FreeBSD

Jeffrey Hsu (a well known FreeBSD and DragonFly networking stack developer) has committed first cut of TCP ABC implementation for DragonFlyBSD. Described in RFC 3465, this is an improvement that can provide better throughput.

Colin is very effective man that has made some changes to the kernel, and so@ has approved this, and 5.4-RELEASE gets its first patchlevel.

I’m happy that this did not forced me to go to the hosting provider :-)

I have upgraded tarsier from 5.4-RC1 to 5.4-RELEASE right now. It goes smoothly.

Hey I know it makes the uptime go to 0, but it’s a sign of patching known issues, while they are not so serious :-)

许多人开始在论坛宣布5.4-RELEASE。历史上FreeBSD把发出的iso收回重新release又不是没发生过，那么着急做什么？FreeBSD是一个开源的系统，国内有两个每15分钟更新一次的官方cvsup镜像，何必呢……

Today I have experienced how to install FreeBSD from a USB device - quite simple so you can do it yourself :-)

First, initialize the USB solid state disk with bsdlabel(8):

bsdlabel -wB /dev/da0

Then, initialize a file system:

newfs -O1 /dev/da0a

Third, copy CDROM’s /boot to it.

And you can now boot from the USB disk.

Today, Colin has committed three security fixes that addresses three medium-risk security issues in FreeBSD kernel. That results in p11, p12 and p13 of FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, and has been committed to RELENG_5_4 as well so we will get that in the final release build.

Ken Smith has announced the tagging (with a mini heads-up in developers@), and then committed the naming (5.4-RELEASE) to the RELENG_5_4 tree. After that, RELENG_5_4 was tagged as RELENG_5_4_0_RELEASE, which is the last step of the release engineering that is related to the src/tree.

Please note that, this is not the final step of the final release. FreeBSD is very careful about the quality (not only as opposed to the kernel with colorful history of its security record, which is released under GPL and often release from time to time, haha, you know which is that) of a release, therefore, tagging does not mean that “we made it”, that is just a stage. Please be patient to wait for the PGP signed 5.4-RELEASE announcement BEFORE you download isos, even they were found on any sites.

我一直不是一个认为「酒香不怕巷子深」的人，不过这位老兄的话还是多少让人觉得有点不爽。其实挺好的一个事情，非得搞到*BSD和Linux对决不可吗？

Apparantly des@ has pointed out a serious problem with my patchset, say, the inconsistency of underlying API is the root of evil(tm), and should be corrected.

Let’s go go go!

So I got this in libmsun’s bsdsrc :-)

I have enabled PREEMPTION, FULL_PREEMPTION with ULE. Now I get strange result here:

• propagate_priority gets a TD_ON_LOCK(td)
• It tries to panic(), unfortunatelly, ts->ts_lockobj here is NULL
• A fatal trap 12 happens.

It seems that ts->ts_lockobj was touched by sched_lend_prio, for unknown reasons. Maybe there is some lock releases?