diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge/chapter.sgml index 1e2b2980ce..74e03d9532 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1869 +1,1851 @@ Jim Mock Restructured, reorganized, and parts updated by Jordan Hubbard Original work by Poul-Henning Kamp John Polstra Nik Clayton The Cutting Edge Synopsis &os; is under constant development between releases. For people who want to be on the cutting edge, there are several easy mechanisms for keeping your system in sync with the latest developments. Be warned—the cutting edge is not for everyone! This chapter will help you decide if you want to track the development system, or stick with one of the released versions. After reading this chapter, you will know: The difference between the two development branches: &os.stable; and &os.current;. How to keep your system up to date with CVSup, CVS, or CTM. How to rebuild and reinstall the entire base system with make world. Before reading this chapter, you should: Properly setup your network connection (). Know how to install additional third-party software (). &os.current; vs. &os.stable; -CURRENT -STABLE There are two development branches to FreeBSD: &os.current; and &os.stable;. This section will explain a bit about each and describe how to keep your system up-to-date with each respective tree. &os.current; will be discussed first, then &os.stable;. Staying Current with &os; As you read this, keep in mind that &os.current; is the bleeding edge of &os; development. &os.current; users are expected to have a high degree of technical skill, and should be capable of solving difficult system problems on their own. If you are new to &os;, think twice before installing it. What Is &os.current;? snapshot &os.current; is the latest working sources for &os;. This includes work in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms that might or might not be present in the next official release of the software. While many &os; developers compile the &os.current; source code daily, there are periods of time when the sources are not buildable. These problems are resolved as expeditiously as possible, but whether or not &os.current; brings disaster or greatly desired functionality can be a matter of which exact moment you grabbed the source code in! Who Needs &os.current;? &os.current; is made available for 3 primary interest groups: Members of the &os; group who are actively working on some part of the source tree and for whom keeping current is an absolute requirement. Members of the &os; group who are active testers, willing to spend time solving problems in order to ensure that &os.current; remains as sane as possible. These are also people who wish to make topical suggestions on changes and the general direction of &os;, and submit patches to implement them. Those who merely wish to keep an eye on things, or to use the current sources for reference purposes (e.g. for reading, not running). These people also make the occasional comment or contribute code. What Is &os.current; <emphasis>Not</emphasis>? A fast-track to getting pre-release bits because you heard there is some cool new feature in there and you want to be the first on your block to have it. Being the first on the block to get the new feature means that you're the first on the block to get the new bugs. A quick way of getting bug fixes. Any given version of &os.current; is just as likely to introduce new bugs as to fix existing ones. In any way officially supported. We do our best to help people genuinely in one of the 3 legitimate &os.current; groups, but we simply do not have the time to provide tech support. This is not because we are mean and nasty people who do not like helping people out (we would not even be doing &os; if we were). We simply cannot answer hundreds messages a day and work on FreeBSD! Given the choice between improving &os; and answering lots of questions on experimental code, the developers opt for the former. Using &os.current; -CURRENT using - Join the &a.current; and the &a.cvsall;. This is not + Join the &a.current.name; and the &a.cvsall.name; lists. This is not just a good idea, it is essential. If - you are not on the &a.current;, + you are not on the &a.current.name; list, you will not see the comments that people are making about the current state of the system and thus will probably end up stumbling over a lot of problems that others have already found and solved. Even more importantly, you will miss out on important bulletins which may be critical to your system's continued health. - The &a.cvsall; will allow you to see the + The &a.cvsall.name; list will allow you to see the commit log entry for each change as it is made along with any pertinent information on possible side-effects. - To join these lists, send mail to &a.majordomo; and - specify the following in the body of your message: - - subscribe freebsd-current -subscribe cvs-all - - Majordomo - - - Optionally, you can also say help - and Majordomo will send you full help on how to subscribe - and unsubscribe to the various other mailing lists we - support. + To join these lists, or one of the others available + go to &a.mailman.lists.link; and click on the list that + you wish to subscribe to. Instructions on the rest of + the procedure are available there. Grab the sources from a &os; mirror site. You can do this in one of three ways: cvsup cron -CURRENT Syncing with CVSup Use the cvsup program with this supfile. This is the most recommended method, since it allows you to grab the entire collection once and then only what has changed from then on. Many people run cvsup from cron and keep their sources up-to-date automatically. You have to customize the sample supfile above, and configure cvsup for your environment. If you want help doing this configuration, simply type: &prompt.root; pkg_add -f ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/packages/All/cvsupit-3.1.tgz -CURRENT Downloading with ftp Use ftp. The source tree for &os.current; is exported on some of the FTP mirrors in the directory /pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/. Some of our FTP mirrors may also allow compressed/tarred grabbing of whole trees. For example you see: usr.bin/lex You can do the following to get the whole directory as a tar file: ftp> cd usr.bin ftp> get lex.tar If you wish to download the entire &os.current; source tree cvsup handles this much better than mirroring a FTP site. -CURRENT Syncing with CTM Use the CTM facility. If you have very bad connectivity (high price connections or only email access) CTM is an option. However, it is a lot of hassle and can give you broken files. This leads to it being rarely used, which again increases the chance of it not working for fairly long periods of time. We recommend using CVSup for anybody with a 9600 bps modem or faster connection. If you are grabbing the sources to run, and not just look at, then grab all of &os.current;, not just selected portions. The reason for this is that various parts of the source depend on updates elsewhere, and trying to compile just a subset is almost guaranteed to get you into trouble. -CURRENT compiling Before compiling &os.current;, read the Makefile in /usr/src carefully. You should at least run a make world the first time through as part of the upgrading process. Reading the &a.current; will keep you up-to-date on other bootstrapping procedures that sometimes become necessary as we move toward the next release. Be active! If you are running &os.current;, we want to know what you have to say about it, especially if you have suggestions for enhancements or bug fixes. Suggestions with accompanying code are received most enthusiastically! Staying Stable with &os; What Is &os.stable;? -STABLE &os.stable; is our development branch from which major releases are made. Changes go into this branch at a different pace, and with the general assumption that they have first gone into &os.current; for testing. This is still a development branch, however, and this means that at any given time, the sources for &os.stable; may or may not be suitable for any particular purpose. It is simply another engineering development track, not a resource for end-users. Who Needs &os.stable;? If you are interested in tracking or contributing to the FreeBSD development process, especially as it relates to the next point release of FreeBSD, then you should consider following &os.stable;. While it is true that security fixes also go into the &os.stable; branch, you do not need to track &os.stable; to do this. Every security advisory for FreeBSD explains how to fix the problem for the releases it affects That is not quite true. We can not continue to support old releases of FreeBSD forever, although we do support them for many years. For a complete description of the current security policy for old releases of FreeBSD, please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/ , and tracking an entire development branch just for security reasons is likely to bring in a lot of unwanted changes as well. Although we endeavor to ensure that the &os.stable; branch compiles and runs at all times, this cannot be guaranteed. In addition, while code is developed in &os.current; before including it in &os.stable;, more people run &os.stable; than &os.current;, so it is inevitable that bugs and corner cases will sometimes be found in &os.stable; that were not apparent in &os.current;. For these reasons, we do not recommend that