OpenBSD 4.5-beta announced

[jggimi]

4.5-beta was "announced" in CVS logs last night, and the announcement was published this morning in the OpenBSD Journal: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...&mode=expanded

For those who may not know, the "-beta" flavor of OpenBSD is -current which has all of the functionality of the upcoming -release. 4.5-release is expected on or before May 1. Its purpose is to have a robust testing (and patching) period prior to the final -release lock down.

An OpenBSD user on 4.4-release/4.4-stable who wishes to participate in testing may "upgrade" to 4.5-beta using a snapshot, followed by careful use of sysmerge(8) along with a review of the following -current FAQ. Continued testing with new snapshots will go on for 4 to 6 weeks. At the end of the beta period, the user may elect to stay with -current, or, may "upgrade" from 4.5-beta to 4.5-release/stable on May 1.

If the user moves on to 4.5-current at the end of the -beta period (when -release is tagged), they should note they'll stay on -current unless they reinstall, as an "upgrade backwards" to 4.5-release is not supported.

[J65nko]

And 4.5 snapshots have arrived too

       94576 Feb 10 10:13 INSTALL.amd64
         807 Feb 10 10:13 MD5
    52557308 Feb 10 10:13 base45.tgz
     7284459 Feb 10 10:13 bsd
     7308015 Feb 10 10:13 bsd.mp
     6425058 Feb 10 10:13 bsd.rd
     6541312 Feb 10 10:13 cd45.iso
       42940 Feb 10 10:13 cdboot
        2048 Feb 10 10:13 cdbr
   103191839 Feb 10 10:13 comp45.tgz
      511710 Feb 10 10:13 etc45.tgz
     1474560 Feb 10 10:13 floppy45.fs
     2706320 Feb 10 10:13 game45.tgz
         227 Feb 10 04:05 index.txt
   262547456 Feb 10 10:13 install45.iso
     8223311 Feb 10 10:13 man45.tgz
     2935045 Feb 10 10:13 misc45.tgz
       53268 Feb 10 10:13 pxeboot
    11265249 Feb 10 10:14 xbase45.tgz
       77937 Feb 10 10:14 xetc45.tgz
    35579835 Feb 10 10:14 xfont45.tgz
    21490094 Feb 10 10:14 xserv45.tgz
     2762776 Feb 10 10:13 xshare45.tgz

[Oko]

I noticed that the new SMTPd is committed. Does it mean that sendmail is
already out of base or it is still going to be in the base until SMTPd gets developed little bit more?

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by Oko

I noticed that the new SMTPd is committed. Does it mean that sendmail is
already out of base or it is still going to be in the base until SMTPd gets developed little bit more?

The standard modus operandi of the project is to check in base functionality & let it mature before announcing to the world that new functionality is/has been available. I highly doubt that sendmail will be replaced anytime soon -- especially in the 4.5 timeframe.

I'm sure there will be both discussion & debate on misc@ when it finally happens.

[jggimi]

It was added to the tree in mid-November for testing and bug reporting, according to the developer, gilles@. In early December a call for testing went out, but I have seen no announcements (yet) of sendmail redaction. 4.5-beta includes sendmail -- which means 4.5-release will include it.

[BSDfan666]

The new SNMP daemon was simply committed to make it easier to work on, it isn't even linked to the build yet, so unfortunately.. sendmail remains for now.

[lvlamb]

Fwiw, ext2fs support has been removed from bsd.rd (some moons ago).
This means:
- you cannot install|upgrade from the *.tgz you would have saved on a ext2fs USB stick or HD partition.
- if you upgrade and fstab contains an ext2fs mount, the upgrade will exit with a fatal error as the ext2fs now is unknown.

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by lvlamb

Fwiw, ext2fs support has been removed from bsd.rd

For amd64, true. But the i386 bsd.rd (RAMDISK_CD) still has it.

Inclusion of a particular filesystem varies by architecture and specific kernel.

See src/sys/<arch>/conf/RAMDISK* for specifics.

