- And to any others we've forgotten, apologies and heartfelt thanks!
-
From 2.0.5R to 2.2.1R, the primary configuration file is
- /etc/sysconfig. All the options are to be specified in
- this file and other files such as Look in the /etc/sysconfig file and change the value to
- match your system. This file is filled with comments to show what
- to put in there.
-
- In post-2.2.1 and 3.0, /etc/sysconfig was renamed
- to a more self-describing /etc/rc.local is here as always and may be used to
- start up additional local services like The /etc/rc.serial is for serial port initialization
- (e.g. locking the port characteristics, and so on.).
-
- The /etc/rc.i386 is for Intel-specifics settings, such
- as iBCS2 emulation or the PC system console configuration.
-
- Starting with 2.1.0R, you can also have "local" startup files in a
- directory specified in /etc/sysconfig (or
- /etc/rc.conf):
-
- Each file ending in If you want to ensure a certain execution order without changing all
- the file names, you can use a scheme similar to the following with
- digits prepended to each file name to insure the ordering:
-
- It can be seen as ugly (or SysV :-)) but it provides a simple and
- regular scheme for locally-added packages without resorting to
- magical editing of /etc/rc.local. Many of the ports/packages
- assume that /usr/local/etc/rc.d is a local startup directory.
-
- Use the To remove the user again, use the See the Disk Formatting Tutorial at
- Whether it's a removable drive like a ZIP or an EZ drive (or
- even a floppy, if you want to use it that way), or a new hard
- disk, once it's installed and recognized by the system, and
- you have your cartridge/floppy/whatever slotted in, things are
- pretty much the same for all devices.
-
-
Please take a look at Most ports should be available for the 2.2, 3.x and 4.0
- branches, and many of them should work on 2.1.x systems as
- well. Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the
- ports tree at the time of release in also included in the
- ports/ directory.
-
- We also support the concept of a ``package'', essentially no
- more than a gzipped binary distribution with a little extra
- intelligence embedded in it for doing whatever custom installation
- work is required. A package can be installed and uninstalled
- again easily without having to know the gory details of which
- files it includes.
-
- Use the package installation menu in /stand/sysinstall
- (under the post-configuration menu item) or invoke the
- pkg_add(1) command on the specific package files you're
- interested in installing. Package files can usually be identified by
- their .tgz suffix and CDROM distribution people will have
- a packages/All directory on their CD which contains such
- files. They can also be downloaded over the net for various versions
- of FreeBSD at the following locations:
-
- or your nearest local mirror site.
-
- Note that all ports may not be available as packages since
- new ones are constantly being added. It is always a good
- idea to check back periodically to see which packages are available
- at the
You are trying to run a package for 2.2/3.x/4.0 on a 2.1.x - system. Please take a look at the previous section and get - the correct port/package for your system. - -
You don't have a math co-processor, right?
- You will need to add the alternative math emulator to your kernel;
- you do this by adding the following to your kernel config file
- and it will be compiled in.
-
-
You first need to edit the /etc/sysconfig
- (or It will load the You'll then need to set up /compat/ibcs2/dev to look like:
-
- You just need socksys to go to After installing the inn package or port, an excellent place to
- start is Use the Port, Luke! A pre-patched version of Apache is available
- in the ports tree.
-
- Yes. Please see If you're running a FreeBSD version that lags significantly behind
- -current or -stable, you may need a ports upgrade kit from
- If you want to run some aout applications like
- Netscape Navigator on an Elf'ened machine such as 3.1-R or later,
- it would need /usr/libexec/ld.so and some aout libs.
- They are included in the compat22 distribution.
- Use /stand/sysinstall or install.sh in the compat22 subdirectory
- and install it.
- Also read ERRATAs for 3.1-R and 3.2-R.
-
-
There are currently three active/semi-active branches in the FreeBSD
- To make a release you need to do three things: First, you need to
- be running a kernel with the Second, you have to have the whole CVS repository at hand.
- To get this you can use Then run Finally, you need a chunk of empty space to build into. Let's
- say it's in /some/big/filesystem, and from the example
- above you've got the CVS repository in /home/ncvs:
-
- An entire release will be built in
- /some/big/filesystem/release and you will have a full FTP-type
- installation in /some/big/filesystem/release/R/ftp when you're
- done. If you want to build your SNAP along some other branch than
- -current, you can also add
- The entire process of creating installation disks and source and
- binary archives is automated by various targets in
- /usr/src/release/Makefile. The information there should
- be enough to get you started. However, it should be said that this
- involves doing a ``make world'' and will therefore take up a lot of
- time and disk space.
-
- Yes, this is the general idea; as its name might suggest,
- ``make world'' rebuilds every system binary from scratch, so you can be
- certain of having a clean and consistent environment at the end (which
- is why it takes so long).
-
- If the environment variable ${DESTDIR}.
- Some random combination of shared libraries modifications and
- program rebuilds can cause this to fail in ``
- The Adaptec 1542 SCSI host adapters allow the user to configure
- their bus access speed in software. Previous versions of the
- 1542 driver tried to determine the fastest usable speed and set
- the adapter to that. We found that this breaks some users'
- systems, so you now have to define the ``
- Yes, you can do this
-
- Newer BSD based systems have a ``Here is an example from /usr/src/Makefile.
-
- Please take a look at And thanks for the thought!
