|
[20080225]
|
Mondo catch-up on source-changes (~Aug '07 'till Feb '08)
In the context of Mark Kirby
stopping his NetBSD CVS Digest,
I've felt an urge to catch up on
source-changes, and put
up some of the items here that I haven't found mentioned
or announced elsewhere (or that I've plainly missed)
after digging through some 7,000 mails. All those
changes are
available in NetBSD-current today
and that will be in NetBSD 5.0:
- 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
Plus:
- 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
The above list is a mixed list of items. There are a number of
areas where there is very active development going on in NetBSD.
Andrew Doran is further working on SMP, fine-grained locking
inside the kernel and interrupt priority handling. Antti Kantee
has has done more work on his filesystems work (rump, puffs,
refuse/fuse), and Jared McNeill and Jörg Sonnenberger have
continued their work on NetBSD's power management framework.
Those changes are large and far-reaching, and I've yet to look
at them before I can report more here.
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]
|
