[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

OSKit 20020317 snapshot; St. Patrick's Day Snapshot



Luck o' the Irish to ya!  After more than a year, we have finally made a
new OSKit snapshot!

The major new feature in this snapshot is Kota Abe's simple process library
and encapsulated NetBSD UVM library.  The process library allows you to
create multiple, demand-pageable, address spaces in which to run code in
user-mode.  A mechanism exists for defining system calls to give access to
privileged services from these user-mode processes.  It should be noted that
this is only the first step in defining a process model in the OSKit.
Kota did this work while a visiting researcher here in 2000-2001.

We have also added some initial infrastructure for SNMP-like queries, but
this work is *FAR* from complete, and the OSKit does *NOT* yet have any
components for actually sending or receiving SNMP messages.  What it does
have is COM interfaces that correspond to the major groups of SNMP's MIB-II,
and the FreeBSD network stack now implements the relevant interfaces.

Here is a brief rundown of other changes from the 20010214
(``Valentine's Day'') release:

BOOTLOADERS:
* Netboot has been enhanced to support loading via TFTP as well as NFS.

* Added ofwboot for Sharks.  It is the equivalent of pxeboot, interacting
  with the Emulab bootinfo server to determine what kernel to boot.

* Much reorg, bug fixing, and performance enhancement in netdisk.

IMPROVEMENTS:
* Make sure some examples (SVGA, X11) don't get built unless the libraries
  are configured in.

* Audio support on ARM.  Mostly entailed adding more device support for
  the ARM and "commonizing" existing x86 code.  This was a lark project
  to turn a Shark into an MP3 player.  See the libmad directory.

* Added Testbed Master Control Protocol (TMCP) support for use in running
  OSKit kernels in the Emulab (www.emulab.net) environment.

* Changes to the startup library to allow more fine-grained initialization
  of network interfaces, added startup for sound devices.

* Added prototype support for transmit "polling" (i.e., transmit complete
  interrupts disabled) to go along with receive polling in the network
  infrastructure.  Only the eepro100 driver supports this mode of operation.

IMPORTANT FIXES:

* Various fixes to the mini UDP library: recvfrom returned wrong value,
  alignment problems, problems with IP broadcast addresses.

DOCUMENTATION:
* Added chapters for simple process library and UVM library.

* Began chapter documenting libstartup.

* Changes to improve WWW version.

NITS:
* In mklinuximage, ensure that resulting binary is not too large for LILO

* pthread_mutex_trylock can now be called at interrupt time

* Propagate "no more space" errors on send from ethernet drivers through
  the BSD network stack and back to applications.