-
- By: In a nutshell, there a few I/O ports that all of the PnP boards
- respond to when the host asks if anyone is out there. So when
- the PnP probe routine starts, he asks if there are any PnP boards
- present, and all the PnP boards respond with their model # to
- a I/O read of the same port, so the probe routine gets a wired-OR
- ``yes'' to that question. At least one bit will be on in that
- reply. Then the probe code is able to cause boards with board
- model IDs (assigned by Microsoft/Intel) lower than X to go
- ``off-line''. It then looks to see if any boards are still
- responding to the query. If the answer was ``The IDs are two 32-bit fields (hence 2ˆ64) + 8 bit checksum.
- The first 32 bits are a vendor identifier. They never come out
- and say it, but it appears to be assumed that different types of
- boards from the same vendor could have different 32-bit vendor
- ids. The idea of needing 32 bits just for unique manufacturers
- is a bit excessive.
-
- The lower 32 bits are a serial #, ethernet address, something
- that makes this one board unique. The vendor must never produce
- a second board that has the same lower 32 bits unless the upper
- 32 bits are also different. So you can have multiple boards of
- the same type in the machine and the full 64 bits will still be
- unique.
-
- The 32 bit groups can never be all zero. This allows the
- wired-OR to show non-zero bits during the initial binary search.
-
- Once the system has identified all the board IDs present, it will
- reactivate each board, one at a time (via the same I/O ports),
- and find out what resources the given board needs, what interrupt
- choices are available, etc. A scan is made over all the boards
- to collect this information.
-
- This info is then combined with info from any ECU files on the
- hard disk or wired into the MLB BIOS. The ECU and BIOS PnP
- support for hardware on the MLB is usually synthetic, and the
- peripherals don't really do genuine PnP. However by examining
- the BIOS info plus the ECU info, the probe routines can cause the
- devices that are PnP to avoid those devices the probe code cannot
- relocate.
-
- Then the PnP devices are visited once more and given their I/O,
- DMA, IRQ and Memory-map address assignments. The devices will
- then appear at those locations and remain there until the next
- reboot, although there is nothing that says you can't move them
- around whenever you want.
-
- There is a lot of oversimplification above, but you should get
- the general idea.
-
- Microsoft took over some of the primary printer status ports to
- do PnP, on the logic that no boards decoded those addresses for
- the opposing I/O cycles. I found a genuine IBM printer board
- that did decode writes of the status port during the early PnP
- proposal review period, but MS said ``tough''. So they do a
- write to the printer status port for setting addresses, plus that
- use that address +
- Several groups of people have expressed interest in working on
- multi-architecture ports for FreeBSD and the FreeBSD/AXP (ALPHA)
- port is one such effort which has been quite successful, now
- available in 3.0 SNAPshot release form at This depends on whether or not you plan on making the driver
- publicly available. If you do, then please send us a copy of the
- driver source code, plus the appropriate modifications to
- files.i386, a sample configuration file entry, and the
- appropriate
- In answer to the question of alternative layout policies for
- directories, the scheme that is currently in use is unchanged
- from what I wrote in 1983. I wrote that policy for the original
- fast filesystem, and never revisited it. It works well at keeping
- cylinder groups from filling up. As several of you have noted,
- it works poorly for find. Most filesystems are created from
- archives that were created by a depth first search (aka ftw).
- These directories end up being striped across the cylinder groups
- thus creating a worst possible senario for future depth first
- searches. If one knew the total number of directories to be
- created, the solution would be to create (total / fs_ncg) per
- cylinder group before moving on. Obviously, one would have to
- create some heuristic to guess at this number. Even using a
- small fixed number like say 10 would make an order of magnitude
- improvement. To differentiate restores from normal operation
- (when the current algorithm is probably more sensible), you
- could use the clustering of up to 10 if they were all done
- within a ten second window. Anyway, my conclusion is that this
- is an area ripe for experimentation. Kirk McKusick, September 1998
- [This section was extracted from a mail written by
-
- [<ben@rosengart.com> posted the following panic
- message]
- [When] you see a message like this, it's not enough to just
- reproduce it and send it in. The instruction pointer value that
- I highlighted up there is important; unfortunately, it's also
- configuration dependent. In other words, the value varies
- depending on the exact kernel image that you're using. If you're
- using a GENERIC kernel image from one of the snapshots, then
- it's possible for somebody else to track down the offending
- function, but if you're running a custom kernel then only
- What you should do is this:
-
- I see people constantly show panic messages like this but
- rarely do I see someone take the time to match up the
- instruction pointer with a function in the kernel symbol table.
-
- The best way to track down the cause of a panic is by
- capturing a crash dump, then using
- In any case, the method I normally use is this:
-
- [Note: Now that FreeBSD 3.x kernels are Elf by default,
- you should use
-
- Note that YOU DO To make sure you capture a crash dump, you need edit
- /etc/rc.conf and set /etc/rc.conf, the /var/crash.
-
- NOTE: FreeBSD crash dumps are usually the same size as the
- physical RAM size of your machine. That is, if you have 64MB of
- RAM, you will get a 64MB crash dump. Therefore you must make sure
- there's enough space in /var/crash to hold the dump.
- Alternatively, you run Once you have recovered the crash dump, you can get a stack
- trace with
- Note that there may be several screens worth of information;
- ideally you should use Now, if you're really insane and have a second computer, you
- can also configure [Bill adds: "I forgot to mention one thing: if you have
- DDB enabled and the kernel drops into the debugger, you can
- force a panic (and a crash dump) just by typing 'panic' at the
- ddb prompt. It may stop in the debugger again during the panic
- phase. If it does, type 'continue' and it will finish the crash
- dump." -ed]
-
- The ELF toolchain does not, by default, make the symbols
- defined in an executable visible to the dynamic linker.
