Faster SCSI, new objcache to test

Gary Stanley (‘Ancient’ on #dragonflybsd) has posted a patch against the most recent DragonFly sources that adds SCSI domain validation. It ought to work on older releases, too.

The name isn’t exciting, but SCSI domain validation ensures your SCSI bus runs as fast as possible. If you have the hardware for it, try it out.

Also, if you’re in a testing mood, Matthew Dillon has posted a new version of kern_objcache.c, using spinlocks instead of tokens, coming from a longer conversation detailing locking models in DragonFly.

Bug not a bug

It’s been reported that most every flavor of BSD (including DragonFly) has a FireWire bug allowing a local user to dump all system memory by passing a negative value to an ioctl. This is reported as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs, though that project’s web page doesn’t list it.

Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out that it isn’t a problem on i386 systems, as copyout checks that the argument doesn’t intrude into userland or beyond address space.

No, not yet

The virtual kernel work Matthew Dillon is doing will help support architectures other than x86 someday, but the work isn’t complete yet.

I post this in part because I see people ask “Does DragonFly support the AMD64?” relatively often. There’s also other platforms that are becoming more common (ARM) or less (PowerPC) that would be nice to support.

Of course, AMD64 is a relative term, since it certainly works on AMD64 – you’re reading this web page served from such a system now.