[Nobber]

I'm now running 4.5-beta:

# dmesg | head -1
OpenBSD 4.5-beta (GENERIC) #1684: Sun Feb 15 15:26:02 MST 2009

As far as I can tell, this is the first time OpenBSD has supported WPA with Atheros wireless chipsets, so for me at least, OpenBSD just got usable (on real hardware)!

Almost everything works nicely on my laptop, but there is one problem:

# dmesg | grep apm
apm0 at bios0: Power Management spec V1.2
apm0: AC on, battery charge unknown

Which means I can't get any battery monitors (klaptop, gkrellm etc.) to work. Is it worth me looking for a fix or workaround, or is this probably a permanent case of OpenBSD and ACPI/APM just not getting along?

[Oko]

Originally Posted by Nobber

I'm now running 4.5-beta:

# dmesg | head -1
OpenBSD 4.5-beta (GENERIC) #1684: Sun Feb 15 15:26:02 MST 2009

As far as I can tell, this is the first time OpenBSD has supported WPA with Atheros wireless chipsets, so for me at least, OpenBSD just got usable (on real hardware)!

OpenBSD has been supporting WPA almost a year now. I had it working on ral driver. Are you saying that it didn't work on Atheros before? If I remember correctly WPA was supported on lots of wireless drivers but not all.

Originally Posted by Nobber

Almost everything works nicely on my laptop, but there is one problem:

# dmesg | grep apm
apm0 at bios0: Power Management spec V1.2
apm0: AC on, battery charge unknown

Which means I can't get any battery monitors (klaptop, gkrellm etc.) to work. Is it worth me looking for a fix or workaround, or is this probably a permanent case of OpenBSD and ACPI/APM just not getting along?

I have ACPI and APM working perfectly on DeLL Latitude D830 (Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 80GB HDD) running 4.4 bsd.mp generic kernel. It is in my office so I can not send you dmesg right now.

ACPM and APM work almost perfectly on my ThinkPad A20p. The only problem I noticed is that it hangs if you try to power of by typing

shutdown -hp now

It is similar situation on my ancient ThinkPad 390E.
In all tree cases battery monitor works perfectly. I rarely or never use hibernation mode so I really
can not tell you if it works from the top of my head.

[Nobber]

Originally Posted by Oko

OpenBSD has been supporting WPA almost a year now. I had it working on ral driver. Are you saying that it didn't work on Atheros before? If I remember correctly WPA was supported on lots of wireless drivers but not all.

Yes, that's right. I looked up OpenBSD recently, discovered it now has WPA support, and installed 4.4 with some anticipation - only to discover that ath(4) did not support WPA. Then I read in a recent mailing list post that WPA support had been added to that driver, so I installed the latest 4.5 snapshot, and now I'm connected.

I like how WPA and the key are configured via ifconfig, by the way. Very simple and elegant.

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by Nobber

I like how WPA and the key are configured via ifconfig, by the way. Very simple and elegant.

Wireless NIC configuration wasn't always that way. There was a concerted effort about 3-4 years ago, to eliminate all of the individual-driver-based management and configuration tools from /sbin.

Having suffered through the older method, I agree with you, ifconfig is the right place for it.

[BSDfan666]

As has been indicated previously on this forum, apm(4) gets first dibs at attaching under most circumstances.

You can disable apm(4) and use acpi(4) instead:
boot> boot -c
UKC> disable apm
UKC> quit

Fortunately when you switch to ACPI it generously provides APM emulation so user-land applications can still use the /dev/{apm,apmctl} interface.

This means those ports should work as intended, as will apm(8), but you won't see the apm(4) verbiage in the dmesg(1) output.

Hope that helps.

[Nobber]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

You can disable apm(4) and use acpi(4) instead...

Sounds promising. I'll give that a try later. Thanks!

[BSDfan666]

Note; the instructions above aren't permanent.. you can use the config(8) utility to make them so.

I would going to leave this as an exercise, but that seemed counterproductive.
$ sudo config -ef /bsd
..output.
ukc> quit

Good luck.