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[20080323]
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Another catch-up on source-changes
Here's another summary of NetBSD's changes, summarized after reading
the source-changes mailing list from the past few weeks:
- Matt Fleming made progress on the mjf-devfs2 branch, adding a dctl(4)
device for communication between the kernel and the devfs daemon
running in userland. It's possible now to manually create and remove
device nodes (using mknod and rm), and changes will be noted and saved
across reboots.
- NetBSD's Kerberos was updated to Heimdal 1.1 by Michael van Elst
- Machine-independent atomic operations were implemented for the ia64
port by Takayoshi Koch
- bzip2 was updated to version 1.0.5, which removes a potential security
vulnerability (CERT-FI 20469: Joint Vulnerability Advisory on Archive
Formats, for the parts that apply to bzip2). The new version doesn't
offer an info page any more.
- Many network device drivers have been prepared for self-suspension
in the context of the new power-management framework.
- Matthias Drochner has added a routine to reset the VGA console to something
useable when the system crashes while running X. So far the console was
mostly dead in that situation, but it can be restored with that call now.
To run it, either (blindly) type "call ddb_vgapost"
while in DDB, or put the command into the ddb.commandonenter sysctl.
Note that this is for crash analysis only, as the X server
will most likely not like the kernel fiddling with its VGA/graphics state.
- Andrew Doran has continued his crusade to make the kernel work fine with
SMP systems. His most recent changes include cleanup of reference count
handling in the file descriptor handling, and moving kqueue and kevent
towards being
safe on multiprocessing and multithreading systems. This led to a lot of code
not needing to bother with reference counting, and it also reduced the
numner of arguments passed around in internal functions.
- Support for the ARM
Vector Floating Point (VF
P) unit
was added by Richard Earnshaw.
- While talking about ARM: support for XScale (PXA-2x0) based
iPaqs was added by Rafal Boni and Robert Swindells.
- Takeshi Nakayama has worked on lowlevel sparc64 routines like
inter-processor interrupts (IPIs), per-CPU TLB, MMU and interrupt
handling. This eventually got sparc64 SMP working. Yai!
- Manuel Bouyer has taught Xen's block storage driver about wedges,
and also how to handle files larger than 4TB.
- Frank Wille has made efforts to build NetBSD's in-tree XFree86
on Open Firmware-based PowerPCs
- Michael Lorenz has added the start of a driver for the CRIME
rendering engine found on SGI O2 workstations. This goes for wscons,
and also Xwsfb.
- Jeremy Reed has started a "NetBSD Tips" fortune file. To use, run
"fortune netbsd-tips".
- Mindaugas 'rmind' Rasiukevicius has done a lot of work on NetBSD's
scheduler recently. In support of this work, he has added a number of
manpages, where using things from userland are documented,
see sched(3) and pset(3).
The above list go hand in hand with
Mark Kirby's NetBSD CVS Digest. Have a look!
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