The last half year I've been working on a replacement TTY layer for the
FreeBSD kernel. The new TTY layer was designed to improve the following:
- Improved driver model:
The old TTY layer has a driver model that is not abstract enough to
make it friendly to use. A good example is the output path, where the
device drivers directly access the output buffers. This means that an
in-kernel PPP implementation must always convert network buffers into
TTY buffers.
If a PPP implementation would be built on top of the new TTY layer
(still needs a hooks layer, though), it would allow the PPP
implementation to directly hand the data to the TTY driver.
- Improved hotplugging:
With the old TTY layer, it isn't entirely safe to destroy TTY's from
the system. This implementation has a two-step destructing design,
where the driver first abandons the TTY. After all threads have left
the TTY, the TTY layer calls a routine in the driver, which can be
used to free resources (unit numbers, etc).
The pts(4) driver also implements this feature, which means
posix_openpt() will now return PTY's that are created on the fly.
- Improved performance:
One of the major improvements is the per-TTY mutex, which is expected
to improve scalability when compared to the old Giant locking.
Another change is the unbuffered copying to userspace, which is both
used on TTY device nodes and PTY masters.
Upgrading should be quite straightforward. Unlike previous versions,
existing kernel configuration files do not need to be changed, except
when they reference device drivers that are listed in UPDATING.
Obtained from: //depot/projects/mpsafetty/...
Approved by: philip (ex-mentor)
Discussed: on the lists, at BSDCan, at the DevSummit
Sponsored by: Snow B.V., the Netherlands
dcons(4) fixed by: kan
This driver supports GW3887 based chipsets and works on
x86/powerpc/sparc64. You need upgtfw kernel module before loading
upgt(4). Please see the manpage.
Obtained from: OpenBSD
found in Soekris hardware, for instance). The hardware supports acceleration
of AES-128-CBC accessible through crypto(4) and supplies entropy to random(4).
TODO:
o Implement rndtest(4) support
o Performance enhancements
Submitted by: Patrick Lamaizière <patfbsd -at- davenulle.org>
Reviewed by: jhb, sam
MFC after: 1 week
features of CPUs like reading/writing machine-specific registers,
retrieving cpuid data, and updating microcode.
- Add cpucontrol(8) utility, that provides userland access to
the features of cpuctl(4).
- Add subsequent manpages.
The cpuctl(4) device operates as follows. The pseudo-device node cpuctlX
is created for each cpu present in the systems. The pseudo-device minor
number corresponds to the cpu number in the system. The cpuctl(4) pseudo-
device allows a number of ioctl to be preformed, namely RDMSR/WRMSR/CPUID
and UPDATE. The first pair alows the caller to read/write machine-specific
registers from the correspondent CPU. cpuid data could be retrieved using
the CPUID call, and microcode updates are applied via UPDATE.
The permissions are inforced based on the pseudo-device file permissions.
RDMSR/CPUID will be allowed when the caller has read access to the device
node, while WRMSR/UPDATE will be granted only when the node is opened
for writing. There're also a number of priv(9) checks.
The cpucontrol(8) utility is intened to provide userland access to
the cpuctl(4) device features. The utility also allows one to apply
cpu microcode updates.
Currently only Intel and AMD cpus are supported and were tested.
Approved by: kib
Reviewed by: rpaulo, cokane, Peter Jeremy
MFC after: 1 month
As clearly mentioned on the mailing lists, there is a list of drivers
that have not been ported to the MPSAFE TTY layer yet. Remove them from
the kernel configuration files. This means people can now still use
these drivers if they explicitly put them in their kernel configuration
file, which is good.
People should keep in mind that after August 10, these drivers will not
work anymore. Even though owners of the hardware are capable of getting
these drivers working again, I will see if I can at least get them to a
compilable state (if time permits).
MPSAFE patches on current@ and stable@. This driver also has a fundamental
issue in that it sleeps when sending commands to the card including in the
if_init/if_start routines (which can be called from interrupt context). As
such, the driver shouldn't be working reliably even on 4.x.
and stable@. It also is a driver for an older non-802.11 wireless PC card
that is quite slow in comparison to say, wi(4). I know Warner wants this
driver axed as well.
current@ and stable@ for the locking patches. The driver can always be
revived if someone tests it.
