One of the more frequently updated files is the i386 port's GENERIC kernel config file, which is at revision 1.963 right now. This means that since it's import into CVS, 963 different revisions have been made. In CVS, all those files are kept in a single GENERIC,v file. In git, this puts 963 files on the file system. A bit of a difference.

Looking at the space requirements for storing the repository data itself, the GENERIC,v file is 883,233 bytes[1]. Extracting all 963 versions from revision 1.1 to revision 963 results in disk space usage of 32,805,828 bytes[2,3]. And that's not counting the overhead of 962 inodes and the related directory bookkeeping.

In other words, the git model requires about 37 times the space that CVS does.

Sure the example file is not exactly one with an average number of revisions, and I know that git offers some more efficient storage methods via "pack" files, but investigating those is left as an exercise to the reader. :-)

% ls -la GENERIC,v 
-r--r--r--  1 feyrer  wheel  883233 Feb 12 16:57 GENERIC,v 

[2]

% mkdir extracted
% chdir extracted
% sh -c 'for i in `jot 964`; do echo $i ; co -p -r1.$i ../GENERIC >GENERIC-`printf %04d $i` ; done'

[3]

% cat extracted/* | wc -c
 32805828 

• Support C99 complex arithmetic was added by importing the "cephes" math library
• POSIX Message queues were added
• bozohttpd was added as httpd.
• the x86 bootloader now reads /boot.cfg to configure banner text, console device, timeout etc. - see boot.cfg(5)
• ifconfig(8) now has a "list scan" command to scan for access points
• SMP (multiprocessor) support is now enabled in i386 and amd64 GENERIC kernels
• Processor-sets, affinity and POSIX real-time extensions were added, along with the schedctl(8) program to control scheduling of processes and threads.
• systrace was removed, due to security concerns
• the refuse-based Internet Access Node file system was committed, which provides a filesystem interface to FTP and HTTP, similar to the old alex file system, see http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2007/08/28/0081.html
• LKMs don't care for options MULTIPROCESSOR and LOCKDEBUG, i.e. it's easier to reuse LKMs between debugging/SMP and non-debugging/SMP kernels now.
• PCC, the Portable C Compiler that originates in the very beginnings of Unix, was added to NetBSD. The idea is that it is used as alternative to the GNU C Compiler in the long run.
• In addition to the iSCSI target (server) code that is already in NetBSD 4.0, there'a also a refuse-based iSCSI initiator (client) now, see http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2007/11/08/0038.html

• Many driver updates and new drivers, see your nearest GENERIC kernel config file
• Many security updates, see list of security advisories
• Many 3rd software packages that NetBSD ships with were updated: ipsec-tools (racoon), GCC 4.1, Automated Testing Framework 0.4, OpenSSH 4.7, wpa_supplicant and hostapd 0.6.2, OpenPAM Hydrangea

So much on this subject for now. If someone's willing to help out with continuing Mark Kirby's NetBSD CVS Digest either using his software-setup or by simply reading the list and writing a monthly/weekly digest of the "interesting" changes, I'd appreciate this very much. Put me on CC: for your postings! :)

[Tags: alex, bozohttpd, c99, cephes, cvs, cvs-digest, digest, ian, iscsi, lkm, pcc, refuse, smp, systrace]

/home/cvs/src-current/obj.i386/tooldir/bin/nbinstallboot  -t raw  \
	-mi386  bootxx /home/cvs/src-current/obj.i386/destdir/usr/\
	mdec/bootxx_cd9660
nbinstallboot: Invalid magic in stage1 bootstrap 0 != 7886b6d1
nbinstallboot: Set bootstrap operation failed 

I've verified that daily releng builds work, so this was probably a problem on my side, but where? I didn't want to blindly rebuild the whole toolchain on this slow PC, so tried investigating. Comparing /usr/mdec/bootxx_cd990 from my own and the releng build showed that there *was* some difference, so I continued looking in src/sys/arch/i386/stand/bootxx/bootxx_cd9660 to see what the matter was. Using hexdump -C showed that there was a difference between my bootxx_cd9660 and the releng one, and after getting the intermediate files of the build (bootxx_cd9660.tmp, cdboot.o) from a helpful being on #NetBSD, nm(1) showed that my version of cdboot.o lacked several symbols, e.g. a "start1".

As the cdboot.o file is made directly from a cdboot.S file, there's probably not much chance for the compiler to break things, and I didn't really believe that the assembler would add symbols on its own. Asking other people, they confirmed that they had "start1" in their cdboot.S files, while my copy of the same file lacked such a symbol. From there it was just a quick look at src/sys/arch/i386/stand/cdboot/CVS/Entries to fine the problem:

miyu% cat CVS/Entries
/Makefile/1.6/Wed Jun 28 20:23:05 2006//
/cdboot.S/1.2/Mon Aug  7 23:24:18 2006//T1.2
D 

Next thing to do: cd src ; cvs up -A, just to be on the safe side.

[Tags: cvs, hubertf, rants]

 ...
 P distrib/sets/lists/xserver4/md.i386
 P distrib/sets/lists/xserver4/mi
 cvs update: move away distrib/utils/sysinst/Makefile; it is in the way
 C distrib/utils/sysinst/Makefile
 cvs update: move away distrib/utils/sysinst/Makefile.inc; it is in the way
 C distrib/utils/sysinst/Makefile.inc
 cvs update: move away distrib/utils/sysinst/SPELLING.en; it is in the way
 C distrib/utils/sysinst/SPELLING.en
 ...  

To end the problem for all times, I remembered of a nice trick I saw recently (I think mentioned by someone from the NetBSD admins team) to use one file for all CVS/Root files, and hardlink that into all "CVS"-directories:

 % cd .../src
 % cat CVS/Root >r
 % find . -name Root | grep CVS/Root \
 ? | sh -c 'while read r ; do echo rm $r ; echo ln r $r ; done' \
 ? | sh -v
 % rm r 

Now whenever the CVS repository needs to be switched, updating a single file is enough, due to all the .../CVS/Root files being hardlinks to the same file (watch the link count of 6494):

 % ls -la CVS/Root
 -rw-r--r--  6494 feyrer  wheel  32 Mar 20 20:39 CVS/Root
 % cat bin/ls/CVS/Root 
 anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot
 % echo anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.netbsd.org:/cvsroot >CVS/Root
 % cat bin/ls/CVS/Root 
 anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.netbsd.org:/cvsroot