Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 20:36:44 +0100 From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Project status Message-ID: <xzpy94v3kj7.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> In-Reply-To: <20030204135158.D4487@papagena.rockefeller.edu> (Rahul Siddharthan's message of "Tue, 4 Feb 2003 13:51:58 -0500") References: <20030204135158.D4487@papagena.rockefeller.edu>
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Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> writes: > Since you ask, I was planning to learn about the PAM thing (I guess > you're the right guy)... I never learned what its benefits are, and > maybe I got biased by a broken linux machine which would let me log in > without a password. PAM is a framework for authentication and related functionality. It provides entry points for six common authentication-related operations and a configurable stacking system that allows the admin to decide how these operations are to be performed on a per-application basis. It's not new in 5.0, but I've rewritten the PAM library (4.x has Linux-PAM, which is horribly broken), added some modules, improved the ones we already had, integrated PAM into just about everything in the base system that cares about authentication, and removed most of the legacy (non-PAM) code. I've also written some documentation, which isn't entirely done yet: <URL:http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/pam/>; > The other major 5.0 feature I noticed was ACPI. Apparently a work in > progress, so maybe not good to make loud noises about it. Any good > documents on that, other than the manpages? I had problems with > suspend (or rather, standby), so I switched back to APM but I'm > willing to experiment. We're using Intel's own ACPI implementation, and it's getting updated regularly. I've had trouble with it in the past, but the latest incarnation works just fine, and does things APM never could. Unlike APM, which is implemented entirely within the BIOS, ACPI is implemented in the OS, and all the vendor provides is a high-level description of the hardware, its capabilities, and how to use it. This means that you can't improve APM on a system short of updating the BIOS (if the vendor acknowledges the problem and releases a bugfix), but you can improve ACPI and implement workarounds for quirky systems. The main problem with ACPI these days, I hear, is that most mobo vendors don't care if their ACPI stuff breaks the spec as long as Windows boots, while Intel's implementation is rather strict about some things (understandably, since it's their spec to begin with). DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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