Author: Justin Sherrill

Matt Dillon’s reorganizing some of the header files; if you build a new kernel anytime soon, make sure you build from scratch using ‘config -r’, as some of the old header files have now vanished.

Changes to systat by Kenneth Culver gives it the ability to show each network interface and its throughput.

Jeffrey Hsu and Matt Dillon’s network changes are being committed – the first third is in, according to a commit by Matt.

Matt describes the plan thusly:

“Basically the goal of this work is to isolate and serialize PCBs in specific threads in order to (A) not have to lock them and (B) improve cache locality for ISR processing loops as well as for data. Isolating a network PCB means dealing with the points where the PCB talks to other parts of the system. There are three points where this happens:

• incoming packets go through preprocessing (e.g. IP) before
  being routed to the target protocol & PCB (e.g. TCP and UDP).

• user syscalls operate on PCBs
• timers and such initiate work related to particular PCBs”

I wish I knew what a PCB was.

Matt Dillon’s putting in some material from FreeBSD-5, so if PNPBIOS is defined, you may not produce a working kernel during the next few days.

update: PNPBIOS should not be enabled if you have a AMD64 machine, and the K8V motherboard, as that appears to be broken.

The 3c940 ethernet driver (found on ASUS K8V motherboards) is now supported. It’s the ‘sk’ device. Matt Dillon’s AMD64 machine apparently arrived.

Eirik Nygaard has also cleaned out all the __P() in usr.bin and usr.sbin, and incidentally gained a commit bit. Congrabulations.

Eirik Nygaard submitted a patch that removes over 700 instances of __P() from src/sbin/. It’s been committed.