cvs-src summary for May 24-31

From: Mark Johnston <mjohnston_at_skyweb.ca>
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 19:58:45 -0500
Thanks for your patience, all - here's the summary.

FreeBSD cvs-src summary for 24/05/04 to 31/05/04
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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::

============
New features
============
Driver for Intel PRO/10GbE network cards added
----------------------------------------------
Tony Ackerman (tackerman) committed the first release of the ixgb driver,
supporting Intel PRO/10GbE 10 gigabit Ethernet cards.  The driver should
work with both -CURRENT and -STABLE.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405280023.i4S0N0Tv065573

mbuma mbuf and cluster allocator added
--------------------------------------
Bosko Milekic imported mbuma, an mbuf and cluster allocator built on the
UMA (Uniform Memory Access) framework, that will replace mballoc, the old
allocator.  Among many other changes, the NMBCLUSTERS compile-time option
is no longer used; it is set according to maxusers, but it can be made
unlimited by setting the kern.ipc.nmbclusters boot-time tunable to zero.

Bosko has written `a paper`_ talking about the new allocator.

.. _`a paper`: http://www.unixdaemons.com/~bmilekic/netbuf_bmilekic.pdf

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405312146.i4VLk6Yu050600

Sysctl subtrees created for each device
---------------------------------------
Dag-Erling Smorgrav (des) created a new top-level sysctl node named "dev",
under which he created a subtree for each device.  This will simplify
sysctl settings for drivers that allow per-device sysctl variables.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405251206.i4PC6QR0063467

Support for /etc/eui64 added
----------------------------
Brooks Davis (brooks) added support for a /etc/eui64 file, similar to
/etc/ethers, to associate names with EUI-64_ (Extended Unique Identifier)
IDs.  EUI-64 IDs are a 24-bit organization identifier and a 40-bit
extension identifier, and are used mostly to identify specific devices,
like MAC IDs for Ethernet cards.

.. _EUI-64: http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/tutorials/EUI64.html

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405262258.i4QMw7KZ085659

-depth flag added to find
-------------------------
Oliver Eikemeier (eik) added a "-depth n" flag to find.  The new flag
tests whether the depth of the current file relative to the starting point
is n.  He gave this example code to print the top ten maintainers of
Python module ports::

    find /usr/ports -depth 2 \! -name 'py-*' -prune -o -depth 3 -name Makefile 
\
    -execdir make -VMAINTAINER \; | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405281717.i4SHHFfU007326

-w and -U flags added to tftpd
------------------------------
Matthew N. Dodd (mdodd) committed code from Patton Electronics Co. to add
two new flags to tftpd, the TFTP server.  A new -w flag allows new files
to be created, rather than restricting uploads to existing files only.  A
-U flag allows the umask of the server to be set.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405242256.i4OMuFH0061849

===============
Notable Changes
===============
Lowest ACPI idle states enabled
-------------------------------
Nate Lawson (njl) enabled the use of the lowest ACPI idle states when the
system is online; previously, they were enabled only when offline.  The
change has been stable since December 2003, but if it causes problems, you
can disable it by setting performance_cx_lowest="HIGH" in /etc/rc.conf.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405290452.i4T4qcoD079684

=================
Discussion topics
=================
Copyright attributions in modified files
----------------------------------------
Brooks Davis (brooks)'s commit of the eui64 code prompted a question
from Ceri Davies (ceri) regarding the copyright, which was in Bill Paul
(wpaul)'s name.  Brooks responded that the files with Bill's copyrights
were copied from files Bill wrote, with a few edits and deletions; Brooks
felt there was enough of Bill's code and little enough of Brooks's that
Bill's copyright should stand alone.  Marcel Moolenaar (marcel) speculated
that, from a legal perspective, it's probably better to add one's name
when editing a file, since without a disclaimer of liability, it's
important to know who is liable for what lines.  Brooks responded that he
would have to add a full copyright block with licensing terms approved by
his legal department (equivalent to the 3-line BSD license).  He suspected
he would be covered as a contributor in the existing license, but wasn't
sure.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405262258.i4QMw7KZ085659

===================
Important bug fixes
===================
Security problem in msync fixed
-------------------------------
Dag-Erling Smorgrav fixed a bug in the msync system call that permitted
users, in some situations, to prevent changes to a file from being saved
to disk.  The fix is present in -STABLE, 4.10, 4.9, 4.8, and 5.2.  This
bug is discussed in `FreeBSD-SA-04:11.msync`_, which credits it to Stephan
Uphoff and Matt Dillon.

.. _`FreeBSD-SA-04:11.msync`: 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-04:11.msync.asc

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405251840.i4PIesBn0633538

===============
Other bug fixes
===============
Bill Paul (wpaul) added a workaround in the NDIS driver for drivers that
have mismatched letter cases in the registry and driver, and fixed a
couple of bugs, one related to the Atheros Aries driver.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405290641.i4T6fHhj002797

Marius Strobl (marius) added a workaround for a problem that caused
auto-negotiation on some hme Ethernet cards to never establish a
full-duplex 100baseTX connection.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405291823.i4TINQK0077073

Josef El-Rayes (josef) committed a patch from Tom Convery to fix the
kernel not building when "options BKTR_USE_FREEBSD_SMBUS" was present in
the kernel configuration.  The fix closes `PR 60458`_.

.. _`PR 60458`: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=60458

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405262018.i4QKIxZY050987

Alan Cox (alc) committed a patch from Matt Dillon that removes a bug from
the memory management code that resulted in lost memory pages under some
circumstances.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405281942.i4SJg3aJ040317
Received on Tue Jun 01 2004 - 15:58:47 UTC

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