  The bug was noticed and tracked down by Morten
Johansen. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401290944.i0T9iaCH096502

Doug Barton (dougb) imported an updated named.root, including a new IP
address for b.root-servers.net.  It was MFCed by Joerg Wunsch (joerg).
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401291624.i0TGOUq0026826

Diomidis Spinellis (dds) added a -e flag to killall(1), which allows it
to kill processes based on effective user id instead of the real one.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200401261111.i0QBBaH5083511