you blindly track &os.stable;, and it is particularly important that you do not update any production servers to &os.stable; without first thoroughly testing the code in your development environment. If you do not have the resources to do this then we recommend that you run the most recent release of FreeBSD, and use the binary update mechanism to move from release to release. Using &os.stable; -STABLE using - Join the &a.stable;. This will keep you informed of + Join the &a.stable.name; list. This will keep you informed of build-dependencies that may appear in &os.stable; or any other issues requiring special attention. Developers will also make announcements in this mailing list when they are contemplating some controversial fix or update, giving the users a chance to respond if they have any issues to raise concerning the proposed change. - The &a.cvsall; will allow you to see the + The &a.cvsall.name; list will allow you to see the commit log entry for each change as it is made along with any pertinent information on possible side-effects. - To join these lists, send mail to &a.majordomo; and - specify the following in the body of your message: - - subscribe freebsd-stable -subscribe cvs-all - - - Majordomo - - Optionally, you can also say help - and Majordomo will send you full help on how to subscribe - and unsubscribe to the various other mailing lists we - support. + To join these lists, or one of the others available + go to &a.mailman.lists.link; and click on the list that + you wish to subscribe to. Instructions on the rest of + the procedure are available there. If you are installing a new system and want it to be as stable as possible, you can simply grab the latest dated branch snapshot from and install it like any other release. If you are already running a previous release of &os; and wish to upgrade via sources then you can easily do so from &os; mirror site. This can be done in one of three ways: cvsup cron -STABLE syncing with CVSup Use the cvsup program with this supfile. This is the most recommended method, since it allows you to grab the entire collection once and then only what has changed from then on. Many people run cvsup from cron to keep their sources up-to-date automatically. You have to customize the sample supfile above, and configure cvsup for your environment. If you want help doing this configuration, simply type:
&prompt.root; pkg_add -f ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/packages/All/cvsupit-3.1.tgz
 -STABLE downloading with FTP Use ftp. The source tree for &os.stable; is exported on some of the FTP mirrors in the directory /pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-stable/. Some of our FTP mirrors may also allow compressed/tarred grabbing of whole trees. For example you see: usr.bin/lex You can do the following to get the whole directory for you as a tar file: ftp> cd usr.bin ftp> get lex.tar If you wish to download the entire &os.stable; source tree cvsup handles this much better than mirroring a FTP site. -STABLE syncing with CTM Use the CTM facility. If you do not have a fast and inexpensive connection to the Internet, this is the method you should consider using. Essentially, if you need rapid on-demand access to the source and communications bandwidth is not a consideration, use cvsup or ftp. Otherwise, use CTM. -STABLE compiling Before compiling &os.stable;, read the Makefile in /usr/src carefully. You should at least run a make world the first time through as part of the upgrading process. Reading the &a.stable; will keep you up-to-date on other bootstrapping procedures that sometimes become necessary as we move toward the next release. Synchronizing Your Source There are various ways of using an Internet (or email) connection to stay up-to-date with any given area of the &os; project sources, or all areas, depending on what interests you. The primary services we offer are Anonymous CVS, CVSup, and CTM. While it is possible to update only parts of your source tree, the only supported update procedure is to update the entire tree and recompile both userland (i.e., all the programs that run in user space, such as those in /bin and /sbin) and kernel sources. Updating only part of your source tree, only the kernel, or only userland will often result in problems. These problems may range from compile errors to kernel panics or data corruption. anonymous CVS Anonymous CVS and CVSup use the pull model of updating sources. In the case of CVSup the user (or a cron script) invokes the cvsup program, and it interacts with a cvsupd server somewhere to bring your files up-to-date. The updates you receive are up-to-the-minute and you get them when, and only when, you want them. You can easily restrict your updates to the specific files or directories that are of interest to you. Updates are generated on the fly by the server, according to what you have and what you want to have. Anonymous CVS is quite a bit more simplistic than CVSup in that it is just an extension to CVS which allows it to pull changes directly from a remote CVS repository. CVSup can do this far more efficiently, but Anonymous CVS is easier to use. CTM CTM, on the other hand, does not interactively compare the sources you have with those on the master archive or otherwise pull them across. Instead, a script which identifies changes in files since its previous run is executed several times a day on the master CTM machine, any detected changes being compressed, stamped with a sequence-number and encoded for transmission over email (in printable ASCII only). Once received, these CTM deltas can then be handed to the &man.ctm.rmail.1; utility which will automatically decode, verify and apply the changes to the user's copy of the sources. This process is far more efficient than CVSup, and places less strain on our server resources since it is a push rather than a pull model. There are other trade-offs, of course. If you inadvertently wipe out portions of your archive, CVSup will detect and rebuild the damaged portions for you. CTM will not do this, and if you wipe some portion of your source tree out (and do not have it backed up) then you will have to start from scratch (from the most recent CVS base delta) and rebuild it all with CTM or, with Anonymous CVS, simply delete the bad bits and resync. Using <command>make world</command> make world Once you have synchronized your local source tree against a particular version of &os; (&os.stable;, &os.current;, and so on) you can then use the source tree to rebuild the system. Take a Backup It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to take a backup of your system before you do this. While rebuilding the world is (as long as you follow these instructions) an easy task to do, there will inevitably be times when you make mistakes, or when mistakes made by others in the source tree render your system unbootable. Make sure you have taken a backup. And have a fixit floppy to hand. You will probably never have to use it, but it is better to be safe than sorry! Subscribe to the Right Mailing List mailing list The &os.stable; and &os.current; branches are, by their nature, in development. People that contribute to &os; are human, and mistakes occasionally happen. Sometimes these mistakes can be quite harmless, just causing your system to print a new diagnostic warning. Or the change may be catastrophic, and render your system unbootable or destroy your file systems (or worse). If problems like these occur, a heads up is posted to the appropriate mailing list, explaining the nature of the problem and which systems it affects. And an all clear announcement is posted when the problem has been solved. If you try to track &os.stable; or &os.current; and do not read the &a.stable; or the &a.current; respectively, then you are asking for trouble. Read <filename>/usr/src/UPDATING</filename> Before you do anything else, read /usr/src/UPDATING (or the equivalent file wherever you have a copy of the source code). This file should contain important information about problems you might encounter, or specify the order in which you might have to run certain commands. If UPDATING contradicts something you read here, UPDATING takes precedence. Reading UPDATING is not an acceptable substitute for subscribing to the correct mailing list, as described previously. The two requirements are complementary, not exclusive. Check <filename>/etc/make.conf</filename> make.conf Examine the files /etc/defaults/make.conf and /etc/make.conf. The first contains some default defines – most of which are commented out. To make use of them when you rebuild your system from source, add them to /etc/make.conf. Keep in mind that anything you add to /etc/make.conf is also used every time you run make, so it is a good idea to set them to something sensible for your system. A typical user will probably want to copy the CFLAGS and NOPROFILE lines found in /etc/defaults/make.conf to /etc/make.conf and uncomment them. Examine the other definitions (COPTFLAGS, NOPORTDOCS and so on) and decide if they are relevant to you. Update the files in <filename>/etc</filename> The /etc directory contains a large part of your system's configuration information, as well as scripts that are run at system startup. Some of these scripts change from version to version of FreeBSD. Some of the configuration files are also used in the day to day running of the system. In particular, /etc/group. There have been occasions when the