Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:51:29 +0100 From: Marius Strobl <marius@alchemy.franken.de> To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: improvements in 7.1 Message-ID: <20090113195129.GA9784@alchemy.franken.de>
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FYI, in comparison to FreeBSD 7.0, 7.1 contains the following improvements interesting for sparc64: o ata(4) was tought about the mapping used by (Open)Solaris required to fit the geometries of larger, i.e. > 32GB, disks into the the 16-bit fields of the Sun and VTOC8 disk labels. This means it's now possible to use the full capacity of such disks without the need to label them with (Open)Solaris. o dc(4) grew a workaround for a minor hardware bug of certain chips that it supports, including those used on-board in V100 and X1, which prevented the link state to be reported correctly, in turn causing failover of lagg(4) to not work. Solving this revealed bugs which could lead to panics in dc(4) itself though. If you're using dc(4) and updated some time between 7.0 and 7.1 you'll definitely should switch to 7.1. o esp(4) received an overhaul adapting it to MPSAFE cam(4) and make it more robust regarding target failures that previously caused panics, amongst other improvements. Unfortunately, the esp(4) in 7.0 was incorrectly marked as being MPSAFE with unclear outcome. If you use esp(4) on a MP machine you thus should update to 7.1 o kbdmux(4) was enabled by default in the sparc64 GENERIC. Since sunkbd(4) emulates PS/2 keyboards by default for some time just like ukbd(4) does it's possible to mix RS232 and USB keyboards now (this actually was requested by someone some time ago...). o gem(4) received some minor fixes. Support for the SBus- version of GEM will hit CURRENT soon and should be available in 7-STABLE some time before 7.2. o hme(4) got some fixes and improvements, though nothing particular standing out. o sf(4) was enabled by default in the sparc64 GENERIC after it received a major overhaul making it work on all architectures supported by FreeBSD. o sym(4) was adapted to MPSAFE cam(4) and now correctly negotiates Ultra-3 with 53C1010 without NVRAM as found on sparc64. o vr(4) was enabled by default in the sparc64 GENERIC after it received a major overhaul making it work on all architectures supported by FreeBSD. o The sparc64 interrupt code was better adapted to the machine independent one, getting rid of unnecessary disabling and re-enabling of the interrupt source with ever acknowledge and allowing to load-balance interrupts across the CPUs in MP system as well as binding single interrupts to specific CPUs. o The sparc64 OFW PCI code was switched over to use the PCI domain support, which is mandatory for bringing in support for USIII and beyond sun4u. This should be transparent for the average user, just pciconf(8) selectors might have changed on some machines as a result. o A workaround in the sparc64 stack_save(9) for an old GCC bug was removed, which fixes backtracing of curthread as done by witness(4) for displaying information when using GCC 4.2 or later. o A race concerning more or less (well, at least not limited to sparc64) machine dependent code of kmem(4), which allowed a panic to by triggered using for example fstat(1), was fixed. Chances are also that we once again shipped with working Firefox 2 and friends, though unfortunately version 3 was reported to again contain a bunch of LP64 bugs. Marius
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