Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 10:28:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: "a.s.gruner" <plankalkuel@encephalon.de>, Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What will be new in FBSD 5 Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020508100237.83455R-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <3CD8BD17.1F72D951@mindspring.com>
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Actually, the easiest thing to do is to check out the 5.0 release notes from the source tree, build them, and read them. Or you can read them in sgml source, of course :-). You can check them out of src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes Ignore entries marked '&merged' since those are things that went into the 5.0 branch but got merged back to 4.x and will be included in a release prior to 5.0. They get removed before the release happens but are left in for reference. Off-hand, some of the really interesting things going in are: - Fine-grained kernel SMP (SMPng) which permits higher performance and parallelism, and restructures the kernel around improved synchronization primitives. Many scalability improvements for SMP, and an improved kernel locking paradigm. - KSE: Derived from the notion of Scheduler Activations, this mechanism will support much improved scalability and performance of user threads on FreeBSD. - devfs: the device filesystem removes manual management of the /dev tree, allowing the system to adapt to device environment changes more cleanly and with less administrator intervention. This is really helpful with widespread use of USB, firewire, etc. - Client-side NFS locking using a distributed lock manager, a feature we've needed for a long time and will finally have. - A complete reimplemntation of the /dev/random entropy collecting mechanism based on Yarrow, improving the gathering and management of "randomness" for cryptographic purposes. - Support for Sparc64, IA64, and possibly PowerPC depending on how that goes :-) - Support for extended attributes and file system ACLs in UFS, and also support for an enhanced version of the file system, UFS2, which targets higher performance for EAs and ACLs, support for larger disk and file sizes, and more. Support for file system snapshots. Support for background file system checking at boot. - A high performance SMP-capable kernel slab memory allocator. - A complete reimplementation and reintegration of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), correcting many long-standing integration issues and bugs. - The "GEOM" framework, improving flexibility of the disk device framework, bringing support for cryptographic protection of swap and file systems. - Removal of almost all use of /dev/kmem and setgid for system monitoring tools, improving security by reducing the level of privilege required for routine monitoring activity. - Support for UDF, the filesystem used on DVDs. - Support for Cardbus, and a complete reimplementation of the PCCard stack. - Support for ACPI, which replaces (among other things) the existing APM mechanism, improves hardware discovery and probing, and allows us to support much of the new hardware being released. This is for both i386 and also (I believe) ia64. - Support for Open Firmware, which serves a function similar to ACPI on PPC and Sparc64. - An OpenSSH upgrade or two - The TrustedBSD MAC framework, which permits run-time extension of the kernel security framework, including support for a variety of MAC models (Biba, MLS), as well as a plug-in SEBSD module which uses the framework to support substantial parts of NSA's FLASK and SELinux implementations. A bunch of other random security modules that plug in, including mac_seeotheruids, mac_bsdextended (a firewall-like tool for file systems), and more. - A move to the lukemftp client and server, improving functionality and the level of support. - Upgrades to the USB stack to support, among other things, USB2 And much more that I've forgotten, and beg forgiveness for forgetting. All in all, this is going to be an excellent release, and will really propel the FreeBSD operating system to (as people so rediculously put it) "the next level". Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services On Tue, 7 May 2002, Terry Lambert wrote: > "a.s.gruner" wrote: > > Oh, i forgot somthing. > > Can i find out when atacontrol (or any other change) was the first time > > in a release ? In 4.4 or 4.5 ? > > The easiest way I've found is to cd into the source directory, > and do a "cvs log | more", and then look at the tags. > > -- Terry > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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