installation part of make world has expected certain usernames or groups to exist. When performing an upgrade it is likely that these users or groups did not exist. This caused problems when upgrading. A recent example of this is when the smmsp user was added. Users had the installation process fail for them when &man.mtree.8; was trying to create /var/spool/clientmqueue. The solution is to examine /usr/src/etc/group and compare its list of groups with your own. If there are any groups in the new file that are not in your file then copy them over. Similarly, you should rename any groups in /etc/group which have the same GID but a different name to those in /usr/src/etc/group. Since 4.6-RELEASE you can run &man.mergemaster.8; in pre-buildworld mode by providing the option. This will compare only those files that are essential for the success of buildworld or installworld. If your old version of mergemaster does not support , use the new version in the source tree when running for the first time: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/mergemaster &prompt.root; ./mergemaster.sh -p If you are feeling particularly paranoid, you can check your system to see which files are owned by the group you are renaming or deleting: &prompt.root; find / -group GID -print will show all files owned by group GID (which can be either a group name or a numeric group ID). Drop to Single User Mode single-user mode You may want to compile the system in single user mode. Apart from the obvious benefit of making things go slightly faster, reinstalling the system will touch a lot of important system files, all the standard system binaries, libraries, include files and so on. Changing these on a running system (particularly if you have active users on the system at the time) is asking for trouble. multi-user mode Another method is to compile the system in multi-user mode, and then drop into single user mode for the installation. If you would like to do it this way, simply hold off on the following steps until the build has completed. You can postpone dropping to single user mode until you have to installkernel or installworld. As the superuser, you can execute: &prompt.root; shutdown now from a running system, which will drop it to single user mode. Alternatively, reboot the system, and at the boot prompt, enter the flag. The system will then boot single user. At the shell prompt you should then run: &prompt.root; fsck -p &prompt.root; mount -u / &prompt.root; mount -a -t ufs &prompt.root; swapon -a This checks the file systems, remounts / read/write, mounts all the other UFS file systems referenced in /etc/fstab and then turns swapping on. If your CMOS clock is set to local time and not to GMT (this is true if the output of the &man.date.1; command does not show the correct time and zone), you may also need to run the following command: &prompt.root; adjkerntz -i This will make sure that your local timezone settings get set up correctly — without this, you may later run into some problems. Remove <filename>/usr/obj</filename> As parts of the system are rebuilt they are placed in directories which (by default) go under /usr/obj. The directories shadow those under /usr/src. You can speed up the make world process, and possibly save yourself some dependency headaches by removing this directory as well. Some files below /usr/obj may have the immutable flag set (see &man.chflags.1; for more information) which must be removed first. &prompt.root; cd /usr/obj &prompt.root; chflags -R noschg * &prompt.root; rm -rf * Recompile the Source Saving the Output It is a good idea to save the output you get from running &man.make.1; to another file. If something goes wrong you will have a copy of the error message. While this might not help you in diagnosing what has gone wrong, it can help others if you post your problem to one of the &os; mailing lists. The easiest way to do this is to use the &man.script.1; command, with a parameter that specifies the name of the file to save all output to. You would do this immediately before rebuilding the world, and then type exit when the process has finished. &prompt.root; script /var/tmp/mw.out Script started, output file is /var/tmp/mw.out &prompt.root; make TARGET … compile, compile, compile … &prompt.root; exit Script done, … If you do this, do not save the output in /tmp. This directory may be cleared next time you reboot. A better place to store it is in /var/tmp (as in the previous example) or in root's home directory. Compile the Base System You must be in the /usr/src directory: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src (unless, of course, your source code is elsewhere, in which case change to that directory instead). make To rebuild the world you use the &man.make.1; command. This command reads instructions from the Makefile, which describes how the programs that comprise &os; should be rebuilt, the order in which they should be built, and so on. The general format of the command line you will type is as follows: &prompt.root; make -x -DVARIABLE target In this example, is an option that you would pass to &man.make.1;. See the &man.make.1; manual page for an example of the options you can pass. passes a variable to the Makefile. The behavior of the Makefile is controlled by these variables. These are the same variables as are set in /etc/make.conf, and this provides another way of setting them. &prompt.root; make -DNOPROFILE target is another way of specifying that profiled libraries should not be built, and corresponds with the NOPROFILE= true # Avoid compiling profiled libraries line in /etc/make.conf. target tells &man.make.1; what you want to do. Each Makefile defines a number of different targets, and your choice of target determines what happens. Some targets are listed in the Makefile, but are not meant for you to run. Instead, they are used by the build process to break out the steps necessary to rebuild the system into a number of sub-steps. Most of the time you will not need to pass any parameters to &man.make.1;, and so your command like will look like this: &prompt.root; make target Beginning with version 2.2.5 of &os; (actually, it was first created on the &os.current; branch, and then retrofitted to &os.stable; midway between 2.2.2 and 2.2.5) the world target has been split in two: buildworld and installworld. As the names imply, buildworld builds a complete new tree under /usr/obj, and installworld installs this tree on the current machine. This is very useful for 2 reasons. First, it allows you to do the build safe in the knowledge that no components of your running system will be affected. The build is self hosted. Because of this, you can safely run buildworld on a machine running in multi-user mode with no fear of ill-effects. It is still recommended that you run the installworld part in single user mode, though. Secondly, it allows you to use NFS mounts to upgrade multiple machines on your network. If you have three machines, A, B and C that you want to upgrade, run make buildworld and make installworld on A. B and C should then NFS mount /usr/src and /usr/obj from A, and you can then run make installworld to install the results of the build on B and C. Although the world target still exists, you are strongly encouraged not to use it. Run &prompt.root; make buildworld It is now possible to specify a option to make which will cause it to spawn several simultaneous processes. This is most useful on multi-CPU machines. However, since much of the compiling process is IO bound rather than CPU bound it is also useful on single CPU machines. On a typical single-CPU machine you would run: &prompt.root; make -j4 buildworld &man.make.1; will then have up to 4 processes running at any one time. Empirical evidence posted to the mailing lists shows this generally gives the best performance benefit. If you have a multi-CPU machine and you are using an SMP configured kernel try values between 6 and 10 and see how they speed things up. Be aware that this is still somewhat experimental, and commits to the source tree may occasionally break this feature. If the world fails to compile using this parameter try again without it before you report any problems. Timings make world timings Many factors influence the build time, but currently a 500 MHz Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM takes about 2 hours to build the &os.stable; tree, with no tricks or shortcuts used during the process. A &os.current; tree will take somewhat longer. Compile and Install a New Kernel kernel compiling To take full advantage of your new system you should recompile the kernel. This is practically a necessity, as certain memory structures may have changed, and programs like &man.ps.1; and &man.top.1; will fail to work until the kernel and source code versions are the same. The simplest, safest way to do this is to build and install a kernel based on GENERIC. While GENERIC may not have all the necessary devices for your system, it should contain everything necessary to boot your system back to single user mode. This is a good test that the new system works properly. After booting from GENERIC and verifying that your system works you can then build a new kernel based on your normal kernel configuration file. If you are upgrading to &os; 4.0 or above then the old kernel build procedure (as described in ) is deprecated. Instead, you should run these commands after you have built the world with buildworld. If you want to build a custom kernel, and already have a configuration file, just use KERNCONF=MYKERNEL like this: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL &prompt.root; make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL In FreeBSD 4.2 and older you must replace KERNCONF= with KERNEL=. 