cvs-src summary for May 10 - May 17

[Mark Johnston]

Yes, this is a particularly short summary; it was a pretty quiet week.  Do 
check out the pics of the DES cracker linked from the article about the 
Enigma cipher, though.  Any other cool stuff on your site we should know 
about, Nate?  :)

FreeBSD cvs-src summary for 10/05/04 to 17/05/04
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is a regular weekly summary of FreeBSD's cutting-edge development.
It is intended to help the FreeBSD community keep up with the fast-paced
work going on in FreeBSD-CURRENT by distilling the deluge of data from
the CVS mailing list into a (hopefully) easy-to-read newsletter.  This
newsletter is marked up in reStructuredText_, so any odd punctuation
that you see is likely intended for the reST parser.

.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

You can get old summaries, and an HTML version of this one, at
http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/.  Please send any comments to Mark Johnston
(mark at xl0.org).

For Lukasz Dudek and Szymon Roczniak's Polish translations of these
summaries, which may lag the English ones slightly, please see
http://mocart.pinco.pl/FreeBSD/.

.. contents::

======
Errata
======
Last week, when noting Stefan Farfeleder (stefan) becoming a new src
committer, I stated that he was a developer on the TenDRA project.
The link I gave, http://www.tendra.org/, leads to an entirely
unrelated TenDRA project; Stefan is actually a developer on the one at
http://www.ten15.org/.

============
New features
============
ARM support added
-----------------
Olivier Houchard (cognet) imported kernel, libc, and various support code
for the ARM processor.  It only supports SA1110 on Simics right now, but
XScale support is coming soon.  Most of the code came from NetBSD, with
some initial work on the kernel done by Stephane Potvin.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405141146.i4EBkkvN064068
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405141204.i4EC4VvI075885

Jitter support added to cron
----------------------------
(The following is Yar Tikhiy (yar)'s commit message; I can't imagine any
clearer wording.  Thanks, Yar!)

Add two new options to cron(8), -J and -j.  They allow to specify the
maximum amount of time jitter for root and other users, respectively.
Before starting a job, cron(8) will sleep a random number of seconds, from
0 to the amount specified.  This can help to smooth down load spikes when
a lot of jobs are to start at the beginning of a particular minute (e.g.,
the first minute of an hour.)

PR:             bin/66474
Submitted by:   Dmitry Morozovsky <marck <@> rinet.ru>

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405161929.i4GJTXDu084445

=================
Discussion topics
=================
Relevance of the Enigma cipher
------------------------------
Joerg Wunsch (joerg) updated the enigma man page, prompting some
discussion about the security and relevance of the enigma encryption
utility.  Jim Rees (rees) started by suggesting that the page be updated
to clarify that the encryption uses only a single rotor and is less secure
than the also-unsafe German military Enigma machine.  He also suggested
that the bdes page be updated to reflect that DES is no longer considered
a very strong cryptosystem, prompting Nate Lawson (njl) to post this
`interesting article`_ about a custom-built DES cracker.

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) responded to Jim's description of the German
Enigma machine, noting that it is very safe when used properly, although
not a strong cryptosystem by modern standards.  Jim responded that, since
it has to be re-keyed every 200 characters, it is unlikely to be used in
a safe way.  Poul-Henning suggested that it's included more for the sake
of fun than utility.  Colin Percival (cperciva) jokingly suggested it be
moved to /usr/games, and Nate responded, saying he had thought that had
already been done.

.. _`interesting article`: 
http://www.cryptography.com/resources/whitepapers/DES.html

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405141929.i4EJTdOa082177

===============
Other bug fixes
===============
Tim J. Robbins (tjr) MFC'ed fixes to buffer overflows in timedc (the time
daemon controller), lpc (a printer control program), and tftp (the TFTP
client).  The fixes were also merged to 4.10.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405120305.i4C35JGj042519
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405120314.i4C3E0Dj044566
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405120330.i4C3U0vx047757

Vinod Kashyap (vkashyap) committed fixes to the twe driver, for 3ware ATA
RAID cards, to a problem that would cause out-of-order requests and a race
condition.  The fixes were merged to -STABLE and to 4.10.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405120337.i4C3bha004974

Diomidis Spinellis (dds) rearranged the ppp code to avoid an unnecessary
system call.  In his testing, the change gave a 38% reduction in overall
overhead.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200405130903.i4D930tS085950