- Consequently dlsym() searches on handles obtained
- from calls to dlopen(NULL, flags) will fail to find
- such symbols.
-
- If you want to search, using dlsym(), for symbols
- present in the main executable of a process, you need to link
- the executable using the -export-dynamic option to the
-
- By default, the kernel address space is 256 MB on FreeBSD 3.x
- and 1 GB on FreeBSD 4.x. If you run a network-intensive server
- (e.g. a large FTP or HTTP server), you might find that 256 MB is
- not enough.
-
-
- So how do you increase the address space? There are two aspects
- to this. First, you need to tell the kernel to reserve a larger
- portion of the address space for itself. Second, since the
- kernel is loaded at the top of the address space, you need to
- lower the load address so it doesn't bump its head against the
- ceiling.
-
-
- The first goal is achieved by increasing the value of
- src/sys/i386/include/pmap.h. Here's what
- it looks like for a 1 GB address space:
-
-
- To find the correct value of
- To achieve the second goal, you need to compute the correct load
- address: simply subtract the address space size (in bytes) from
- 0x100100000; the result is 0xc0100000 for a 1 GB address space.
- Set src/sys/i386/conf/Makefile.i386
- to that value; then set the location counter in the beginning of
- the section listing in src/sys/i386/conf/kernel.script
- to the same value, as follows:
-
-
- Then reconfig and rebuild your kernel. You will probably have
- problems with /usr/include/vm/.
-
-
- NOTE: the size of the kernel address space must be a multiple of
- four megabytes.
-
-
- [
FreeBSD supports EIDE and SCSI drives (with a compatible
- controller; see the next section), and all drives using the
- original "Western Digital" interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and
- of course IDE). A few ESDI controllers that use proprietary
- interfaces may not work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces
- and clones.
-
- See the complete list in the
- Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller is supported.
-
- The following proprietary CD-ROM interfaces are also supported:
-
- All non-SCSI cards are known to be extremely slow compared to
- SCSI drives, and some ATAPI CDROMs may not work.
-
- As of 2.2 the FreeBSD CDROM from Walnut Creek supports booting
- directly from the CD.
-
- FreeBSD supports the SCSI ZIP drive out of the box, of course. The
- ZIP drive can only be set to run at SCSI target IDs 5 or 6, but if
- your SCSI host adapter's BIOS supports it you can even boot from
- it. I don't know which host adapters let you boot from targets
- other than 0 or 1... look at your docs (and let me know if it works
- out for you).
-
- ATAPI (IDE) Zip drives are supported in FreeBSD 2.2.6 and
- later releases.
-
- FreeBSD has contained support for Parallel Port Zip Drives since
- version 3.0. If you are using a sufficiently up to date version, then
- you should check that your kernel contains the scbus0, da0
- , ppbus0, and vp0 drivers (the GENERIC kernel
- contains everything except vp0). With all these drivers present, the
- Parallel Port drive should be available as /dev/da0s4. Disks can
- be mounted using mount /dev/da0s4 /mnt OR (for dos disks)
- mount_msdos /dev/da0s4 /mnt as appropriate.
-
- Also check out ,
- and .
-
- Apart from the IDE version of the EZ drive, these are all SCSI
- devices, so the should all look like SCSI disks to FreeBSD, and
- the IDE EZ should look like an IDE drive.
-
-
You generally need just one floppy image, the floppies/boot.flp - file, which you image-copy onto a 1.44MB floppy and then boot from - in order to download the rest (and the installation will manage your - TCP/IP connection, deal with tapes, CDROMs, floppies, DOS - partitions, whatever's necessary to get the rest of the bits - installed). - -
If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS
- filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations
- for distributions to grab:
-
-
Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about
- installation issues in general can be found in the A 3.5 inch (1.44MB) floppy can accomodate 1474560 bytes of data.
- The boot image is exactly 1474560 bytes in size.
- Common mistakes when preparing the boot floppy are:
- Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to ascii
- and attempt to change any end-of-line characters received to match
- the conventions used by the client's system.
- This will almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the
- size of the downloaded boot image: if it is not exactly
- that on the server, then the download process is suspect.
- To workaround: type binary at the FTP command prompt
- after getting connected to the server and before starting the
- download of the image.
- Programs like copy will not work as the boot
- image has been created to be booted into directly. The image has
- the complete content of the floppy, track for track, and is not
- meant to be placed on the floppy as a regular file.
- You have to transfer it to the floppy ``raw'', using the
- low-level tools (e.g. fdimage or rawrite)
- described in the Installation instructions can be found in the
- You'll need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at
- least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA
- graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.
-
- See also the section on
-
- FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed
- on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB
- to install on a new system.
-
- All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will RUN in 4MB of ram, they
- just can't run the installation program in 4MB. You can add
- extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then
- after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could
- always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto
- it and then swap it back.
-
- There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install
- in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB
- extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the ``lost''
- memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able
- to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up.
-
- Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a ``remap'' option.
- Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing.
-
- It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a
- custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4
- MB out again.
-
- You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7
- with the ``upgrade'' option of the 2.1.7 installation program.
-
- After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run
- in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the
- system was almost unusable though :-))
-
- Currently there's no way to *just* make a custom install floppy.
- You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install
- floppy. There's some code in /usr/src/release/floppies/Makefile
- that's supposed to let you *just* make those floppies, but it's not
- really gelled yet.