4.2-STABLE that was fetched before Feb 2nd, 2001 does not recognize KERNCONF=. Note that if you have raised kern.securelevel above 1 and you have set either the noschg or similar flags to your kernel binary, you might find it necessary to drop into single user mode to use installkernel. Otherwise you should be able to run both these commands from multi user mode without problems. See &man.init.8; for details about kern.securelevel and &man.chflags.1; for details about the various file flags. If you are upgrading to a version of &os; below 4.0 you should use the old kernel build procedure. However, it is recommended that you use the new version of &man.config.8;, using a command line like this. &prompt.root; /usr/obj/usr/src/usr.sbin/config/config KERNELNAME Reboot into Single User Mode single-user mode You should reboot into single user mode to test the new kernel works. Do this by following the instructions in . Install the New System Binaries If you were building a version of &os; recent enough to have used make buildworld then you should now use installworld to install the new system binaries. Run &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make installworld If you specified variables on the make buildworld command line, you must specify the same variables in the make installworld command line. This does not necessarily hold true for other options; for example, must never be used with installworld. For example, if you ran: &prompt.root; make -DNOPROFILE buildworld you must install the results with: &prompt.root; make -DNOPROFILE installworld otherwise it would try to install profiled libraries that had not been built during the make buildworld phase. Update Files Not Updated by <command>make world</command> Remaking the world will not update certain directories (in particular, /etc, /var and /usr) with new or changed configuration files. The simplest way to update these files is to use &man.mergemaster.8;, though it is possible to do it manually if you would prefer to do that. Regardless of which way you choose, be sure to make a backup of /etc in case anything goes wrong. Tom Rhodes Contributed by <command>mergemaster</command> mergemaster The &man.mergemaster.8; utility is a Bourne script that will aid you in determining the differences between your configuration files in /etc, and the configuration files in the source tree /usr/src/etc. This is the recommended solution for keeping the system configuration files up to date with those located in the source tree. mergemaster was integrated into the FreeBSD base system between 3.3-RELEASE and 3.4-RELEASE, which means it is present in all -STABLE and -CURRENT systems since 3.3. To begin simply type mergemaster at your prompt, and watch it start going. mergemaster will then build a temporary root environment, from / down, and populate it with various system configuration files. Those files are then compared to the ones currently installed in your system. At this point, files that differ will be shown in &man.diff.1; format, with the sign representing added or modified lines, and representing lines that will be either removed completely, or replaced with a new line. See the &man.diff.1; manual page for more information about the &man.diff.1; syntax and how file differences are shown. &man.mergemaster.8; will then show you each file that displays variances, and at this point you will have the option of either deleting the new file (referred to as the temporary file), installing the temporary file in its unmodified state, merging the temporary file with the currently installed file, or viewing the &man.diff.1; results again. Choosing to delete the temporary file will tell &man.mergemaster.8; that we wish to keep our current file unchanged, and to delete the new version. This option is not recommended, unless you see no reason to change the current file. You can get help at any time by typing ? at the &man.mergemaster.8; prompt. If the user chooses to skip a file, it will be presented again after all other files have been dealt with. Choosing to install the unmodified temporary file will replace the current file with the new one. For most unmodified files, this is the best option. Choosing to merge the file will present you with a text editor, and the contents of both files. You can now merge them by reviewing both files side by side on the screen, and choosing parts from both to create a finished product. When the files are compared side by side, the l key will select the left contents and the r key will select contents from your right. The final output will be a file consisting of both parts, which can then be installed. This option is customarily used for files where settings have been modified by the user. Choosing to view the &man.diff.1; results again will show you the file differences just like &man.mergemaster.8; did before prompting you for an option. After &man.mergemaster.8; is done with the system files you will be prompted for other options. &man.mergemaster.8; may ask if you want to rebuild the password file and/or run &man.MAKEDEV.8; if you run a FreeBSD version prior to 5.0, and will finish up with an option to remove left-over temporary files. Manual Update If you wish to do the update manually, however, you cannot just copy over the files from /usr/src/etc to /etc and have it work. Some of these files must be installed first. This is because the /usr/src/etc directory is not a copy of what your /etc directory should look like. In addition, there are files that should be in /etc that are not in /usr/src/etc. If you are using &man.mergemaster.8; (as recommended), you can skip forward to the next section. The simplest way to do this by hand is to install the files into a new directory, and then work through them looking for differences. Backup Your Existing <filename>/etc</filename> Although, in theory, nothing is going to touch this directory automatically, it is always better to be sure. So copy your existing /etc directory somewhere safe. Something like: &prompt.root; cp -Rp /etc /etc.old does a recursive copy, preserves times, ownerships on files and suchlike. You need to build a dummy set of directories to install the new /etc and other files into. /var/tmp/root is a reasonable choice, and there are a number of subdirectories required under this as well. &prompt.root; mkdir /var/tmp/root &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/etc &prompt.root; make DESTDIR=/var/tmp/root distrib-dirs distribution This will build the necessary directory structure and install the files. A lot of the subdirectories that have been created under /var/tmp/root are empty and should be deleted. The simplest way to do this is to: &prompt.root; cd /var/tmp/root &prompt.root; find -d . -type d | xargs rmdir 2>/dev/null This will remove all empty directories. (Standard error is redirected to /dev/null to prevent the warnings about the directories that are not empty.) /var/tmp/root now contains all the files that should be placed in appropriate locations below /. You now have to go through each of these files, determining how they differ with your existing files. Note that some of the files that will have been installed in /var/tmp/root have a leading .. At the time of writing the only files like this are shell startup files in /var/tmp/root/ and /var/tmp/root/root/, although there may be others (depending on when you are reading this). Make sure you use ls -a to catch them. The simplest way to do this is to use &man.diff.1; to compare the two files: &prompt.root; diff /etc/shells /var/tmp/root/etc/shells This will show you the differences between your /etc/shells file and the new /var/tmp/root/etc/shells file. Use these to decide whether to merge in changes that you have made or whether to copy over your old file. Name the New Root Directory (<filename>/var/tmp/root</filename>) with a Time Stamp, So You Can Easily Compare Differences Between Versions Frequently rebuilding the world means that you have to update /etc frequently as well, which can be a bit of a chore. You can speed this process up by keeping a copy of the last set of changed files that you merged into /etc. The following procedure gives one idea of how to do this. Make the world as normal. When you want to update /etc and the other directories, give the target directory a name based on the current date. If you were doing this on the 14th of February 1998 you could do the following: &prompt.root; mkdir /var/tmp/root-19980214 &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/etc &prompt.root; make DESTDIR=/var/tmp/root-19980214 \ distrib-dirs distribution Merge in the changes from this directory as outlined above. Do not remove the /var/tmp/root-19980214 directory when you have finished. When you have downloaded the latest version of the source and remade it, follow step 1. This will give you a new directory, which might be called /var/tmp/root-19980221 (if you wait a week between doing updates). You can now see the differences that have been made in the intervening week using &man.diff.1; to create a recursive diff between the two directories: &prompt.root; cd /var/tmp &prompt.root; diff -r root-19980214 