Committed Code – Page 32 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/02/29

Deleting too fast

Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.

2012/02/28

Going Gold

Thanks to John Marino’s work, it’s now possible to build the DragonFly kernel and world using gold, and have it work. You just have to set WORLD_LDVER to make it work. I don’t think there’s any user-visible change from this, other than a tiny speedup in building. I don’t know if any other BSD is using gold yet.

2012/02/272012/02/26

Random numbers on nonexistent chips

Alex Hornung added support for rdrand(4), the random number generator built into some Intel CPUs. That would be Ivy Bridge CPUs, which aren’t released yet, so it hasn’t been tested… but you’re covered for that day in the future when they arrive.

2012/02/15

Hammer 2, the commits

For the curious and technically oriented, Hammer 2 development can be watched directly by looking for any commits marked ‘hammer2’. There’s been a lot, and if you want to see the code as it flows in, here’s your chance.

2012/02/11

Preinit, init, and fini arrays added

John Marino has added support for preinit, init, and fini arrays. DragonFly is the first BSD to do so, apparently. What are they for? I’m not sure. The commit message points to more documentation, but not simple enough for me.

2012/02/082012/02/06

PUFFS now in DragonFly

Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.

2012/02/062012/02/07

GCC 4.6 now possible

John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile ~~GCC 4.6~~ a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.

Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.

2012/01/31

ISDN really gone

ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.

2012/01/262012/01/25

Libpcap, tcpdump updated

Peter Avalos updated libpcap and tcpdump. This is on master, not the 3.0 branch.

2012/01/252012/01/24

Old ATA also out

A bit of symmetry in that title, there. Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone. This should affect nobody…

2012/01/202012/01/17

RELRO in a BSD

John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.

2012/01/202012/01/20

Security problem and a fix

Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.

2012/01/192012/01/17

How low can you go? (with RAM and Hammer)

Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.

2012/01/162012/01/17

Have problems, become immortalized

What happens when you break enough things in DragonFly that you become a source of test cases? As Antonio Huete Jimenez (AKA “tuxillo” on IRC) found out, you get a stress test named after you.

2012/01/122012/01/12

Netgraph update

Nuno Antunes has committed a large quantity of work on updating netgraph to version 7. His goal is to be able to run mpd5, though it’s not there yet. If you want to look at it, go to the monthly page and look around the 10th; there’s too much to link to individually.

2012/01/05

OpenSSL update

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0f; this is to fix 6 security issues identified in the OpenSSL changelog.

2012/01/03

Something for re(4) users

You may want to update for this – a lockup bug with the re(4) (RealTek 8xxx series) driver has been fixed.

2012/01/03

dma(8) update

dma, which originated on DragonFly, is now at version 0.7, and so is the version in DragonFly.

2011/12/29

Libm updates, plus a free security fix

John Marino updated libm, bringing a large quantity of functions. This may be a stopgap measure for now. As a positive side effect, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder now.

2011/12/27

Telnetd update, and history

The recently discovered telnetd vulnerability has been fixed in DragonFly, thanks to Peter Avalos. Apparently it’s been around everywhere forever. (last link via xhr) Hopefully there aren’t that many people that still need a telnet daemon; SSH has run it out of town for the most part.