RCNG revs up

Matt Dillon’s updated RCNG in a big way. You can now check the status of, or start, stop, etc. different system services using appropriate single commands like rcstart, rcstop, rcrestart, and so on. varsym -sa will list service status.

The old way had you looking for the appropriate file in /etc/rc.d and issing commands for it, and having to poke throught ps -ax or /var/run/ to see what’s going.

To get this running, do make upgrade_etc in /usr/src/etc, or a regular build/installworld. Also, install /usr/src/sbin/rcrun, and reboot.

lnc and vx in

Code to add the lnc and vx network drivers from FreeBSD-5 is in, put together by Joerg Sonnenberger. This is part of the PCI compat cleanup, though these just-added drivers just use newbus.

Libcaps update

Libcaps, the library for userland threading, has been updated. Work is still proceeding on fp stave/restore, and some other tasks, including Galen Sampson’s work. Matt Dillon’s commit message sums it up as neatly as possible, so I’ll just paste it:

Major update to libcaps. Implement support for virtual cpus using
rfork_thread() and implement IPIs, per-virtual-cpu globaldata areas,
and per-virtual-cpu LWKT scheduling.

libcaps halfway

Galen Sampson and Matt Dillon have committed the first stage of the userland threading – globaldata structure and thread primitives are connected, and libcaps can lock in a fashion similar to the existing kernel locks.

nrelease directory

/usr/src/nrelease has the ability to build the new ‘live’ CD iso images. Listed here is what Matt Dillon listed as possible make targets in that directory:


“release: This will do a full buildworld and buildkernel (GENERIC)
with the current source tree, then generate the release
ISO and directory structure in /usr/release.

quickrel: This will do a ‘quick’ buildworld and buildkernel (i.e.
-DNOCLEAN) and then generate the release ISO and directory
structure in /usr/release.

realquickrel: This is even faster. It assumes that the buildkernel and
buildworld have already been done and just generates the ISO
directory structure and ISO file in /usr/release.”

1.0-CURRENT

Aaaand it’s done – rebuilding your system with current sources will give you a uname that reports “DragonFly”. Through some trickery, most ports are apparently not broken by this.

MBWTest added

I’ll quote Matt Dillon’s entry cause I’m working late:

” The MBWTest program (/tmp/mbw1) attempts to figure out the L1 and L2 cache sizes and measures L1, L2, and non-cached linear memory bandwidth.”

FreeBSD-5 boot

Matt Dillon’s added boot code from FreeBSD 5 – this allows AMD64 and ELF64 support. He also pushed in new linker code and some (not yet enabled) support for UFS2.

Use installkernel and installworld as part of your build process, and you should be fine with these changes. However, you will manually have to copy /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/loader.rc to /boot.

There’s been a lot of new code lately – that’s good!