root-19980221 Typically, this will be a much smaller set of differences than those between /var/tmp/root-19980221/etc and /etc. Because the set of differences is smaller, it is easier to migrate those changes across into your /etc directory. You can now remove the older of the two /var/tmp/root-* directories: &prompt.root; rm -rf /var/tmp/root-19980214 Repeat this process every time you need to merge in changes to /etc. You can use &man.date.1; to automate the generation of the directory names: &prompt.root; mkdir /var/tmp/root-`date "+%Y%m%d"` Update <filename>/dev</filename> DEVFS If you are running FreeBSD 5.0 or later you can safely skip this section. These versions use &man.devfs.5; to allocate device nodes transparently for the user. In most cases, the &man.mergemaster.8; tool will realize when it is necessary to update the device nodes, and offer to complete it automatically. These instructions tell how to update the device nodes manually. For safety's sake, this is a multi-step process. Copy /var/tmp/root/dev/MAKEDEV to /dev: &prompt.root; cp /var/tmp/root/dev/MAKEDEV /dev MAKEDEV If you used &man.mergemaster.8; to update /etc, then your MAKEDEV script should have been updated already, though it cannot hurt to check (with &man.diff.1;) and copy it manually if necessary. Now, take a snapshot of your current /dev. This snapshot needs to contain the permissions, ownerships, major and minor numbers of each filename, but it should not contain the time stamps. The easiest way to do this is to use &man.awk.1; to strip out some of the information: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ls -l | awk '{print $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $NF}' > /var/tmp/dev.out Remake all the device nodes: &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV all Write another snapshot of the directory, this time to /var/tmp/dev2.out. Now look through these two files for any device node that you missed creating. There should not be any, but it is better to be safe than sorry. &prompt.root; diff /var/tmp/dev.out /var/tmp/dev2.out You are most likely to notice disk slice discrepancies which will involve commands such as: &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV sd0s1 to recreate the slice entries. Your precise circumstances may vary. Update <filename>/stand</filename> This step is included only for completeness. It can safely be omitted. For the sake of completeness, you may want to update the files in /stand as well. These files consist of hard links to the /stand/sysinstall binary. This binary should be statically linked, so that it can work when no other file systems (and in particular /usr) have been mounted. &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/release/sysinstall &prompt.root; make all install Rebooting You are now done. After you have verified that everything appears to be in the right place you can reboot the system. A simple &man.fastboot.8; should do it: &prompt.root; fastboot Finished You should now have successfully upgraded your &os; system. Congratulations. If things went slightly wrong, it is easy to rebuild a particular piece of the system. For example, if you accidentally deleted /etc/magic as part of the upgrade or merge of /etc, the &man.file.1; command will stop working. In this case, the fix would be to run: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/usr.bin/file &prompt.root; make all install Questions Do I need to re-make the world for every change? There is no easy answer to this one, as it depends on the nature of the change. For example, if you just ran CVSup, and it has shown the following files as being updated: src/games/cribbage/instr.c src/games/sail/pl_main.c src/release/sysinstall/config.c src/release/sysinstall/media.c src/share/mk/bsd.port.mk it probably is not worth rebuilding the entire world. You could just go to the appropriate sub-directories and make all install, and that's about it. But if something major changed, for example src/lib/libc/stdlib then you should either re-make the world, or at least those parts of it that are statically linked (as well as anything else you might have added that is statically linked). At the end of the day, it is your call. You might be happy re-making the world every fortnight say, and let changes accumulate over that fortnight. Or you might want to re-make just those things that have changed, and be confident you can spot all the dependencies. And, of course, this all depends on how often you want to upgrade, and whether you are tracking &os.stable; or &os.current;. My compile failed with lots of signal 11 (or other signal number) errors. What has happened? signal 11 This is normally indicative of hardware problems. (Re)making the world is an effective way to stress test your hardware, and will frequently throw up memory problems. These normally manifest themselves as the compiler mysteriously dying on receipt of strange signals. A sure indicator of this is if you can restart the make and it dies at a different point in the process. In this instance there is little you can do except start swapping around the components in your machine to determine which one is failing. Can I remove /usr/obj when I have finished? The short answer is yes. /usr/obj contains all the object files that were produced during the compilation phase. Normally, one of the first steps in the make world process is to remove this directory and start afresh. In this case, keeping /usr/obj around after you have finished makes little sense, and will free up a large chunk of disk space (currently about 340 MB). However, if you know what you are doing you can have make world skip this step. This will make subsequent builds run much faster, since most of sources will not need to be recompiled. The flip side of this is that subtle dependency problems can creep in, causing your build to fail in odd ways. This frequently generates noise on the &os; mailing lists, when one person complains that their build has failed, not realizing that it is because they have tried to cut corners. Can interrupted builds be resumed? This depends on how far through the process you got before you found a problem. In general (and this is not a hard and fast rule) the make world process builds new copies of essential tools (such as &man.gcc.1;, and &man.make.1;) and the system libraries. These tools and libraries are then installed. The new tools and libraries are then used to rebuild themselves, and are installed again. The entire system (now including regular user programs, such as &man.ls.1; or &man.grep.1;) is then rebuilt with the new system files. If you are at the last stage, and you know it (because you have looked through the output that you were storing) then you can (fairly safely) do: … fix the problem … &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make -DNOCLEAN all This will not undo the work of the previous make world. If you see the message: -------------------------------------------------------------- Building everything.. -------------------------------------------------------------- in the make world output then it is probably fairly safe to do so. If you do not see that message, or you are not sure, then it is always better to be safe than sorry, and restart the build from scratch. How can I speed up making the world? Run in single user mode. Put the /usr/src and /usr/obj directories on separate file systems held on separate disks. If possible, put these disks on separate disk controllers. Better still, put these file systems across multiple disks using the &man.ccd.4; (concatenated disk driver) device. Turn off profiling (set NOPROFILE=true in /etc/make.conf). You almost certainly do not need it. Also in /etc/make.conf, set CFLAGS to something like . The optimization is much slower, and the optimization difference between and is normally negligible. lets the compiler use pipes rather than temporary files for communication, which saves disk access (at the expense of memory). Pass the option to &man.make.1; to run multiple processes in parallel. This usually helps regardless of whether you have a single or a multi processor machine. The file system holding /usr/src can be mounted (or remounted) with the option. This prevents the file system from recording the file access time. You probably do not need this information anyway. &prompt.root; mount -u -o noatime /usr/src The example assumes /usr/src is on its own file system. If it is not (if it is a part of /usr for example) then you will need to use that file system mount point, and not /usr/src. The file system holding /usr/obj can be mounted (or remounted) with the option. This causes disk writes to happen asynchronously. In other words, the write completes immediately, and the data is written to the disk a few seconds later. This allows writes to be clustered together, and can be a dramatic performance boost. Keep in mind that this option makes your file system more fragile. With this option there is an increased chance that, should power fail, the file system will be in an unrecoverable state when the machine restarts. If /usr/obj is the only thing on this file system then it is not a problem. If you have other, valuable data on the same file system then ensure your backups are fresh before you enable this option. &prompt.root; mount -u -o async /usr/obj As above, if /usr/obj is not on its own file system, replace it in the example with the name of the appropriate mount point. What