cvs-src summary for April 26-May 3

FreeBSD cvs-src summary for 26/04/04 to 03/05/04
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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
============
GEOM Gate network disk driver added
-----------------------------------
Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd) committed GEOM Gate, a GEOM driver that allows
disks to be mounted over the network.  This is unlike NFS in that the
actual low-level disk device is exposed to the network, not a mounted
filesystem.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404301608.i3UG8CZV076151

Link state change notification for Ethernet media
-------------------------------------------------
Andre Oppermann (andre) added code to send a notification via the routing
socket when an Ethernet interface is plugged in or unplugged.  This allows
user-space programs to take action based on the state change.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405031348.i43DmZpU020415

Latest lukemftp imported
------------------------
Mike Heffner (mikeh) imported the latest CVS version of lukemftp, Luke
Mewburn's enhanced FTP client from NetBSD.  The new version allows a
prefix string before the progress bar and fixes a problem that occurred
when the connect call was interrupted.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404270031.i3R0VakV064023

libarchive continues to improve
-------------------------------
Tim Kientzle enhanced libarchive, a library for reading and writing
various streaming archives, with support for old-style cpio and SVR4
archives.  He also added a man page, libarchive-formats(5), to summarize
all the supported file formats.  Finally, he added some code to track
statistics and allow libarchive-using programs to get at them.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404280344.i3S3i8Wg052405
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404280434.i3S4Y7Ex069247
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404280441.i3S4fRWg070485

New rarpd merged from -CURRENT
------------------------------
Joerg Wunsch (joerg) merged updates to rarpd, the reverse ARP server.
Reverse ARP is a legacy protocol used to let hosts find out their IP
addresse based on their MAC address.  The update brings in some major
cleanups and fixes rarpd so it can listen on interfaces with more than one
IP address.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404271925.i3RJP1Kp032843

===============
Notable changes
===============
GNU patch removed from contrib
------------------------------
Marius Strobl (marius) removed the GNU patch source from contrib, since
they have been unused for six years in favor of src/gnu/usr.bin/patch.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404302033.i3UKX9tM041329

=================
Discussion topics
=================
Handling of preprocessed assembly code
--------------------------------------
Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) changed the comments in the boot0 bootloader code
to allow it to be preprocessed with cpp.  M. Warner Losh (imp) suggested
that the filename's extension should be .S, not .s, since .S denotes a
preprocessed file.  Julian Elischer (julian) agreed, and Ruslan Ermilov
(ru) clarified that the compiler uses the extension to know when a file
should be preprocessed.  In another thread, Ruslan suggested that changing
the comments from "#" to "//" was backwards, and offered a patch to
reverse it; Bruce Evans (bde) asked for clarification, and after further
research, Ruslan determined that "#" is not a valid comment character
after all.  Ruslan later went on to fix all the preprocessed assembler
boot code to use //-style comments and capital S in the extension.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404271907.i3RJ7ZkI028848

Trouble with hardware clocks
----------------------------
John Baldwin (jhb) posted a minor fix to the hardware clock code.  Mike
Silbersack (silby) asked whether this fixed a bug that had been causing
his system clock to run fast, also noting that his CPU clock measurement
has been varying inexplicably.  Mike also included his timer interrupt
counts, which were lower than they should be.  Bruce Evans (bde) answered
that the commit would not fix calibration problems, and wondered whether
an interrupt could be causing a problem.  Nate Lawson (njl) responded
that that could be happening, and gave the right interrupt counts (99
for IRQ 0 and 127 for IRQ 8) as a comparison.  Bruce clarified that the
correct numbers are 100 and 128, but that 99 and 127 were printed because
of rounding bugs in vmstat.  Mike and Bruce, in a subthread, discussed
a potential change to the clock code that ended up being unhelpful.
In a separate reply, Bruce explained that the commit fixes the i8254
timecounter that was broken by new interrupt code in December.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040501154619.W19822

===================
Important bug fixes
===================
MySQL hangs corrected
---------------------
Daniel Eischen (deischen) modified the kernel threading code to avoid a
race condition.  This change fixes a recent problem with MySQL hanging.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200404282038.i3SKarho043330

===============
Other bug fixes
===============
Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) imported some minor bug fixes from OpenBSD for
the pf packet filter, one of which prevents a potential infinite loop in
route-to.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405022047.i42KlPeD071046