Software Update: NetBSD 2.1

NetBSD is the third variant of the Unix-like operating system BSD, alongside FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The developers behind NetBSD have just released the first so-called maintenance release of the netbds-2 branch released and is available for no less than 54 variants (17 different machine types and 17 processor families). The complete list of changes can be found here, these are the main changes since version 2.0:

Kernel

• Fix a bug that caused spontaneous reboot under heavy load on SH3/4 platforms.
• Fixed some sparc64 and alpha pmap(9) issues.
• A longstanding bug in the SYSV semaphore code has been fixed.
• Eliminated hangs when large processes fork.
• ata(4) and wdc(4) drives now only downgrade modes due to actual CRC errors, and UDMA modes are downgraded more slowly.
• The pdcsata(4) driver was added, with support for the Promise SATA150 series of controllers, including RAID support.
• The RAIDframe disk driver had various bug fixes and improvements.
• Added support for various devices from the nVidia nForce3 chipset (i386, amd64).
• Fixed interrupt problems on some Intel Xeon systems.
• Added support for the VT642 SATA RAID Controller.
• Various fixes to the esiop(4) driver.
• Added support for the Dell CERC SATA RAID to the aac(4) driver.
• Added support for additional Dell boards to the ahd(4) driver.
• Fixed a number of issues with the ehci(4) driver.
• Added ukyopon(4) : Kyocera AIR-EDGE phone driver.
• The wdc(4) driver has been fixed for commands with opaque data structures. The atactl smart status command now works on big-endian hosts.

Networking

• wm(4) fixed major performance issues with the i82547 Gig-E chip.
• sk(4) improved chip identification and improved performance, and added support for the Belkin Gigabit Desktop Network PCI card.
• Fix a bug which would crash the system when destroying vlan(4) interfaces.
• Added rtk(4) and tl(4) interfaces as rnd(4) sources.
• Added support for the Compaq Netelligent 10 T/2 PCI UTP/Coax Controller to the tl(4) driver.
• Added support for changing the MTU of an stf(4) interface.
• Added support for IPv6 over gre(4) interfaces.
• The hme(4) driver now supports Sun QFE boards on non-SPARC hardware.
• Fix some stge(4) big-endian issues, and some other issues. stge(4) works on sparc64 with hardware checksums.

File system

• Fix a number of NFS issues.
• Fixed file access problems via SMBFS when the file is already open on the server.
• Various improvements to LFS, the BSD log-structured file system.

Security

• Support changing passwords in a Windows 2000 (or later) domain with krb5(3).
• Fixed a possible Denial of Service attack via IPSec AH packets.
• NetBSD-SA2005-10 OpenSSL “man in the middle” can force weak protocol
• NetBSD-SA2005-09 Insecure /tmp file usage when building using imake
• NetBSD-SA2005-08 Heap memory corruption in FreeBSD compat code
• NetBSD-SA2005-07 AES-XCBC-MAC always caculated with same key
• NetBSD-SA2005-06 Multiple vulnerabilities in CVS
• NetBSD-SA2005-05 cgd(4) key destruction on unconfigure
• NetBSD-SA2005-04 Buffer overflows in MIT Kerberos 5 telnet client
• NetBSD-SA2005-03 F_CLOSEM local denial of service
• NetBSD-SA2005-02 Local DoS via audio device with specific drivers

System administration and user tools

• ntpd(8) coredump if local system and NTP server did not have overlapping protocol family support (IPv4 vs. IPv6, for example) fixed.
• pax(1) has a number of bug fixes and new features.
• ifwatchd(8) has been fixed to call the CARRIER script if a link is already up during the initial interface scan.
• cvs(1) has been upgraded to version 1.11.20.
• Avoid crashes in grep(1) on empty or very large files.
• Fixed a number of issues in gzip(1).

Miscellaneous

• Added VT switching for the cats port.
• Various fixes and improvements to the cross-build system.
• Fixed some issues in libpthread and libpthread_dbg.
• Implement a USB memory reserve to work around problems plugging in (for example) umass(4) devices after boot.
• Package tools have been upgraded to version 20050530.

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