-
- To make a custom release, follow the instructions .
-
- Have a look at Install Windows 95 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot
- manager will then manage to boot Win95 and FreeBSD. If you
- install Windows 95 second, it will boorishly overwrite your
- boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see
- the next section.
-
- You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of
- two ways:
-
- and the boot manager will be reinstalled.
-
- FreeBSD's bad block (the If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see .
-
- If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or
- spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy,
- here are three questions to ask yourself:-
-
- There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when
- downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different
- FTP client if you can.
-
- If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape
- using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar
- blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this
- default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes,
- you will get an error that complains about the record size being
- too big.
-
- Get a laplink cable. Make sure both computer have a kernel
- with lpt driver support.
-
- Plug in the laplink cable into the parallel interface.
-
- Configure the network interface parameters for lp0 on both
- sites as root. For example, if you want connect the host max
- with moritz
-
- Thats all! Please read also the manpages
- You should also add the hosts to /etc/hosts
-
- To check if it works do:
-
- on max:
-
- Connect the two computers using a Laplink parallel cable to use
- this feature:
-
- See also on the Mobile Computing page.
-
- (By the "geometry" of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders,
- heads and sectors/track on a disk - I'll refer to this as
- C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out
- which area on a disk to read/write from).
-
- This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First
- of all, the All that matters is the For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended
- translation support is turned on in your controller (this is
- often referred to as "support for DOS disks >1GB" or something
- similar). If it's turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads
- and 32 sectors/track, where 'N' is the capacity of the disk in
- MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders,
- 64 heads and 32 sectors/track.
-
- If it If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the
- geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around
- this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The
- correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove
- the DOS partition in the partition editor if you don't want to keep
- it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like).
-
- Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with
- FreeBSD called ``tools
- subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD
- ftp sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other
- operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this
- geometry in the partition editor.
-
- Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024
- cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this
- is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD).
-
- For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition
- will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended
- translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the
- corresponding figure is 504MB.
-
- FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances
- for it. Other disk managers are not supported.
-
- If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you don't need a
- disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the
- BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD
- should figure out how much space you really have. If you're using
- an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly
- tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use.
-
- If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating
- system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure
- the the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other
- operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you're
- reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty.
-
- This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS
- conflicting over their ideas of disk You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the
- instructions given above will almost always get you going.
-
- This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding
- question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do
- not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder
- translation (often marked as ``>1GB drive support''), try
- toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD.
-
- Apart from performance issues, no. FreeBSD 2.X comes with bounce
- buffers which allow your bus mastering controller access to greater
- than 16MB. (Note that this should only be required if you are using
- ISA devices, although one or two broken EISA and VLB devices may
- need it as well).
-
-
Not at all! Check out the Let me guess. You removed You need to uncomment the following line in the generic config
- file (or add it to your config file), add a `` line and recompile.
-
- Next, you create a device called /dev/ft0 by going into
- /dev and run the following command:
-
- for the first device. You will have a device called /dev/ft0, which you can
- write to through a special program to manage it called
- ``
- for further details.
-
- Versions previous to /usr/src/sbin/ft in
-
-
diff --git a/FAQ/misc.sgml b/FAQ/misc.sgml
deleted file mode 100644
index be5de3b43b..0000000000
--- a/FAQ/misc.sgml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,428 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
- FreeBSD only appears to use more swap than Linux. In actual fact,
- it does not. The main difference between FreeBSD and Linux in this
- regard is that FreeBSD will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages
- of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory available
- for active use. Linux tends to only move pages to swap as a last resort.
- The perceived heavier use of swap is balanced by the more efficient use
- of main memory.
-
- Note that while FreeBSD is proactive in this regard, it does not
- arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system is truely idle. Thus
- you will not find your system all paged out when you get up in the
- morning after leaving it idle overnight.
-
- To understand why FreeBSD uses the a.out format, you must
- first know a little about the 3 currently "dominant" executable
- formats for UNIX:
-
- The oldest and `classic' unix object format. It uses a
- short and compact header with a magic number at the beginning
- that's often used to characterize the format (see
- The SVR3 object format. The header now comprises a section
- table, so you can have more than just .text, .data, and .bss
- sections. The successor to FreeBSD tries to work around this problem somewhat by
- providing a utility for branding a known for more information.
- FreeBSD comes from the "classic" camp and has traditionally used
- the Back in the dim, dark past, there was simple hardware. This
- simple hardware supported a simple, small system. a.out was
- completely adequate for the job of representing binaries on this
- simple system (a PDP-11). As people ported unix from this
- simple system, they retained the a.out format because it was
- sufficient for the early ports of unix to architectures like the
- Motorola 68k, VAXen, etc.
