Last week's thread about status reports spurred me to come up with this in a few idle hours. I've gone through the cvs-src mail from last week and summarized what looked like the most important commits, along with some of the longer threads that cropped up. I'm hoping for some comments on this from some people who contributed to the thread; I'm also CCing Jonathan Sage, who has rigged up an automated status update (and beaten me to the punch by a damn sight), in hopes that we can work together on this project. The report is written in reStructuredText, so it should be legible here; if you want to browse an HTML version of it, please hit http://excel.xl0.org/freebsd/ . If you have a minute, please read through this message and give me a sense of what you think. In particular, please think about: - Subject matter - too narrow? too broad? should I cover the -current list instead of cvs-src, or try to combine both into one report? - Prose - too technical? not technical enough? too flowery? too plain? - Commits covered - Did I miss anything I should have included, or include things I should have skipped? - Impartial? I've tried not to attribute consensus and opinions where they weren't very clear; have I succeeded? - Interest - would you be interested in seeing something like this produced weekly? If you don't have time for those, just a sentence or two of couragement, whether en- or dis-, would really help. If I don't get any answers, I'll assume that nobody's interested in this sort of report, so do respond if you are. Thanks, Mark [Report follows] FreeBSD CURRENT news for 17/01/04 to 23/01/04 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This is an experimental 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. The format of this summary is based on Brett Cannon's python-dev summaries, but it is subject to change. Please send any and all comments to Mark Johnston (mark at xl0.org). .. contents:: ================= Committer changes ================= Three new src committers were added this week. Robert Watson (rwatson) introduced Colin Percival (cperciva), who has been working on `FreeBSD Update`_, a binary update system for FreeBSD. Colin will initially be fixing the bugs he has uncovered during his FreeBSD Update work. Shortly thereafter, Nate Lawson (njl) introduced Philip Paeps (philip), who will be working on the ACPI_ (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) subsystem. ACPI allows operating systems to manage hardware configuration and power in a standard way. It is especially important for laptops and newer motherboards, and especially challenging because of varying vendor implementations. Wilko Bulte (wilko), acting as core secretary, introduced Ken Smith (kensmith), who will be mentored by Robert Watson (rwatson). Finally, Eric Moore (emoore) retired from committership by request to core. .. _FreeBSD Update: http://www.daemonolgy.net/freebsd-update/ .. _ACPI: http://www.acpi.info/ ================= Discussion topics ================= Filenames and line numbers added to panic output ------------------------------------------------ Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) added code to display the filename and line number where the system was panic'ed. This prompted discussion of whether the change was worthwhile for most users, and comparisons to crash dumps and other debugging methods. It was agreed that the change should be left in to get other opinions on it before a final decision was made to keep it or back it out. In the same thread, Robert Watson (rwatson) brought up a discussion he had had with Bill Paul (wpaul) about the possibility of storing panic messages and backtraces in swap space when the system crashes. This idea was widely appreciated. New committer woes ------------------ Colin Percival (cperciva)'s eager message, wondering whether FreeBSD had ever seen two src committers introduced in two hours, elicited some comments and reminiscences about new committers. The thread ended with an image of committers staggering around a vast desert under the weight of their to-do lists, ruled by witches and monsters and communicating with tin cans and string. This experience will no doubt be a distinct benefit to committers applying for jobs in IT. First DragonflyBSD merge ------------------------ Jeffrey Hsu (hsu) merged some TCP code from DragonflyBSD_. Alexey Dokuchaev suspects that this is the first merge from Dragonfly that FreeBSD has seen. .. _DragonflyBSD: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ ============= Major changes ============= cvs security update ------------------- Jacques Vidrine (nectar) added two security patches to CVS. The first stops CVS's native server mode, pserver, from being configured to run as root. The second patch catches malicious requests that would cause the CVS server to attempt to create directories in the root of the filesystem holding the CVS repository. Bluetooth enhancements ---------------------- Maksim Yevmenkin (emax) imported sdpd, the Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol Daemon. sdpd will help FreeBSD interoperate with Bluetooth devices. Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) requested a NO_BLUETOOTH option to disable the whole Bluetooth system; Maksim is planning to add it. PowerPC enhancements -------------------- Peter Grehan (grehan) made many PPC commits this week, including introducing a console implementation. Peter also updated several files to be PPC compatible; the system can now be built completely for PowerPC. Dag-Erling Smorgrav (des) will be seeing whether it can be hooked up to the tinderbox for regular testing. Startup scripts no longer to be synced with NetBSD -------------------------------------------------- Mike Makonnen (mtm) removed NetBSD-specific code from many of the startup scripts in /etc/rc.d. He reports that Luke Mewburn of NetBSD has indicated that NetBSD no longer plans to keep their scripts synchronized to FreeBSD's. Mike also fixed a few minor bugs and tidied the rc.d files a bit. New SNMP code ------------- Hartmut Brandt (harti) imported version 1.5a of bsnmpd_, his own SNMP implementation. bsnmpd is part of the ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) subsystem, which allows FreeBSD systems to participate in the high-performance networks and backbones that use ATM. .. _bsnmpd: http://people.freebsd.org/~harti/bsnmpd/ New number conversion code -------------------------- David Schultz (das) imported version 20040118 of gdtoa, the package that handles conversion of numbers to and from their printable forms. This new version fixes some minor bugs in strtod(), which converts a text decimal number to a double-precision variable. He also updated the printf(3) manual page to match the new code. Marcel Moolenaar (marcel) discovered a bug in the new gdtoa code that affects the kernel build on the IA64 platform and is looking into it. ================== Less-Major Changes ================== Cryptographic code separated ---------------------------- Ruslan Ermilov (ru) announced that all crypto-related bits have been moved out of the base distribution, mostly to the "crypto" distribution set. NDISulator development progressing ---------------------------------- Bill Paul (wpaul) made numerous enhancements to his NDISulator code, which allows some Windows network card drivers to be used on FreeBSD. The NDISulator was introduced not long ago, but development is moving quickly and it is growing to support more and more cards. Work continues on new infrastructure for ports ---------------------------------------------- Eivind Eklund (eivind) added the directory /var/db/ports/, which is used by the new OPTIONS infrastructure for ports. ============= Minor Changes ============= Theo de Raadt pointed out that a cryptography testing file he held the copyright to was in FreeBSD without a license. After a politically-charged flurry of e-mail, logged in PR 61676_, the file was removed. .. _61676: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=61676 David Schultz (das) improved the random number generation by having the system discard the first 1024 bytes of random output. (PR 61126_ submitted by Jeff Ito.) .. _61126: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=61126 Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) reworked libalias, the library that handles NAT and packet aliasing, creating a new API for it that allows one program to use it multiple times. The old API will continue to work. Colin Percival (cperciva) corrected a problem with traceroute when the number of packets per hop times the number of hops is greater than 255. Mike Makonnen (mtm) reworked some of the libthr threading code, adding more detailed debugging, refactoring some of the functions, and adding and documenting some missing functions. Soeren Schmidt (sos) tweaked some of the ATA code, fixing a problem that Nate Lawson (njl) had reported with his computer hanging on boot, and improving hardware support.Received on Fri Jan 23 2004 - 22:08:33 UTC
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