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[20090116]
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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]
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