-
- Then some bright hardware engineer decided that if he could
- force software to do some sleazy tricks, then he'd be able to
- shave a few gates off the design and allow his CPU core to run
- faster. While it was made to work with this new kind of
- hardware (known these days as RISC), In addition, program sizes were getting huge and disks (and
- physical memory) were still relatively small so the concept of a
- shared library was born. The VM system also became more
- sophisticated. While each one of these advancements was done
- using the However, as time passed, the build tools that FreeBSD derived
- their build tools from (the assembler and loader especially)
- evolved in two parallel trees. The FreeBSD tree added shared
- libraries and fixed some bugs. The GNU folks that originally
- write these programs rewrote them and added simpler support for
- building cross compilers, plugging in different formats at will,
- etc. Since many people wanted to build cross compilers
- targeting FreeBSD, they were out of luck since the older sources
- that FreeBSD had for as and ld weren't up to the task. The new
- gnu tools chain (binutils) does support cross compiling,
-
- You have to use either `` and
- With the trailing slash, You'd think it'd be easy enough to change If you're absolutely confident in your ability to find and fix
- these sorts of problems for yourself when and if they pop up, you
- can increase the login name length in earlier releases by editing
- /usr/include/utmp.h and changing UT_NAMESIZE accordingly. You must
- also update MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h to match
- the UT_NAMESIZE change. Finally, if you build from sources, don't
- forget that /usr/include is updated each time! Change the appropriate
- files in /usr/src/.. instead. Yes, starting with version 3.0 you can using BSDI's if you're interested in
- joining this ongoing effort!
-
- For pre-3.0 systems, there is a neat utility called
- SUP is not bandwidth friendly, and has been retired. The current
- recommended method to keep your sources up to date is
- Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while running FreeBSD?
- I know Linux runs cooler than dos, but have never seen a mention of
- FreeBSD. It seems to run really hot.
-
- A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on blindfolded
- volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of LSD-25
- administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers said that FreeBSD
- tasted sort of orange, whereas Linux tasted like purple haze.
- Neither group mentioned any particular variances in temperature
- that I can remember. We eventually had to throw the results of
- this survey out entirely anyway when we found that too many
- volunteers were wandering out of the room during the tests, thus
- skewing the results. I think most of the volunteers are at Apple
- now, working on their new ``scratch and sniff'' GUI. It's a
- funny old business we're in!
-
- Seriously, both FreeBSD and Linux use the ``
- Q. Is there anything "odd" that FreeBSD does when compiling the
- kernel which would cause the memory to make a scratchy sound? When
- compiling (and for a brief moment after recognizing the floppy drive
- upon startup, as well), a strange scratchy sound emanates from what
- appears to be the memory banks.
-
- A. Yes! You'll see frequent references to ``daemons'' in the BSD
- documentation, and what most people don't know is that this
- refers to genuine, non-corporeal entities that now possess your
- computer. The scratchy sound coming from your memory is actually
- high-pitched whispering exchanged among the daemons as they best
- decide how to deal with various system administration tasks.
-
- If the noise gets to you, a good ``fdisk /mbr'' from DOS
- will get rid of them, but don't be surprised if they react
- adversely and try to stop you. In fact, if at any point during
- the exercise you hear the satanic voice of Bill Gates coming from
- the built-in speaker, take off running and don't ever look back!
- Freed from the counterbalancing influence of the BSD daemons, the
- twin demons of DOS and Windows are often able to re-assert total
- control over your machine to the eternal damnation of your soul.
- Given a choice, I think I'd prefer to get used to the scratchy
- noises, myself!
-
- MFC is an acronym for 'Merged From -CURRENT.' It's used in the CVS
- logs to denote when a change was migrated from the CURRENT to the STABLE
- branches.
-
- It stands for something in a secret language that only
- members can know. It doesn't translate literally but its ok to
- tell you that BSD's translation is something between, 'Formula-1
- Racing Team', 'Penguins are tasty snacks', and 'We have a better
- sense of humor than Linux.' :-)
-
- Seriously, BSD is an acronym for 'Berkeley Software
- Distribution', which is the name the Berkeley CSRG (Computer
- Systems Research Group) chose for their Unix distribution way
- back when.
-
- One thousand, one hundred and seventy-two:
-
- Twenty-three to complain to -current about the lights being
- out;
-
- Four to claim that it is a configuration problem, and that
- such matters really belong on -questions;
-
- Three to submit PRs about it, one of which is misfiled under
- doc and consists only of "it's dark";
-
- One to commit an untested lightbulb which breaks buildworld,
- then back it out five minutes later;
-
- Eight to flame the PR originators for not including patches
- in their PRs;
-
- Five to complain about buildworld being broken;
-
- Thirty-one to answer that it works for them, and they must
- have cvsupped at a bad time;
-
- One to post a patch for a new lightbulb to -hackers;
-
- One to complain that he had patches for this three years ago,
- but when he sent them to -current they were just ignored, and he
- has had bad experiences with the PR system; besides, the
- proposed new lightbulb is non-reflexive;
-
- Thirty-seven to scream that lightbulbs do not belong in the
- base system, that committers have no right to do things like
- this without consulting the Community, and WHAT IS -CORE DOING
- ABOUT IT!?
-
- Two hundred to complain about the color of the bicycle shed;
-
- Three to point out that the patch breaks style(9);
-
- Seventeen to complain that the proposed new lightbulb is
- under GPL;
-
- Five hundred and eighty-six to engage in a flame war about
- the comparative advantages of the GPL, the BSD license, the MIT
- license, the NPL, and the personal hygiene of unnamed FSF
- founders;
-
- Seven to move various portions of the thread to -chat and
- -advocacy;
-
- One to commit the suggested lightbulb, even though it shines
- dimmer than the old one;
-
- Two to back it out with a furious flame of a commit message,
- arguing that FreeBSD is better off in the dark than with a dim
- lightbulb;
-
- Forty-six to argue vociferously about the backing out of the
- dim lightbulb and demanding a statement from -core;
-
- Eleven to request a smaller lightbulb so it will fit their
- Tamagotchi if we ever decide to port FreeBSD to that platform;
-
- Seventy-three to complain about the SNR on -hackers and -chat
- and unsubscribe in protest;
-
- Thirteen to post "unsubscribe", "How do I unsubscribe?", or
- "Please remove me from the list", followed by the usual footer;
-
- One to commit a working lightbulb while everybody is too busy
- flaming everybody else to notice;
-
- Thirty-one to point out that the new lightbulb would shine
- 0.364% brighter if compiled with TenDRA (although it will have
- to be reshaped into a cube), and that FreeBSD should therefore
- switch to TenDRA instead of EGCS;
-
- One to complain that the new lightbulb lacks fairings;
-
- Nine (including the PR originators) to ask "what is MFC?";
-
- Fifty-seven to complain about the lights being out two weeks
- after the bulb has been changed.