This driver also sleeps in its if_init routine, so it likely doesn't really
work at all anyway in modern releases.
semaphores. Specifically, semaphores are now represented as new file
descriptor type that is set to close on exec. This removes the need for
all of the manual process reference counting (and fork, exec, and exit
event handlers) as the normal file descriptor operations handle all of
that for us nicely. It is also suggested as one possible implementation
in the spec and at least one other OS (OS X) uses this approach.
Some bugs that were fixed as a result include:
- References to a named semaphore whose name is removed still work after
the sem_unlink() operation. Prior to this patch, if a semaphore's name
was removed, valid handles from sem_open() would get EINVAL errors from
sem_getvalue(), sem_post(), etc. This fixes that.
- Unnamed semaphores created with sem_init() were not cleaned up when a
process exited or exec'd. They were only cleaned up if the process
did an explicit sem_destroy(). This could result in a leak of semaphore
objects that could never be cleaned up.
- On the other hand, if another process guessed the id (kernel pointer to
'struct ksem' of an unnamed semaphore (created via sem_init)) and had
write access to the semaphore based on UID/GID checks, then that other
process could manipulate the semaphore via sem_destroy(), sem_post(),
sem_wait(), etc.
- As part of the permission check (UID/GID), the umask of the proces
creating the semaphore was not honored. Thus if your umask denied group
read/write access but the explicit mode in the sem_init() call allowed
it, the semaphore would be readable/writable by other users in the
same group, for example. This includes access via the previous bug.
- If the module refused to unload because there were active semaphores,
then it might have deregistered one or more of the semaphore system
calls before it noticed that there was a problem. I'm not sure if
this actually happened as the order that modules are discovered by the
kernel linker depends on how the actual .ko file is linked. One can
make the order deterministic by using a single module with a mod_event
handler that explicitly registers syscalls (and deregisters during
unload after any checks). This also fixes a race where even if the
sem_module unloaded first it would have destroyed locks that the
syscalls might be trying to access if they are still executing when
they are unloaded.
XXX: By the way, deregistering system calls doesn't do any blocking
to drain any threads from the calls.
- Some minor fixes to errno values on error. For example, sem_init()
isn't documented to return ENFILE or EMFILE if we run out of semaphores
the way that sem_open() can. Instead, it should return ENOSPC in that
case.
Other changes:
- Kernel semaphores now use a hash table to manage the namespace of
named semaphores nearly in a similar fashion to the POSIX shared memory
object file descriptors. Kernel semaphores can now also have names
longer than 14 chars (up to MAXPATHLEN) and can include subdirectories
in their pathname.
- The UID/GID permission checks for access to a named semaphore are now
done via vaccess() rather than a home-rolled set of checks.
- Now that kernel semaphores have an associated file object, the various
MAC checks for POSIX semaphores accept both a file credential and an
active credential. There is also a new posixsem_check_stat() since it
is possible to fstat() a semaphore file descriptor.
- A small set of regression tests (using the ksem API directly) is present
in src/tools/regression/posixsem.
Reported by: kris (1)
Tested by: kris
Reviewed by: rwatson (lightly)
MFC after: 1 month
provides the correct semantics for flock(2) style locks which are used by the
lockf(1) command line tool and the pidfile(3) library. It also implements
recovery from server restarts and ensures that dirty cache blocks are written
to the server before obtaining locks (allowing multiple clients to use file
locking to safely share data).
Sponsored by: Isilon Systems
PR: 94256
MFC after: 2 weeks
NET_NEEDS_GIANT. netatm has been disconnected from the build for ten
months in HEAD/RELENG_7. Specifics:
- netatm include files
- netatm command line management tools
- libatm
- ATM parts in rescue and sysinstall
- sample configuration files and documents
- kernel support as a module or in NOTES
- netgraph wrapper nodes for netatm
- ctags data for netatm.
- netatm-specific device drivers.
MFC after: 3 weeks
Reviewed by: bz
Discussed with: bms, bz, harti
