This is a regular weekly summary of FreeBSD's cutting-edge development. It is intended to help the FreeBSD community keep up with the fast-paced work going on in FreeBSD-CURRENT by distilling the deluge of data from the CVS mailing list into a (hopefully) easy-to-read newsletter. This newsletter is marked up in reStructuredText, so any odd punctuation that you see is likely intended for the reST parser.
The mailing list archive is still reported to be down, but the links seem to be working anyway. YMMV, but check http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/ for more information.
The format of this summary is based on Brett Cannon's python-dev summaries, but it is subject to change.
You can get old summaries, and an HTML version of this one, at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/ . Please send any comments to Mark Johnston (mark at xl0.org).
Two committers were added this week. Scott Long (scottl) introduced Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd), who will be working on GEOM and RAID. Scott will be Pawel's mentor. Joerg Wunsch (joerg) introduced Lukas Ertl (le), who will also initially be working on Vinum and its integration with GEOM. Greg Lehey (grog) will be Lukas's official mentor, but because of the time difference between the two, Joerg will be a co-mentor.
pjd's introduction: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402020905.i1295w5X080401 le's introduction: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402021905.i12J57UU030079
Nate Lawson (njl) applied a minor patch to the ACPI code to prevent false positives in the high-temperature shutdown routine, prompting some general discussion of the feature. M. Warner Losh (imp) mentioned that a high-temperature shutdown would have saved his melted Casio FIVA; sadly, the feature wasn't here a year ago when it overheated. There was some discussion about other high-temperature-emergency measures, like dropping to single-user mode or spinning down disks. Nate explained that, once cpufreq (code for controlling the speed of the system's processor) is done, it will be used to slow down the CPU before the temperature gets critical.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402021803.i12I3ZJW016336
David Xu (davidxu) added a debugger-independent library, libpthread_dbg, that can be used to read and write libpthread's data structures. Marcel Moolenaar (marcel) suggested that the library be named libthread_db, for consistency. David argued that, since the library will support only libpthread, it should use libpthread in the name. Daniel Eischen (deischen) offered to add abstraction to allow the library to support all the threading libraries.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402040501.i1451Gir058159
Many people contributed to a discussion about a problem that has been cropping up with CVS commit mail lately, where the committer's userid in the message is replaced with a different one. Ken Smith stated that the problem is being actively worked on. Numerous people looked over the code, and David Malone (dwmalone) noted that he has been noticing getlogin(2) returning the wrong thing under -STABLE. For now, the problem remains at large.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402030932.i139WBpQ054113
Jacques Vidrine (nectar) applied a security fix for a bug in shmat(2), which is used to allocate SysV shared memory, as reported in FreeBSD-SA-04:02.shmat. Jacques also patched the security branches for 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9. Please see the advisory for more information. This bug was originally reported by Joost Pol.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402051800.i15I0ZOx085923
Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd) made some important commits to the filesystem mounting code. Before his changes, root, from inside a jail, could unmount any file system, and users inside jails could mount a file system when the sysctl vfs.usermount was set to 1.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402021902.i12J25GL028606
Max Khon (fjoe) committed libmap to -STABLE. libmap is a function in the dynamic linker that allows programs loading libraries at runtime to be redirected to other libraries on the fly. The most common use of libmap, in -CURRENT, is to manipulate the threading library that an application loads; for instance, if a program tries to load libpthread.so, it can be made to load libc_r.so instead.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402032104.i13L4GAf030014
Brooks Davis (brooks) committed code to the kernel and to ifconfig that allows network interfaces to be renamed on the fly. Network interfaces can now be renamed with ifconfig name, like:
ifconfig xl0 name wired
If you use this feature, watch out for programs that break when their interface is renamed and programs that assume that the interface name is short. Problems should be reported to Brooks and the net@ list.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402040254.i142sPMc014724
Scott Long (scottl) committed fixes to the aac (Adaptec AdvancedRAID) driver over the course of the week, diagnosing and eventually fixing a problem that was causing lost commands and system hangs. As of Saturday, he reports that it is now "safe to go back into the aac waters."
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402071030.i17AUN8a039905
Peter Grehan made many commits to the PowerPC code, bringing in some enhancements from NetBSD as well as some of his own work. (many)
Ruslan Ermilov (ru) made many cleanups to Makefiles all over the system, correcting style problems and fixing inconsistencies and redundancies. (many)
Matt Jacob (mjacob) MFC'ed many bugfixes and minor corrections in the isp driver for QLogic SCSI and Fibre Channel adapters. He also applied fixes in -CURRENT for a number of issues and brought in some cleanup work he had been working on. (many)
Justin T. Gibbs (gibbs) committed many enhancements and bugfixes to the aic7xxx driver, for Adaptec AIC-7000 series RAID controllers. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402041638.i14GccXu087812
Bill Paul (wpaul) continues to work on the NDISulator, AKA Project Evil, at a terrific pace. This week, he added support for the Centrino chipset as supplied by Asus and the AMD Am1771/1772 chipsets. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402030739.i137dNCs021236 http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402070644.i176iDqn083119
John Baldwin (jhb) added some cleaned-up code, originally submitted by Mike Makonnen (mtm), that enables locking for the per-process resource limits structure. Please see the commit message for a detailed list of the many changes. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402042152.i14Lqw7l073871
Mike Makonnen (mtm) committed a patch submitted by Juergen Unger to support starting and stopping jails individually. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402021325.i12DPSHU045860
Yar Tikhiy (yar) fixed a bug in ftpd that could have caused some FTP clients, including Mozilla, to think that a directory was actually a file. The fix was submitted by Bob Finch. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200402071411.i17EBcbj097460