-
-
diff --git a/FAQ/network.sgml b/FAQ/network.sgml
deleted file mode 100644
index f0645749a6..0000000000
--- a/FAQ/network.sgml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,1297 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
- Welcome to the FreeBSD 2.X FAQ!
-
- As is usual with Usenet FAQs, this document aims to cover the most
- frequently asked questions concerning the FreeBSD operating system
- (and of course answer them!). Although originally intended to reduce
- bandwidth and avoid the same old questions being asked over and over
- again, FAQs have become recognized as valuable information resources.
-
- Every effort has been made to make this FAQ as informative as
- possible; if you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved,
- please feel free to mail them to the Briefly, FreeBSD 2.X is a UN*X-like operating system based on
- U.C. Berkeley's 4.4BSD-lite release for the i386 platform. It is
- also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's
- Net/2 to the i386, known as 386BSD, though very little of the 386BSD
- code remains. A fuller description of what FreeBSD is and how
- it can work for you may be found on the FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers,
- computer professionals, students and home users all over the world
- in their work, education and recreation. See some of them in the
- For more detailed information on FreeBSD, please see the
- The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may
- be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us
- have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would
- certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then,
- but we're definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe
- that our first and foremost "mission" is to provide code to any
- and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets
- the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit.
- This is, we believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free
- Software and one that we enthusiastically support.
-
- That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General
- Public License (GPL) or GNU Library General Public License (LGPL)
- comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the
- side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the
- additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of
- GPL software, we do, however, endeavor to replace such software
- with submissions under the more relaxed BSD copyright whenever
- possible.
-
-
- For those of our readers whose first language is not English, it
- may be worth pointing out that the word ``free'' is being used in two
- ways here, one meaning ``at no cost'', the other meaning ``you can do
- whatever you like''. Apart from one or two things you
- Version If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not
- capable of identifying the difference between a real problem and
- a temporary problem, you should not use FreeBSD-current. This
- branch sometimes evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable
- for a number of days at a time. People that use FreeBSD-current
- are expected to be able to analyze any problems and only report them
- if they are deemed to be mistakes rather than ``glitches''. Questions
- such as ``make world produces some error about groups'' on the
- -current mailing list are sometimes treated with contempt.
-
- Every now and again, a No claims are made that any snapshot can be considered
- ``production quality'' for any purpose. For stability
- and tested mettle, you will have to stick to full releases.
-
- Snapshot releases are directly available from Back when FreeBSD 2.0.5 was released, we decided to branch FreeBSD
- development into two parts. One branch was named The -current branch is slowly progressing towards 4.0 and beyond,
- the previous 2.2-stable branch having just retired with the release
- of 2.2.8. 3.0-stable has now replaced it, the next release coming
- up with 3.3 in Q3 1999. 4.0-current is now the "current branch",
- with the first 4.0 releases appearing in Q1 2000.
-
- As a general principle, the FreeBSD core team only release a new
- version of FreeBSD when they believe that there are sufficient new
- features and/or bug fixes to justify one, and are satisfied that the
- changes made have settled down sufficiently to avoid compromising the
- stability of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of
- the best things about FreeBSD, although it can be a little
- frustrating when waiting for all the latest goodies to become
- available...
-
- Releases are made about every 4 months on average.
-
- For people needing (or wanting) a little more excitement, there are
- SNAPs released more frequently, particularly during the month or so
- leading up to a release.
-
- FreeBSD 3.x currently runs on the The key decisions concerning the FreeBSD project, such as the
- overall direction of the project and who is allowed to add code to
- the source tree, are made by a However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in advance in the
- , and there are no restrictions
- on who may take part in the discussion.
-
- Every significant release of FreeBSD is available via anonymous ftp
- from the FreeBSD is also available via CDROM, from the following place(s):
-
- Walnut Creek CDROM In Australia, you may find it at:
-
- Advanced Multimedia Distributors You can find full information in the You can find full information in the You can find full information in the Yes, most major IRC networks host a FreeBSD chat
- channel:
-
- Each of these channels are distinct and are not connected to
- each other. Their chat styles also differ, so you may need to try
- each to find one suited to your chat style. As with *all* types
- of IRC traffic, if you're easily offended or can't deal with lots
- of young people (and more than a few older ones) doing the verbal
- equivalent of jello wrestling, don't even bother with it.
-
- There is a FreeBSD Documentation Project which you may contact (or
- even better, join) on the doc mailing list:
- A FreeBSD ``handbook'' is available, and can be found as:
- The definitive printed guide on FreeBSD is ``The Complete FreeBSD'',
- written by Greg Lehey and published by Walnut Creek CDROM Books. Now
- in its second edition, the book contains 1,750 pages of install &
- system administration guidance, program setup help, and manual pages.
