[20090116]
|
Catching up on NetBSD source changes - Sep'08 to early Jan'09
OK, I'll try to catch up source-changes a bit more frequently
in the future (new years resolutions... don't we all have some?),
but here's what I've missed by now, from between September 2008
until now (early January 2009):
- In preparation of the NetBSD 5.0 release, a lot of documentation
updates were made, esp. in the release notes. Also, many manual
pages were added to the system, documenting existing userland
tools, library, system and internal interfaces.
- Following some re-organization of binary packages on ftp.NetBSD.org
some time ago, the official URLs are now:
- ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
- ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/current-packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
Both should have the same results, the latter is more safe
on mirrors that don't carry /pub/pkgsrc. Adjust your PKG_PATHs!
- Syntax for /etc/rc.conf's ifconfig_xxN variables and /etc/ifconfig.xxN
was changed to also allow line breaks via ';'s. This allows
something like ifconfig_wi0="ssid 'my network'; dhcp"
- Martin Schuette's work on syslogNG from Google Summer of Code 2008
is now available in NetBSD's syslog
- X.org integration is advancing in big steps. It's on by default on
a number of platforms (including alpha, i386, macppc, shark, sparc and sparc64),
and instead of using the (now obsolete) MKXORG build variable
it can be build with "build.sh -x".
- Old-style LKMs are dead, welcome to the new module framework!
(XXX Documentation???) In the process, more and more kernel
subsystems are being changed to be loadable as a module, e.g.
POSIX AIO and semaphores, File System Snapshots,
emulations, exec formats, coredump, NFS client and server,
http and data accept filters, ppp compressors,
and others.
Hooks into UVM have been added to unload unused kernel modules
if memory is scarce.
- MAKEVERBOSE now has two new levels, 3 and 4. The complete list
is now:
- 0 Minimal output ("quiet")
- 1 Describe what is occurring
- 2 Describe what is occurring and echo the actual command
- 3 Ignore the effect of the "@" prefix in make commands
- 4 Trace shell commands using the shell's -x flag
The default remains MAKEVERBOSE=2, you can also set this via
build.sh's -N switch.
- A POSIX conformant tabs(1) utility was added
- The haad-dm branch was merged to NetBSD-current. This
adds Logical Volumen Management (LVM) functionality to
the base NetBSD system. It uses Linux LVM2 tools and our BSD licensed
device-mapper driver.
- The wrstuden-revivesa branch was merged into NetBSD-current,
bringing Scheduler Activation based threading back to NetBSD,
and giving NetBSD 5.0 and up both SA and 1:1 threads.
- Support for the ARM-based Cortina Systems SL3516 eval board was added
to NetBSD/evbarm
- patch(1) got a major overhaul, based on DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD.
There's better detection of double applied patches, rejected diffs
remain in unified diff format, and and less limitation e.g. on line
length.
- pxeboot now understands boot.cfg
- Boot CD ISO creation has been greatly overhauled, accomodating
changes in boot.cfg, and moving away from a ramdisk-based system
to using a file system on the cd-rom, which helps reduce RAM usage.
Also, the GENERIC kernel can be used there.
- makefs(8)'s ISO-9660 (cdrom) support was enhanced to write
RISC OS data. This allows to make bootable CDs for acorn{26,32}
directly, without copying the bootloader to a native file system.
- The christos-time_t branch has been merged into NetBSD-current.
This gives 64bit time_t and dev_t types (no more
year 2038-problem!!!).
Many related places like timeval and timespec were adjusted,
kernel and userland APIs were touched, and shared library
major versions (including libc) were bumped for this fairly
exhaustive change.
See src/UPDATING's entry on 20090110 for the full update path!
- New/updated drivers:
- jme(4) for JMicron Technologies JME250 Gigabit Ethernet and JME260 Fast Ethernet PCI Express controllers
- u3g(4) provides better support for 3G datacards than ugensa
- dbcool(4) for dbCool(tm) family of Thermal Monitor and Fan Controller
- ataraid(4) now supports Intel MatrixRAID and JMicron RAID
- bwi(4) for Broadcom BCM4302 wlan controllers, otherwise known as Airport Extreme
- alipm(4) for the Acer Labs M7101 Power Manage- ment controller
- admtemp(4) for the Analog Devices ADM1021, Analog Devices ADM1023, Analog Devices ADM1032, Genesys Logic GL523SM, Global Mixed-mode Technology G781, Maxim 1617, and Xeon embedded temperature sensors
- ipw(4),iwi(4),wpi(4),iwn(4): We ship the firmware now, but
users have to accept the Intel license manually by setting
sysctls like hw.ipw.accept_eula=1. The latter is also offered
by sysinst.
- nsp(4) adds support for the NSP2000 cryptographic processor
which does crypto, hashing and arbitrary precision arithmetics
in hardware, and which hooks into the opencrypto(9) interface.
- pseye(4) makes the Sony Playstation Eye USB webcam usable with
the new video(4) framework
- ath(4) now uses the recently-released source-based version
of the Atheros HAL, no more binary blob!