do I do if something goes wrong? Make absolutely sure your environment has no extraneous cruft from earlier builds. This is simple enough. &prompt.root; chflags -R noschg /usr/obj/usr &prompt.root; rm -rf /usr/obj/usr &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make cleandir &prompt.root; make cleandir Yes, make cleandir really should be run twice. Then restart the whole process, starting with make buildworld. If you still have problems, send the error and the output of uname -a to &a.questions;. Be prepared to answer other questions about your setup! Mike Meyer Contributed by Tracking for multiple machines NFS installing multiple machines If you have multiple machines that you want to track the same source tree, then having all of them download sources and rebuild everything seems like a waste of resources: disk space, network bandwidth, and CPU cycles. It is, and the solution is to have one machine do most of the work, while the rest of the machines mount that work via NFS. This section outlines a method of doing so. Preliminaries First, identify a set of machines that is going to run the same set of binaries, which we will call a build set. Each machine can have a custom kernel, but they will be running the same userland binaries. From that set, choose a machine to be the build machine. It is going to be the machine that the world and kernel are built on. Ideally, it should be a fast machine that has sufficient spare CPU to run make world. You will also want to choose a machine to be the test machine, which will test software updates before they are put into production. This must be a machine that you can afford to have down for an extended period of time. It can be the build machine, but need not be. All the machines in this build set need to mount /usr/obj and /usr/src from the same machine, and at the same point. Ideally, those are on two different drives on the build machine, but they can be NFS mounted on that machine as well. If you have multiple build sets, /usr/src should be on one build machine, and NFS mounted on the rest. Finally make sure that /etc/make.conf on all the machines in the build set agrees with the build machine. That means that the build machine must build all the parts of the base system that any machine in the build set is going to install. Also, each build machine should have its kernel name set with KERNCONF in /etc/make.conf, and the build machine should list them all in KERNCONF, listing its own kernel first. The build machine must have the kernel configuration files for each machine in /usr/src/sys/arch/conf if it is going to build their kernels. The base system Now that all that is done, you are ready to build everything. Build the kernel and world as described in on the build machine, but do not install anything. After the build has finished, go to the test machine, and install the kernel you just built. If this machine mounts /usr/src and /usr/obj via NFS, when you reboot to single user you will need to enable the network and mount them. The easiest way to do this is to boot to multi-user, then run shutdown now to go to single user mode. Once there, you can install the new kernel and world and run mergemaster just as you normally would. When done, reboot to return to normal multi-user operations for this machine. After you are certain that everything on the test machine is working properly, use the same procedure to install the new software on each of the other machines in the build set. Ports The same ideas can be used for the ports tree. The first critical step is mounting /usr/ports from the same machine to all the machines in the build set. You can then set up /etc/make.conf properly to share distfiles. You should set DISTDIR to a common shared directory that is writable by whichever user root is mapped to by your NFS mounts. Each machine should set WRKDIRPREFIX to a local build directory. Finally, if you are going to be building and distributing packages, you should set PACKAGES to a directory similar to DISTDIR. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml index aa9aac6aba..deb859c36d 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1863 +1,1863 @@ Resources on the Internet The rapid pace of FreeBSD progress makes print media impractical as a means of following the latest developments. Electronic resources are the best, if not often the only, way stay informed of the latest advances. Since FreeBSD is a volunteer effort, the user community itself also generally serves as a technical support department of sorts, with electronic mail and USENET news being the most effective way of reaching that community. The most important points of contact with the FreeBSD user community are outlined below. If you are aware of other resources not mentioned here, please send them to the &a.doc; so that they may also be included. Mailing Lists Though many of the FreeBSD development members read USENET, we cannot always guarantee that we will get to your questions in a timely fashion (or at all) if you post them only to one of the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.* groups. By addressing your questions to the appropriate mailing list you will reach both us and a concentrated FreeBSD audience, invariably assuring a better (or at least faster) response. The charters for the various lists are given at the bottom of this document. Please read the charter before joining or sending mail to any list. Most of our list subscribers now receive many hundreds of FreeBSD related messages every day, and by setting down charters and rules for proper use we are striving to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of the lists high. To do less would see the mailing lists ultimately fail as an effective communications medium for the project. Archives are kept for all of the mailing lists and can be searched using the FreeBSD World Wide Web server. The keyword searchable archive offers an excellent way of finding answers to frequently asked questions and should be consulted before posting a question. List Summary General lists: The following are general lists which anyone is free (and encouraged) to join: List Purpose &a.cvsall.name; Changes made to the FreeBSD source tree &a.advocacy.name; FreeBSD Evangelism &a.announce.name; Important events and project milestones &a.arch.name; Architecture and design discussions &a.bugbusters.name; Discussions pertaining to the maintenance of the FreeBSD problem report database and related tools &a.bugs.name; Bug reports &a.chat.name; Non-technical items related to the FreeBSD community &a.config.name; Development of FreeBSD installation and configuration tools &a.current.name; Discussion concerning the use of &os.current; &a.isp.name; Issues for Internet Service Providers using FreeBSD &a.jobs.name; FreeBSD employment and consulting opportunities &a.newbies.name; New FreeBSD users activities and discussions &a.policy.name; FreeBSD Core team policy decisions. Low volume, and read-only &a.questions.name; User questions and technical support &a.security-notifications.name; Security notifications &a.stable.name; Discussion concerning the use of &os.stable; &a.test.name; Where to send your test messages instead of one of the actual lists Technical lists: The following lists are for technical discussion. You should read the charter for each list carefully before joining or sending mail to one as there are firm guidelines for their use and content. List Purpose &a.afs.name; Porting AFS to FreeBSD &a.aic7xxx.name; Developing drivers for the Adaptec AIC 7xxx &a.alpha.name; Porting FreeBSD to the Alpha &a.arm.name; Porting FreeBSD to ARM processors &a.atm.name; Using ATM networking with FreeBSD &a.audit.name; Source code audit project &a.binup.name; Design and development of the binary update system &a.cluster.name; Using FreeBSD in a clustered environment &a.cvsweb.name; CVSweb maintenance &a.database.name; Discussing database use and development under FreeBSD &a.doc.name; Creating FreeBSD related documents &a.emulation.name; Emulation of other systems such as Linux/DOS/Windows &a.firewire.name; FreeBSD Firewire (iLink, IEEE 1394) technical discussion &a.fs.name; File systems &a.gnome.name; Porting GNOME and GNOME applications &a.hackers.name; General technical discussion &a.hardware.name; General discussion of hardware for running FreeBSD &a.i18n.name; FreeBSD Internationalization &a.ia32.name; FreeBSD on the IA-32 (Intel x86) platform &a.ia64.name; Porting FreeBSD to Intel's upcoming IA64 systems &a.ipfw.name; Technical discussion concerning the redesign of the IP firewall code &a.isdn.name; ISDN developers &a.java.name; Java developers and people porting JDKs to FreeBSD &a.kde.name; Porting KDE and KDE applications &a.lfs.name; Porting LFS to FreeBSD &a.libh.name; The second generation installation and package system &a.mips.name; Porting FreeBSD to MIPS &a.mobile.name; Discussions about mobile computing &a.mozilla.name; Porting Mozilla to FreeBSD &a.multimedia.name; Multimedia applications &a.newbus.name; Technical discussions about bus architecture &a.net.name; Networking discussion and TCP/IP source code &a.openoffice.name; Porting OpenOffice.org and StarOffice to FreeBSD &a.performance.name; Performance tuning questions for high performance/load installations &a.platforms.name; Concerning ports to non-Intel architecture platforms &a.ports.name; Discussion of the ports collection &a.ports-bugs.name; Discussion of the ports bugs/PRs &a.ppc.name; Porting FreeBSD to the PowerPC &a.qa.name; Discussion of Quality Assurance, usually pending a release &a.realtime.name; Development of realtime extensions to FreeBSD &a.scsi.name; The SCSI subsystem &a.security.name; Security issues affecting FreeBSD &a.small.name; Using FreeBSD in embedded applications &a.smp.name; Design discussions for [A]Symmetric MultiProcessing &a.sparc.name; Porting FreeBSD to SPARC based systems &a.standards.name; FreeBSD's conformance to the C99 and the POSIX standards &a.threads.name; Threading in FreeBSD &a.testing.name; FreeBSD Performance and Stability Tests &a.tokenring.name; Support Token Ring in FreeBSD Limited lists: The following lists are for more specialized (and demanding) audiences and are probably not of interest to the general public. It is also a good idea to establish a presence in the technical lists before joining one of these limited lists so that you will understand the communications etiquette involved. List Purpose &a.core.name; FreeBSD core team &a.hubs.name; People running mirror sites (infrastructural support) &a.usergroups.name; User group coordination &a.vendors.name; Vendors pre-release coordination &a.www.name; Maintainers of www.FreeBSD.org Digest lists: All of the above lists are available in a digest format. Once subscribed to a list, you can change your digest options in your account options section. CVS lists: The following lists are for people interested in seeing the log messages for changes to various areas of the source tree. They are Read-Only lists and should not have mail sent to them. List Source area Area Description (source for) &a.cvsall.name; /usr/(CVSROOT|doc|ports|projects|src) All changes to any place in the tree (superset of other cvs commit lists) &a.cvs-doc.name; /usr/doc All changes to the doc tree &a.cvs-ports.name; /usr/ports All changes to the ports tree &a.cvs-projects.name; /usr/projects All changes to the projects tree &a.cvs-src.name; /usr/src All changes to the src tree How to Subscribe To subscribe to a list, click on the list name above or - goto &a.mailman.lists.link; + go to &a.mailman.lists.link; and click on the list that you're interested in. The list page should contain all of the necessary subscription instructions. To actually post to a given list you simply send mail to <listname@FreeBSD.org>. It will then be redistributed to mailing list members world-wide. To unsubscribe yourself from a list, click on the URL found at the bottom of every email received from the list. It is also possible to send an email to freebsd-[listname]-unsubscribe@FreeBSD.org to unsubscribe yourself. Again, we would like to request that you keep discussion in the technical mailing lists on a technical track. If you are only interested in important announcements then it is suggested that you join the &a.announce.name;, which is intended only for infrequent traffic. List Charters All FreeBSD mailing lists have certain basic rules which must be adhered to by anyone using them. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in two (2) written warnings from the FreeBSD Postmaster postmaster@FreeBSD.org, after which, on a third offense, the poster will removed from all FreeBSD mailing lists and filtered from further posting to them. We regret that such rules and measures are necessary at all, but today's Internet is a pretty harsh environment, it would seem, and many fail to appreciate just how fragile some of its mechanisms are. Rules of the road: The topic of any posting should adhere to the basic charter of the list it is posted to, e.g. if the list is about technical issues then your posting should contain technical discussion. Ongoing irrelevant chatter or flaming only detracts from the value of the mailing list for everyone on it and will not be tolerated. For free-form discussion on no particular topic, the &a.chat; is freely available and should be used instead. No posting should be made to more than 2 mailing lists, and only to 2 when a clear and obvious need to post to both lists exists. For most lists, there is already a great deal of subscriber overlap and except for the most esoteric mixes (say -stable & -scsi), there really is no reason to post to more than one list at a time. If a message is sent to you in such a way that multiple mailing lists appear on the Cc line then the Cc line should also be trimmed before sending it out again. You are still responsible for your own cross-postings, no matter who the originator might have been. Personal attacks and profanity (in the context of an argument) are not allowed, and that includes users and developers alike. Gross breaches of netiquette, like excerpting or reposting private mail when permission to do so was not and would not be forthcoming, are frowned upon but not specifically enforced. However, there are also very few cases where such content would fit within the charter of a list and it would therefore probably rate a warning (or ban) on that basis alone. Advertising of non-FreeBSD related products or services is strictly prohibited and will result in an immediate ban if it is clear that the offender is advertising by spam. Individual list charters: &a.afs.name; Andrew File System This list is for discussion on porting and using AFS from CMU/Transarc &a.announce.name; Important events / milestones This is the mailing list for people interested only in occasional announcements of significant FreeBSD events. This includes announcements about snapshots and other releases. It contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities. It may contain calls for volunteers etc. This is a low volume, strictly moderated mailing list. &a.arch.name; Architecture and design discussions This list is for discussion of the FreeBSD architecture. Messages will mostly be kept strictly technical in nature. Examples of suitable topics are: How to re-vamp the build system to have several customized builds running at the same time. What needs to be fixed with VFS to make Heidemann layers work. How do we change the device driver interface to be able to use the same drivers cleanly on many buses and architectures. How to write a network driver. &a.audit.name; Source code audit project This is the mailing list for the FreeBSD source code audit project. Although this was originally intended for security-related changes, its charter has been expanded to review any code changes. This list is very heavy on patches, and is probably of no interest to the average FreeBSD user. Security discussions not related to a particular code change are held on freebsd-security. Conversely, all developers are encouraged to send their patches here for review, especially if they touch a part of the system where a bug may adversely affect the integrity of the system. &a.binup.name; FreeBSD Binary Update Project This list exists to provide discussion for the binary update system, or binup. Design issues, implementation details, patches, bug reports, status reports, feature requests, commit logs, and all other things related to binup are fair game. &a.bugbusters.name; Coordination of the Problem Report handling effort The purpose of this list is to serve as a coordination and discussion forum for the Bugmeister, his Bugbusters, and any other parties who have a genuine interest in the PR database. This list is not for discussions about specific bugs, patches or PRs. &a.bugs.name; Bug reports This is the mailing list for reporting bugs in FreeBSD. Whenever possible, bugs should be submitted using the &man.send-pr.1; command or the WEB interface to it. &a.chat.name; Non technical items related to the FreeBSD community This list contains the overflow from the other lists about non-technical, social information. It includes discussion about whether Jordan looks like a toon ferret or not, whether or not to type in capitals, who is drinking too much coffee, where the best beer is brewed, who is brewing beer in their basement, and so on. Occasional announcements of important events (such as upcoming parties, weddings, births, new jobs, etc) can be made to the technical lists, but the follow ups should be directed to this -chat list. &a.core.name; FreeBSD core team This is an internal mailing list for use by the core members. Messages can be sent to it when a serious FreeBSD-related matter requires arbitration or high-level scrutiny. &a.current.name; Discussions about the use of &os.current; This is the mailing list for users of &os.current;. It includes warnings about new features coming out in -CURRENT that will affect the users, and instructions on steps that must be taken to remain -CURRENT. Anyone running CURRENT must subscribe to this list. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.cvsweb.name; FreeBSD CVSweb Project Technical discussions about use, development and maintenance of FreeBSD-CVSweb. &a.doc.name; Documentation project This mailing list is for the discussion of issues and projects related to the creation of documentation for FreeBSD. The members of this mailing list are collectively referred to as The FreeBSD Documentation Project. It is an open list; feel free to join and contribute! &a.firewire.name; Firewire (iLink, IEEE 1394) This is a mailing list for discussion of the design and implementation of a Firewire (aka IEEE 1394 aka iLink) subsystem for FreeBSD. Relevant topics specifically include the standards, bus devices and their protocols, adapter boards/cards/chips sets, and the architecture and implementation of code for their proper support. &a.fs.name; File systems Discussions concerning FreeBSD file systems. