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openbsd changes of note 3

Things happened. In November.

A pf grammar fix to forbid the unpossible.

Just one of many tmux input improvements.

Time marches on. So do timezones.

A variety of internal smtpd changes to make things invisibly better.

vmd can now boot kernels from inside the disk image. And it also has boot.conf support.

X550 NIC support enabled for real.

Starting up a privsep daemon with lots of children requires creating lots of pipes. Too many children means too many files and failure trying to start. Be more sparing in fd use in relayd.

Add AArch64 backend build infrastructure.

Installer catches up with wobj build user.

512M should be enough for anyone. But some people need 768M.

sshd preallocates more memory for keys. The idea here is that even if you follow best practice and zero sensitive memory after use, additional copies may have been made when the buffer was resized by realloc. By taking back responsibility from libc, sshd can ensure that only one copy of the key is live in memory at any given time.

Preserve aspect ratio of camera image in Xv output.

Like I said, 512M should be enough for anyone. vmd users included.

allwinner,sun7i-a20-mmc is the new allwinner,sun5i-a13-mmc.

Ingo has fixed and revised and edited and clarified approximately 900 man pages for LibreSSL. Here’s one commit. Here’s the other 899.

Build kernel with DEBUG=-g by default. Including type information in the kernel opens the possibility to doing fun introspective style things at runtime in the future.

65435 bytes should be enough for any virtual ethernet driver.

Once a daemon, always a daemon. No need for sshd to do it twice.

New sshd option to disable all the forwarding. As well as anything else we might implement in the future. Because nothing is ever done.

Add a new implementation of MiRA, a rate scaling algorithm for 802.11n. And of course, stsp’s tech announcement. 20MHz should be enough for anyone.

And looking ahead...

TSC timecounters make a comeback. Using rdtsc for the clock is an old idea, but shelved because it wasn’t always reliable and not really necessary. Now it seems to be necessary. Modern machines usually use the acpihpet (ACPI High Precision Event Timer) driver, but this requires evaluating AML which really means doing just about anything. Presumably on previous generations of machines this would be something simple like reading a PCI register or two, but now it goes off an runs SMI or whatever? Who even knows? And since gettimeofday remains in the hot path of a surprising number of applications, it’s important to have a fast clock, which the newest gen of acpihpet is not. Anyway, but since the trouble with drifting TSC counters has been resolved on modern CPUs, we may have a new winner for best clock.

syspatch is now a thing you can test. Upgrade early and often for best results.

Posted 14 Dec 2016 15:50 by tedu Updated: 14 Dec 2016 15:50
Tagged: openbsd