From: kar...@BSDI.COM (Mike Karels)
Subject: BSD/OS 2.1 and BSDI information
Date: 1995/12/20
Message-ID: <199512202204.QAA01221@redrock.BSDI.COM>
X-Deja-AN: 122499273
organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
newsgroups: info.bsdi.users
originator: dae...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
This message is being sent to the bsdi-users mailing list to provide
information about the upcoming BSD/OS 2.1 release and other BSDI news.
A similar message will also be sent to each of our customers (using
the most recent email address in our database).
The 2.0 release has been out for some time, and the 2.0.1 upgrade
came out about August. We have been working on many parts of the
system in the meantime, and the 2.1 release is now imminent. It has
been in beta test since early November, and the final beta is just
going out. We will begin shipping 2.1 in January. Note that it
will probably take us several weeks to ship all of the upgrades.
I have an outline of changes in 2.1, including new drivers, which I
will include here. The information is less detailed than I would like,
but should give folks some idea of what we have been working on.
The main two areas of concentration: easier installation and upgrades,
and additional device drivers. The drivers include support for additional
SCSI host adapters (Adaptec and NCR), FDDI, 10 and 100 Mb/s PCI and EISA
Ethernet, ATAPI (IDE CD-ROM), additional serial multiport cards, token ring,
and improved sound card support. The release also includes many bug
fixes, including a fix for the so-called "swap leak" that affected
long-running processes that forked periodically. New features include
support for additional authentication methods, and a new facility that
can be used to set up different account parameters, including resource
limits, for different classes of users.
BSDI has been growing fairly rapidly in the past year. We now have
five full-time support people, in addition to the support work handled
by engineers when problems are escalated. BSDI is committed to building
the support team to keep ahead of growing sales and increasing load
in order to continue our high-quality support. The office staff has also
grown to handle the increased telephone, shipping and administrative load.
We have added several more world-class engineers too. I don't remember
which of these hires have been announced on this list, so I'll mention
them now: Eric Varsanyi joined us when Cray Computer shut down (not Cray
Research!). Keith Bostic, formerly of the UC Berkeley Computer Systems
Research Group, joined us in May. Jeff Honig started working for us
this month, after many years working for the Gated Consortium at Cornell.
I am pleased that BSDI has been able to build such a fine team,
and I'm looking forward to the progress that this team will make
in the next year.
Mike Karels
BSDI System Architect & V.P. Engineering
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
BSD/OS 2.1 Features and Changes
This is a partial list of changes in the BSD/OS 2.1 release
since the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases.
Easier installation:
Only one boot floppy
choose Express or Custom install
for Express install, installation is much simplified;
only 3 questions need be answered to install the software.
Custom install allows more flexibility, is also easier than 2.0.
Easy upgrade installation from 2.0 and 2.0.1; express upgrade
updates all installed packages in place.
Installation and configuration scripts look snazzier.
Additional driver support:
SCSI Drivers:
NCR PCI/SCSI driver now supports 53C825 as well as 53C810,
53C815, 53C820; wide drives currently run in narrow
mode; improved error recovery
Adaptec PCI, EISA SCSI:
AHA-2940, 2940W PCI cards
AHA-2740, 2740W, 2742, 2742W EISA cards
AHA-2740AT, 2742AT twinchannel EISA cards (only one
channel supported)
AIC-7850, 7870-series chips on motherboard
wide drives currently run in narrow mode
Adaptec 1542CF, 1542CP (with Plug and Play disabled on CP)
removable-media drives now configure as separate device class
(/dev/sr* rather than /dev/sd*)
targets 8-15 not currently supported with wide SCSI
ATAPI (IDE CD-ROM; IDE tape is untested)
Improved IDE performance (now supports multiple sectors per interrupt)
New network drivers:
PCI Ethernet (10 and 100 mb/s)
DEC 21040, 21140 based:
DEC DE435, DE434, DE450, DE500
SMC EtherPower and EtherPower 10/100
SMC EtherPower2 (dual 10 mb/s)
other compatible cards
3COM 3C590, 3C595
EISA Ethernet (10 and 100 mb/s)
3COM 3C592, 3C597
FDDI: DEC DEFPA (PCI) and DEFEA (EISA)
(CDDI, single attach fiber, and dual attach fiber)
Token ring
IBM TRA 16/4 3COM 3C619B TokenLink III 16/4,
and other TROPIC based cards
SMC 8115T TokenCard Elite
SDL RISCom/N2 synchronous interface with integral CSU/DSU
Wireless Ethernet (Arlan)
DEC ISA/EISA Ethernet (included but not supported):
Digital EtherWORKS II, EtherWORKS II Turbo,
EtherWORKS III: DEPCA, DE100, DE101, DE200, DE201,
DE202 (all ISA), and DE422 (EISA))
New serial board drivers:
DigiBoard PC/Xr
Cyclades Cyclom-Y
Chase IOPRO
Specialix Host 2.x (SIPLUS)
Comtrol Rocketport
VOXWare audio drivers: supports CD quality 16 bit stereo
playback and recording (if the hardware is capable),
the standard /dev/audio interface, MIDI, FM synth, and audio
mixer chips. Drivers for most common sound cards are included:
SoundBlaster 1.0 to 2.0, SoundBlaster Pro, SoundBlaster 16
Gravis Ultrasound, Ultrasound+ (16 bit), Ultrasound Max
Pro Audio Spectrum 16
MPU401, 6850, and SB midi
Yamaha OPL2, OPL3, and OPL4 synthesizers
Microsoft Sound System
Note: Some of the drivers listed were provided by third parties,
and some of them will be supported by third parties. Sound drivers
other than SoundBlaster are currently unsupported.
Other improvements:
Virtual memory improvements
"swap leak" fixed (affected daemons that fork periodically)
deadlock with heavy use of mapped files fixed
Swap devices can be added "on the fly"
Shared libraries use less memory (reorganized to save on page tables)
support for dynamic linking (System V-compatible dlopen/dlsym functions)
User classes
Passwd file lists class for each user
Per-class limits, priorities, restrictions
Separate authentication and authorization
Additional authentication schemes:
cryptographic tokens: cryptocard, activecard, snk004
one-time passwords
PPP improvements
tcpdump now works with PPP
IP multicast upgraded to version 3.8, supports "pruning"
Lots of other improvements and fixes (hundreds of bug reports closed)
|