- The book (and current FreeBSD release) can be ordered from
- However, as FreeBSD 2.2.X is based upon Berkeley 4.4BSD-Lite2, most
- of the 4.4BSD manuals are applicable to FreeBSD 2.2.X. O'Reilly
- and Associates publishes these manuals:
-
- A description of these can be found via WWW as:
-
- For a more in-depth look at the 4.4BSD kernel organization,
- you can't go wrong with:
-
- McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, Michael J Karels,
- and John Quarterman. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating
- System. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, 1996. A good book on system administration is:
-
- Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass & Trent R. Hein, The Problem Report database of all open user change requests
- may be queried (or submitted to) by using our web-based PR
- The up-to-date FAQ is available from the FreeBSD Web Server or any
- mirror as PostScript and plain text (7 bit ASCII and 8-bit Latin1).
-
- As PostScript (about 370KB):
- As ASCII text (about 220KB):
- As ISO 8859-1 text (about 220KB):
- The up-to-date Handbook is available from the FreeBSD Web Server or any
- mirror as PostScript and plain text (7 bit ASCII and 8-bit Latin1).
-
- As PostScript (about 1.7MB):
- As ASCII text (about 1080KB):
- As ISO 8859-1 text (about 1080KB):
- True, the ASCII and Latin1 versions of the FAQ and Handbook aren't
- strictly plaintext; they contain underlines and overprints that
- assume the output is going directly to a dot matrix printer. If you
- need to reformat them to be human-readable, run the file through col:
-
- Certainly! There are multiple ways to mirror the Web pages.
-
- Well, we can't pay, but we might arrange a free CD or T-shirt and a
- Contributor's Handbook entry if you submit a translation of the
- documentation.
-
- The following newsgroups contain pertinent discussion for FreeBSD
- users:
-
- Web resources:
-
- The FreeBSD handbook also has a fairly complete
- With SCSI drives, the drive should be capable of re-mapping
- these automatically. However, many drives are shipped with
- this feature disabled, for some mysterious reason...
-
- To enable this, you'll need to edit the first device page mode,
- which can be done on FreeBSD by giving the command (as root)
-
- and changing the values of AWRE and ARRE from 0 to 1:-
-
- The following paragraphs were submitted by
- For IDE drives, any bad block is usually a sign of potential trouble.
- All modern IDE drives come with internal bad-block remapping turned
- on. All IDE hard drive manufacturers today offer extensive
- warranties and will replace drives with bad blocks on them.
-
- If you still want to attempt to rescue an IDE drive with bad blocks,
- you can attempt to download the IDE drive manufacturer's IDE diagnostic
- program, and run this against the drive. Sometimes these programs can
- be set to force the drive electronics to rescan the drive for bad blocks
- and lock them out.
-
- For ESDI, RLL and MFM drives, bad blocks are a normal part of the
- drive and are no sign of trouble, generally. With a PC, the disk drive
- controller card and BIOS handle the task of locking out bad sectors.
- This is fine for operating systems like DOS that use BIOS code to
- access the disk. However, FreeBSD's disk driver does not go through
- BIOS, therefore a mechanism, bad144, exists that replaces this
- functionality. bad144 only works with the wd driver,
- it is NOT able to be used with SCSI. bad144 works by entering all bad
- sectors found into a special file.
-
- One caveat with bad144 - the bad block special file is placed on the
- last track of the disk. As this file may possibly contain a listing for
- a bad sector that would occur near the beginning of the disk, where the
- /kernel file might be located, it therefore must be accessible to the
- bootstrap program that uses BIOS calls to read the kernel file. This
- means that the disk with bad144 used on it must not exceed 1024
- cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors. This places an effective limit
- of 500MB on a disk that is mapped with bad144.
-
- To use bad144, simply set the "Bad Block" scanning to ON in the
- FreeBSD fdisk screen during the initial install. This works up through
- FreeBSD 2.2.7. The disk must have less than 1024 cylinders. It is
- generally recommended that the disk drive has been in operation for at
- least 4 hours prior to this to allow for thermal expansion and track
- wandering.
-
- If the disk has more than 1024 cylinders (such as a large ESDI drive)
- the ESDI controller uses a special translation mode to make it work
- under DOS. The wd driver understands about these translation modes,
- IF you enter the "translated" geometry with the "set geometry" command
- in fdisk. You must also NOT use the "dangerously dedicated" mode of
- creating the FreeBSD partition, as this ignores the geometry. Also,
- even though fdisk will use your overridden geometry, it still knows the
- true size of the disk, and will attempt to create a too large FreeBSD
- partition. If the disk geometry is changed to the translated geometry,
- the partition MUST be manually created with the number of blocks.
-
- A quick trick to use is to set up the large ESDI disk with the ESDI
- controller, boot it with a DOS disk and format it with a DOS partition.
- Then, boot the FreeBSD install and in the fdisk screen, read off and
- write down the blocksize and block numbers for the DOS partition. Then,
- reset the geometry to the same that DOS uses, delete the DOS partition,
- and create a "cooperative" FreeBSD partition using the blocksize you
- recorded earlier. Then, set the partition bootable and turn on bad
- block scanning. During the actual install, bad144 will run first,
- before any filesystems are created. (you can view this with an Alt-F2)
- If it has any trouble creating the badsector file, you have set too
- large a disk geometry - reboot the system and start all over again
- (including repartitioning and reformatting with DOS).
-
- If remapping is enabled and you are seeing bad blocks, consider
- replacing the drive. The bad blocks will only get worse as time goes on.
