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Re: 2.6 suggestions and stuff




On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Chris Cappuccio wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Paul E. Arnold wrote:
> 
>  | Things that would be nice to have in 2.6 OpenBSD
>  | -------------------------------------------------
>  | - Add swapctl to the i386 and sparc distribution. 
>  |    (or some way to see swap size)
> 
> It *is* part of every distribution.  /sbin/swapctl

# uname -a
OpenBSD gs 2.5 GENERIC#243 i386
# ls -l /sbin/s*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        86016 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/savecore
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        57344 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/scan_ffs
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        69632 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/scsi
-r-sr-x---  1 root  operator  143360 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/shutdown
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        61440 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/slattach
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        49152 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/startkey
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        53248 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/swapon

and

# uname -a
OpenBSD ltpcore 2.5 GENERIC#149 sparc
# ls -l /sbin/s*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin       155648 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/savecore
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        73728 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/scan_ffs
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        90112 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/scsi
-r-sr-x---  1 root  operator  172032 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/shutdown
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        81920 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/slattach
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        65536 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/startkey
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin        65536 Apr 16  1999 /sbin/swapon

 and 

# gunzip -c 2.5/i386/base25.tar.gz | tar tvf - | grep -i swap
-r-xr-xr-x   0/7    53248 Apr 16 10:24 1999 ./sbin/swapon

I even tried
# gunzip -c 2.5/i386/*gz | tar tvf - | grep -i swap
-r-xr-xr-x   0/7    53248 Apr 16 10:24 1999 ./sbin/swapon

This is from the online distribution.


> 
>  | - Add vi (static binary) to the boot/recovery floppy
>  |    ( I know ex, cat and rm are there but editing with those, what a pain)
> 
> The floppies are too full, no room, you would need to copy the termcap (which
> is huge) as well as the vi binary

Other distributions on un*x have vi, there really should be a small light
weight editor that can fit on a disk... (pico, vim, vi, something better
than ex, cat and rm)

> 
>  | -  Add to the precomiled packages the following: a2ps, elm, lsof, vim, samba)
> 
> Are there ports for all of these?  If so, I bet you will find them
> in ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/i386
> 

Cool, thanx, I just found out about the snapshots today...

> and these packages, at least some of them, will be on the CD, and all of them
> will be on the web site
> 
>  | - Generic kernel have allocated swap partion on all b partions by default
>  |    (ie. /dev/sd0b, /dev/sd1b, /dev/sd2b, /dev/sd3b, /dev/sd4b, /dev/sd5b)
>  | 
> 
> If you mark your partitions as 'swap' and put them in /etc/fstab and do
> swapon -a this should work.  Note that /etc/rc already does swapon -a
> so you just need to add them into /etc/fstab
> 


# grep -i swap /etc/fstab
/dev/sd0b       swap            swap    sw        0       0
/dev/sd1b       swap            swap    sw        0       0
/dev/sd4b       swap            swap     sw       0       0

# swapon -a
swapon: /dev/sd4b: Device not configured


0b and 1b work but 4b does not...


>  | Things that would be nice to have in future releases of OpenBSD
>  | ---------------------------------------------------------------
>  | - i386 multi-processor support (FreeBSD has it, even BSDI has it, and
>  |   little cousin linux is bragging that is has it.)
>  |   (I have machines that are dual processor that I had go linux because no
>  |   no OpenBSD port :(  )
> 
> Don't wait too long.  For FreeBSD to have SMP support, it took 2 years of
> development, during which time the current source tree was unstable!
> Same for Linux, only it took >2 years for them.
> 
> This isn't possible for OpenBSD, at least yet.  Plus, the actual number of
> SMP capable systems to single CPU systems is very small.  Single processor
> systems are getting so fast that this kind of support does not have huge
> rewards.
> 

I understand, but if you have two processes fast processors it is better
than one fast processor... :)  I understand development will take time...
I just mentioned it, to show that people do care about it.  I think that
it should not disapear off the development path...  :)
 

>  | - A better way to keep a log of all tcp/udp connections 
>  |   (Right now I run a lsof script that appends to a file, there should be a
>  |   more efficient way to do this.) ( This does not work with sparc OpenBSD
>  |   because lsof wouldn't compile)
> 
> ip filter, which comes with OpenBSD on all platforms, will do this
> 

I will investigate ip filters ... (I really need the logging, not
filtering or NAT, but I will look it up)

>  | - Integrate xfs (the new open source of SGI's filesystems)
> 
> SGI's licensing terms are not favorable....also,
> there are no clear advantages with XFS when you add softupdates to
> FFS.  Because softupdates (in theoretical implementation) doesn't leave the
> disk in a trashed state, you don't need to run fsck on boot, you can run it
> in the background after you are booted.  And, it makes the filesystem really
> fast.  

Yeah, we can only wait to see what how SGI handles this... But I just
wanted to put a bug in the ear of the developers (hey, look at this, it
looks pretty cool).

I have been working with sgi (and just about any unix os out) for some
years and xfs has been very stable and reliable on irix compared to efs. 

> 
>  | - Better driver support for Jaz Drives
> 
> What problem are you having with your Jaz right now ??
> Is it IDE or SCSI??
> 

SCSI, it always comes up with bad geometry errors (this machine is at home
so I can not paste the exact error)

>  | - Better driver support for DEC DECchip 21040 (Tulip) ethernet cards 
>  |    (no more  
>  |      /bsd: de0: receive: 00:10:4b:95:b5:51: bad crc
>  |     or
>  |      /bsd: de0: receive: 00:10:5e:47:16:58: alignment error
>  |    )
>  |    This problems occurs on differrent openBSD systems with differrent dec
>  |    cards.  FreeBSD system had this problem also and they wrote new
>  |    drivers, and now no more errors.
>  | 
> 
> This driver is broken in other ways too... If the freebsd driver is
> significantly different, (it wasnt last time i looked) then maybe it is worth
> a port
> 
> -chris
> 
> 

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