Whee... I should really do this more often to cut things down.
[Tags: acorn, ath, cortina, google-soc, iso, lkm, lvm, makefs, modules, patch, pkgsrc, posix, pxe, Release, sa, syslog, tabs, time_t, x.org]
|
[20081130]
|
Atheros HAL source released
To quote from the
madwifi project news itesm,
``Sam Leffler, maintainer of the binary HAL that is also used in MadWifi releases, has released the source code for his HAL variant under ISC license. It is available through a
Subversion repository
(web interface), which is also be used actively for development and further improvements.
In his announcement, Sam states:
Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices. This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other platforms will have to scrape the information from there.
"Linux platform" refers to ath5k and ath9k. Interested parties are advised to attend the
ath5k-devel and
ath9k-devel mailing lists. These lists may be also used to ask general questions about the chipsets supported by the respective drivers. ''
I guess we can look forward to the day when this is integrated into
NetBSD. Note that the named Subversion repository is hosted by
the FreeBSD project, so I guess this won't be off too far until
we see a source-based driver for the Atheros based WiFi cards.
[Tags: ath, atheros, hal]
|
[20060302]
|
Atheros ath* wlan now available for NetBSD/sparc64
The Atheros ath(4) driver is an interesting piece of software,
consisting of a .c glue file that calls into a binary blob object
file. While the interface to the blob is known, the internal
details of it are not, and the blob does all the talking to
the actual hardware. To port the ath(4) driver to a new platform,
a compiled version of that binary blog is necessary, obviously.
Also, some adjusting is needed to adjust the C interface file
to existing blobs to maintain compatibility with the operating
systems' interface.
Now, Martin Husemann has fixed up the glue layer to work on
NetBSD/sparc64, see
his mail
for more details.
(Some people may wonder now why all that fuzz is needed: Atheros
doesn't make the sources of the binary blob available for a number
of reasons; while an open source driver would definitely be nice to
have, living in a world of patents and FCC regulations requires
being flexible)
[Tags: ath, sparc64]
|
[20041210]
|
Installation von WLan-Karten mit Atheros-Chipsatz unter Debian Linux und NetBSD
I helped writing this article some time ago,
but I think I never mentioned it here, and as people occasionally
ask about Atheros cards in NetBSD, this may be of interest.
Beware, german language!
[Tags: ath, debian, Docs, wlan]
|
[20040819]
|
Playing with an ath card
A friend of mine is testing some Linux WiFi stuff at the local
University's Computing Center, and we went to try out NetBSD with
an Atheros card today. An experience made was that the card isn't
easily set to the german frequency modes, even though there is a
sysctl present for it. The solution was to make sure that
CTRY_DEFAULT gets initialized to 276 in contrib/sys/dev/ic/athhal.h.
Now unfortunately no "turbo" modes are available in -current as of
today, while 2.0_BETA finds and lists them both in "dmesg" and
"ifconfig -m". Doh!
[Tags: ath, networking, wlan]
|
[20040819]
|
More ath adventures - NetBSD >> Linux
I continued playing with the Atheros 54MBit WaveLAN cards and an
LanCom Access point today. Getting things configured in NetBSD was
all easy, simply setting "mediaopt turbo" as listed by "ifconfig -m ath0"
and the channel that the AP was tuned to, and off we went. Almost -
I first had to find out that setting the countrycode to Germany
(by patching CTRY_DEFAULT=276 into the kernel) didn't give any Turbo
modes from the HAL, so we operated the hardware in US frequency bands.
Getting the card to attach to the WaveLAN and tune into the right
frequency, ping the access point in the Atheros Turbo mode was all no
problem. On NetBSD.
On Linux, the MadWiFi driver patched into either a 2.4.x or 2.6.x
kernel didn't work when enabling Turbo mode, giving obscure error
messages that we could decode as wrong parameters to one of the HAL
functions by the ifconfig(!) command. This and all the maze of various
tools like ifconfig, iwconfig, iwpriv together with the lot of
undocumented arguments you had to hand them didn't help to make
setting up Turbo mode on an Atheros card w/ Linux a straight forward
job. Manpages for these tools? You wish! And if available, they're
uncomplete and tell the important bits that you have to put into the
"private" bits of the card.
Today's experience confirmed that if you want a working setup
with little to no fuzz, NetBSD is the right choice! Of course in
an economy that lives from consulting and broken things, Linux
sounds much better as it will create demand for support, consulting
and fixing where things could just work, and people could just
get work done otherwise. Oh well!
Performance measurements with iperf showed 43MBit/s (~5MByte/s) between
a Pentium-133 running Linux connected to the AP via ethernet, and a PIII-800
running NetBSD 2.0_BETA/i386 and a -current kernel from today.
[Tags: ath, linux, netbsd, networking, wlan]
|
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'nuff.
Grab the RSS-feed,
index,
or go back to my regular NetBSD page
Disclaimer: All opinion expressed here is purely my own.
No responsibility is taken for anything.