-
- This info is specific to the 742a but may also cover other
- Buslogic cards. (Bustek = Buslogic)
-
- There are 2 general ``versions'' of the 742a card. They are
- hardware revisions A-G, and revisions H - onwards. The revision
- letter is located after the Assembly number on the edge of the
- card. The 742a has 2 ROM chips on it, one is the BIOS chip and
- the other is the Firmware chip. FreeBSD doesn't care what
- version of BIOS chip you have but it does care about what version
- of firmware chip. Buslogic will send upgrade ROMS out if you
- call their tech support dept. The BIOS and Firmware chips are
- shipped as a matched pair. You must have the most current
- Firmware ROM in your adapter card for your hardware revision.
-
- The REV A-G cards can only accept BIOS/Firmware sets up to
- 2.41/2.21. The REV H- up cards can accept the most current
- BIOS/Firmware sets of 4.70/3.37. The difference between the
- firmware sets is that the 3.37 firmware supports ``round robin''
-
- The Buslogic cards also have a serial number on them. If you
- have a old hardware revision card you can call the Buslogic RMA
- department and give them the serial number and attempt to
- exchange the card for a newer hardware revision. If the card is
- young enough they will do so.
-
- FreeBSD 2.1 only supports Firmware revisions 2.21 onward. If you
- have a Firmware revision older than this your card will not be
- recognized as a Buslogic card. It may be recognized as an
- Adaptec 1540, however. The early Buslogic firmware contains an
- AHA1540 ``emulation'' mode. This is not a good thing for an EISA
- card, however.
-
- If you have an old hardware revision card and you obtain the 2.21
- firmware for it, you will need to check the position of jumper W1
- to B-C, the default is A-B.
-
- The easiest way is to simply specify that you want to run X
- during the installation process.
-
- Then read and follow the documentation on the You may also wish to investigate the Xaccel server.
- See the section on or
- for more details.
-
- If you are using syscons (the default console driver), you can
- configure FreeBSD to support a mouse pointer on each virtual
- screen. In order to avoid conflicting with X, syscons supports
- a virtual device called ``/dev/sysmouse''. All mouse events
- received from the real mouse device are written to the sysmouse
- device, using the MouseSystems protocol. If you wish to use your
- mouse on one or more virtual consoles, Some people prefer to use ``/dev/mouse'' under X. To
- make this work, ``/dev/mouse'' should be linked to
- Try turning off the Num Lock key.
-
- If your Num Lock key is on by default at boot-time, you may add
- the following line in the ``
- # Let the server do the NumLock processing. This should only be
- # required when using pre-R6 clients
- ServerNumLock
-
-
- Virtual consoles, put simply, enable you to have several
- simultaneous sessions on the same machine without doing anything
- complicated like setting up a network or running X.
-
- When the system starts, it will display a login prompt on
- the monitor after displaying all the boot messages. You can
- then type in your login name and password and start working (or
- playing!) on the first virtual console.
-
- At some point, you will probably wish to start another
- session, perhaps to look at documentation for a program
- you are running or to read your mail while waiting for an
- FTP transfer to finish. Just do Alt-F2 (hold down the Alt
- key and press the F2 key), and you will find a login prompt
- waiting for you on the second ``virtual console''! When you
- want to go back to the original session, do Alt-F1.
-
- The default FreeBSD installation has three virtual consoles
- enabled, and Alt-F1, Alt-F2, and Alt-F3 will switch between
- these virtual consoles.
-
- To enable more of them, edit Use as many or as few as you want. The more virtual terminals
- you have, the more resources that are used; this can be important
- if you have 8MB RAM or less. You may also want to change the
- `` to:
-
- If your keyboard has only ten function keys, you would end up with:
-
- (You could also just delete these lines.)
-
- Once you have edited Next, the easiest (and cleanest) way to activate the virtual
- consoles is to reboot. However, if you really don't want to
- reboot, you can just shut down the X Window system and execute (as
-
- kill -HUP 1
-
-
- It's imperative that you completely shut down X Window if it is
- running, before running this command. If you don't, your system
- will probably appear to hang/lock up after executing the kill
- command.
-
- If the console is currently displaying X Window, you can use
- Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc. to switch to a virtual console. Note, however,
- that once you've switched away from X Window to a virtual
- terminal, you may use only the Alt- function key to switch to another
- virtual terminal or back to X Window. You do not need to also press the
- Ctrl key. If you use the control key to switch back to X on some
- older releases, you can find your text console stuck in ``control-lock''
- mode. Tap the control key to wake it up again.
-
- There are two schools of thought on how to start The ttys method has the advantage
- of documenting which vty X will start on and passing the responsibility
- of restarting the X server on logout to init. The rc.local method
- makes it easy to kill xdm if there is a problem starting the X server.
-
- If loaded from rc.local, A previous version of the FAQ said to add the
- /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers file. This is not necessary:
- X will use the first free
- If you start This is because of the way console permissions are set by default.
- On a multi-user system, one doesn't necessarily want just any user
- to be able to write on the system console. For users who are logging
- directly onto a machine with a VTY, the
- In a nutshell, make sure an uncommented line of the form
-
- is in Your mouse and the mouse driver may have somewhat become out of
- synchronization.
-
- In versions 2.2.5 and earlier, switching away from X to a
- virtual terminal and getting back to X again may make them
- re-synchronized. If the problem occurs often, you may add the
- following option in your kernel configuration file and recompile it.
-
-