OpenBSD Journal

Sat, 10 May 2008 22:31:02 GMT
Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) sent us this very interesting blog about the latest development in the MacPPC port. Looks like very few people have noticed it, but about two weeks ago bsd.mp appeared in the OpenBSD/macppc snapshots directory on the ftp mirrors. This actually means what you think it is: OpenBSD/macppc now has SMP support! The work on this started quite a while ago. Initial progress was fast, since the PowerPC CPUs in multi-processor Macs have some builtin features that take away headaches like TLB shootdowns, which you have to deal with on other SMP architectures. However, soon after all the ground work was laid and the second CPU on my dual G4 started spinning up I got stuck. Really stuck. We always ended up in ddb in a state that was just impossible. Dale Rahn and I spent a fair amount of time at last year's hackathon trying to find the problem, but we didn't get very far. We had some hope the new machine-independent way of scheduling would help but it didn't... Read more...
Some bugs are so ornery that they remain hidden for a very long time. There are some that happen in such weird edge cases that they go unexposed and are very hard to repeat. Marc Balmer (mbalmer@) investigated a bug that was exposed by Samba. This bug had to do with a corner case with respect to the life of a directory listing. It seems to be the case that iterating through a directory (as provided by seekdir()/readdir()) can return invalid results when the directory is modified (specifically when items are removed) during the list iteration. Read more...
Matthieu Herrb (matthieu@) has committed support for Xorg to detect the keyboard layout based on the wscons keymap being used. Read more...
Wed, 7 May 2008 15:20:47 GMT
Claudio Jeker (claudio@) has removed routed(8). You are encouraged to use ripd(8) instead. Read more...