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
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).
The uart(4) driver has the advantage of supporting a wider variety of
hardware on a greater amount of platforms. This driver has already been
the standard on platforms such as ia64, powerpc and sparc64.
I've decided not to change anything on pc98. I'd rather let people from
the pc98 team look at this.
Approved by: philip (mentor), marcel
Note this includes changes to all drivers and moves some device firmware
loading to use firmware(9) and a separate module (e.g. ral). Also there
no longer are separate wlan_scan* modules; this functionality is now
bundled into the wlan module.
Supported by: Hobnob and Marvell
Reviewed by: many
Obtained from: Atheros (some bits)
to detect (or load) kernel NLM support in rpc.lockd. Remove the '-k'
option to rpc.lockd and make kernel NLM the default. A user can still
force the use of the old user NLM by building a kernel without NFSLOCKD
and/or removing the nfslockd.ko module.
cards:
o RocketRAID 172x series
o RocketRAID 174x series
o RocketRAID 2210
o RocketRAID 222x series
o RocketRAID 2240
o RocketRAID 230x series
o RocketRAID 231x series
o RocketRAID 232x series
o RocketRAID 2340
o RocketRAID 2522
Many thanks to Highpoint for their continued support of FreeBSD.
Submitted by: Highpoint
- Introduce per-architecture stack_machdep.c to hold stack_save(9).
- Introduce per-architecture machine/stack.h to capture any common
definitions required between db_trace.c and stack_machdep.c.
- Add new kernel option "options STACK"; we will build in stack(9) if it is
defined, or also if "options DDB" is defined to provide compatibility
with existing users of stack(9).
Add new stack_save_td(9) function, which allows the capture of a stacktrace
of another thread rather than the current thread, which the existing
stack_save(9) was limited to. It requires that the thread be neither
swapped out nor running, which is the responsibility of the consumer to
enforce.
Update stack(9) man page.
Build tested: amd64, arm, i386, ia64, powerpc, sparc64, sun4v
Runtime tested: amd64 (rwatson), arm (cognet), i386 (rwatson)
Currently, Giant is not too much contented so that it is ok to treact it
like any other mutexes.
Please don't forget to update your own custom config kernel files.
Approved by: cognet, marcel (maintainers of arches where option is
not enabled at the moment)
more exposure. The current state of SCTP implementation is
considered to be ready for 32-bit platforms, but still need some
work/testing on 64-bit platforms.
Approved by: re (kensmith)
Discussed with: rrs
Note on dcons:
To enable dcons in kernel, put the following lines in /boot/loader.conf.
You may also want to enable dcons in /etc/ttys.
boot_multicons="YES"
#Force dcons to be the high-level console if a firewire bus presents.
#hw.firewire.dcons_crom.force_console=1
FireWire/dcons support in loader will come shortly.
(i386/amd64 only)
partitioning class that supports multiple schemes. Current
schemes supported are APM (Apple Partition Map) and GPT.
Change all GEOM_APPLE anf GEOM_GPT options into GEOM_PART_APM
and GEOM_PART_GPT (resp).
The ctlreq interface supports verbs to create and destroy
partitioning schemes on a disk; to add, delete and modify
partitions; and to commit or undo changes made.
The 'nooption' kernel config entry has to be used to turn KSE off now.
This isn't my preferred way of dealing with this, but I'll defer to
scottl's experience with the io/mem kernel option change and the grief
experienced over that.
Submitted by: scottl@
unsuspecting users.
- Add a comment in NOTES about experimental status of SCHED_ULE.
- Make warning about experimental status in sched_ule(4) a bit
stronger.
Suggested and reviewed by: dougb
Discussed on: developers
MFC after: 3 days
in 1999, and there are changes to the sysctl names compared to PR,
according to that discussion. The description is in sys/conf/NOTES.
Lines in the GENERIC files are added in commented-out form.
I'll attach the test script I've used to PR.
PR: kern/14584
Submitted by: babkin
an explicit comment that it's needed for the linuxolator. This is not the
case anymore. For all other architectures there was only a "KEEP THIS".
I'm (and other people too) running a COMPAT_43-less kernel since it's not
necessary anymore for the linuxolator. Roman is running such a kernel for a
for longer time. No problems so far. And I doubt other (newer than ia32
or alpha) architectures really depend on it.
This may result in a small performance increase for some workloads.
If the removal of COMPAT_43 results in a not working program, please
recompile it and all dependencies and try again before reporting a
problem.
The only place where COMPAT_43 is needed (as in: does not compile without
it) is in the (outdated/not usable since too old) svr4 code.
Note: this does not remove the COMPAT_43TTY option.
Nagging by: rdivacky
I picked it up again. The scheduler is forked from ULE, but the
algorithm to detect an interactive process is almost completely
different with ULE, it comes from Linux paper "Understanding the
Linux 2.6.8.1 CPU Scheduler", although I still use same word
"score" as a priority boost in ULE scheduler.
Briefly, the scheduler has following characteristic:
1. Timesharing process's nice value is seriously respected,
timeslice and interaction detecting algorithm are based
on nice value.
2. per-cpu scheduling queue and load balancing.
3. O(1) scheduling.
4. Some cpu affinity code in wakeup path.
5. Support POSIX SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR.
Unlike scheduler 4BSD and ULE which using fuzzy RQ_PPQ, the scheduler
uses 256 priority queues. Unlike ULE which using pull and push, the
scheduelr uses pull method, the main reason is to let relative idle
cpu do the work, but current the whole scheduler is protected by the
big sched_lock, so the benefit is not visible, it really can be worse
than nothing because all other cpu are locked out when we are doing
balancing work, which the 4BSD scheduelr does not have this problem.
The scheduler does not support hyperthreading very well, in fact,
the scheduler does not make the difference between physical CPU and
logical CPU, this should be improved in feature. The scheduler has
priority inversion problem on MP machine, it is not good for
realtime scheduling, it can cause realtime process starving.
As a result, it seems the MySQL super-smack runs better on my
Pentium-D machine when using libthr, despite on UP or SMP kernel.
