4.3BSD-Quasijarus0b was released on 2003-12-07.

The major changes from 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0a to 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0b are:

• Y2K fixes throughout the system.
• Fix for a critical bug in c2, the peephole optimiser, which caused it under certain circumstances to throw out instructions loading registers which were later used in deferred or indexed addressing modes. The resulting misoptimised code thus dereferenced bogus addresses, dumping core or even worse, behaving unpredictably. Many other minor bugs have also been fixed in c2. Since all system binaries are compiled with -O this potentially affects every binary in the system.
• As(1) now automatically chooses between byte branches, word branches, and long jumps, and ignores the -J option. It now also provides relaxed forms of SOB, AOB, and ACB instructions, which are now used by c2.
• Cc(1) -J option causes switch tables to be generated in long form like on Sun3.
• A number of tables have been enlarged in the C compiler and preprocessor.
• When emulating CRC, MATCHC, and MOVTUC instructions on uVAXen the registers and condition codes were being set incorrectly in some corner cases. This has been fixed.
• A security hole in kernel affecting VAX CPUs without PDP-11 compatibility mode support (uVAXen and VAX 8200) has been plugged. The hole allowed any ordinary unprivileged user who is able to run programs on the machine to cause a kernel panic by giving PSL=1 to the sigreturn(2) system call.
• A kernel panic-causing bug in TCP has been fixed. The kernel could panic if a setsockopt(2) was attempted on a TCP socket that had its connection reset. Fix from 4.4BSD.
• Support for DEC DSV11 point-to-point links using Cisco HDLC protocol.
• Sendmail cf files: the prophecy has come true. HOSTS.TXT is gone, everyone uses DNS, and there are no more NIC-registered hosts to worry about.
• Several new MSCP disks have been added to the distributed /etc/disktab and to the compiled-in disk tables in the uda(4) and kdb(4) drivers.
• The MicroVAX boot code no longer requires the boot disk to be unit 0. It must still be on the first MSCP controller, though.
• An RX50 console floppy is now available for the standard system to bootstrap on a VAX 8200.

Unfortunately a bug has crept into the released standalone system breaking cold installation. 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c has been released as a fix.

@(#)0b.html 1.2 04/02/15

Michael Sokolov
[email protected]