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.gnome.name; GNOME Discussions concerning The GNOME Desktop Environment for FreeBSD systems. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.ipfw.name; IP Firewall This is the forum for technical discussions concerning the redesign of the IP firewall code in FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.ia64.name; Porting FreeBSD to IA64 This is a technical mailing list for individuals actively working on porting FreeBSD to the IA-64 platform from Intel, to bring up problems or discuss alternative solutions. Individuals interested in following the technical discussion are also welcome. &a.isdn.name; ISDN Communications This is the mailing list for people discussing the development of ISDN support for FreeBSD. &a.java.name; Java Development This is the mailing list for people discussing the development of significant Java applications for FreeBSD and the porting and maintenance of JDKs. &a.kde.name; KDE Discussions concerning KDE on FreeBSD systems. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.hackers.name; Technical discussions This is a forum for technical discussions related to FreeBSD. This is the primary technical mailing list. It is for individuals actively working on FreeBSD, to bring up problems or discuss alternative solutions. Individuals interested in following the technical discussion are also welcome. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.hardware.name; General discussion of FreeBSD hardware General discussion about the types of hardware that FreeBSD runs on, various problems and suggestions concerning what to buy or avoid. &a.hubs.name; Mirror sites Announcements and discussion for people who run FreeBSD mirror sites. &a.isp.name; Issues for Internet Service Providers This mailing list is for discussing topics relevant to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.newbies.name; Newbies activities discussion We cover any of the activities of newbies that are not already dealt with elsewhere, including: independent learning and problem solving techniques, finding and using resources and asking for help elsewhere, how to use mailing lists and which lists to use, general chat, making mistakes, boasting, sharing ideas, stories, moral (but not technical) support, and taking an active part in the FreeBSD community. We take our problems and support questions to freebsd-questions, and use freebsd-newbies to meet others who are doing the same things that we do as newbies. &a.openoffice.name; OpenOffice.org Discussions concerning the porting and maintenance of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. &a.performance.name; Discussions about tuning or speeding up FreeBSD This mailing list exists to provide a place for hackers, administrators, and/or concerned parties to discuss performance related topics pertaining to FreeBSD. Acceptable topics includes talking about FreeBSD installations that are either under high load, are experiencing performance problems, or are pushing the limits of FreeBSD. Concerned parties that are willing to work toward improving the performance of FreeBSD are highly encouraged to subscribe to this list. This is a highly technical list ideally suited for experienced FreeBSD users, hackers, or administrators interested in keeping FreeBSD fast, robust, and scalable. This list is not a question-and-answer list that replaces reading through documentation, but it is a place to make contributions or inquire about unanswered performance related topics. &a.platforms.name; Porting to Non-Intel platforms Cross-platform FreeBSD issues, general discussion and proposals for non-Intel FreeBSD ports. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.policy.name; Core team policy decisions This is a low volume, read-only mailing list for FreeBSD Core Team Policy decisions. &a.ports.name; Discussion of ports Discussions concerning FreeBSD's ports collection (/usr/ports), ports infrastructure, and general ports coordination efforts. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.ports-bugs.name; Discussion of ports bugs Discussions concerning problem reports for FreeBSD's ports collection (/usr/ports), proposed ports, or modifications to ports. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.questions.name; User questions This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD. You should not send how to questions to the technical lists unless you consider the question to be pretty technical. &a.scsi.name; SCSI subsystem This is the mailing list for people working on the SCSI subsystem for FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.security.name; Security issues FreeBSD computer security issues (DES, Kerberos, known security holes and fixes, etc). This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical discussion is expected. Note that this is not a question-and-answer list, but that contributions (BOTH question AND answer) to the FAQ are welcome. &a.security-notifications.name; Security Notifications Notifications of FreeBSD security problems and fixes. This is not a discussion list. The discussion list is FreeBSD-security. &a.small.name; Using FreeBSD in embedded applications This list discusses topics related to unusually small and embedded FreeBSD installations. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.stable.name; Discussions about the use of &os.stable; This is the mailing list for users of &os.stable;. It includes warnings about new features coming out in -STABLE that will affect the users, and instructions on steps that must be taken to remain -STABLE. Anyone running STABLE should subscribe to this list. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. &a.standards.name; C99 & POSIX Conformance This is a forum for technical discussions related to FreeBSD Conformance to the C99 and the POSIX standards. &a.usergroups.name; User Group Coordination List This is the mailing list for the coordinators from each of the local area Users Groups to discuss matters with each other and a designated individual from the Core Team. This mail list should be limited to meeting synopsis and coordination of projects that span User Groups. &a.vendors.name; Vendors Coordination discussions between The FreeBSD Project and Vendors of software and hardware for FreeBSD. Usenet Newsgroups In addition to two FreeBSD specific newsgroups, there are many others in which FreeBSD is discussed or are otherwise relevant to FreeBSD users. Keyword searchable archives are available for some of these newsgroups from courtesy of Warren Toomey wkt@cs.adfa.edu.au. BSD Specific Newsgroups comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc de.comp.os.unix.bsd (German) fr.comp.os.bsd (French) Other Unix Newsgroups of Interest comp.unix comp.unix.questions comp.unix.admin comp.unix.programmer comp.unix.shell comp.unix.user-friendly comp.security.unix comp.sources.unix comp.unix.advocacy comp.unix.misc comp.bugs.4bsd comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes comp.unix.bsd X Window System comp.windows.x.i386unix comp.windows.x comp.windows.x.apps comp.windows.x.announce comp.windows.x.intrinsics comp.windows.x.motif comp.windows.x.pex comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine World Wide Web Servers — Central Server. — Armenia. — Australia/1. — Australia/2. — Australia/3. — Australia/4. — Australia/5. — Australia/6. — Australia/7. — Austria. — Austria/2. — Belgium. — Brazil/1. — Brazil/2. — Brazil/3. — Bulgaria. — Canada. — China. — Czech Republic. — Denmark. — Denmark/3. — Estonia. — Finland. — Finland/2. — France. — Germany/1. — Germany/2. — Germany/3. — Greece. — Hong Kong. — Hungary. — Hungary/2. — Iceland. — Ireland. — Ireland/2. — Italy. — Italy/2. — Japan. — Korea/1. — Korea/2. — Korea/3. — Latvia. — Lithuania. — Malaysia. — Netherlands/1. — Netherlands/2. — Norway. — Norway/2. — New Zealand. — Philippines. — Poland/1. — Poland/2. — Portugal/2. — Portugal/3. — Portugal/4. — Romania. — Romania/2. — Romania/3. — Romania/4. — Russia/1. — Russia/2. — Russia/3. — Russia/4. — San Marino. — Singapore. — Slovak Republic. — Slovak Republic/2. — Slovenia. — Slovenia/2. — Spain. — Spain/2. — Spain/3. — South Africa/1. — South Africa/2. — Sweden. — Sweden/2. — Switzerland. — Switzerland/2. — Taiwan. — Taiwan/2. — Taiwan/3. — Taiwan/4. — Turkey. — Turkey/2. — Turkey/3. — Ukraine/1. — Ukraine/2. — Ukraine/Crimea. — Ukraine/5. — United Kingdom/1. — United Kingdom/2. — United Kingdom/3. — United Kingdom/4. — USA/Texas. — USA/3. — USA/7. Email Addresses The following user groups provide FreeBSD related email addresses for their members. The listed administrator reserves the right to revoke the address if it is abused in any way. Domain Facilities User Group Administrator ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org Forwarding only freebsd-users@uk.FreeBSD.org Lee Johnston lee@uk.FreeBSD.org Shell Accounts The following user groups provide shell accounts for people who are actively supporting the FreeBSD project. The listed administrator reserves the right to cancel the account if it is abused in any way. Host Access Facilities Administrator storm.uk.FreeBSD.org SSH only Read-only cvs, personal web space, email &a.brian; dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org Telnet/FTP/SSH Email, Web space, Anonymous FTP Lee Johnston lee@uk.FreeBSD.org