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]