[MagniComp Systems] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SysInfo 3.5 Release Notes New License In order to fund future improvements to SysInfo, a new license scheme is introduced with version 3.5. The new license allows no-cost use by non-profit and educational institutions and requires payment for use by all other users. More information, including pricing is available by clicking here SysInfo will automatically detect if it's being run on an educational or non-profit system if the domain name of the system is one of the known educational or non-profit domains. Currently this includes: * .edu * .edu.CC * .ac.CC * .uni-*.de * .org where CC is a country code. All other institutions must register and request a (free) license. SysInfo will automatically allow 60-days of free use for demonstration purposes whenever run with no license found. New Platform Support Solaris 7 (SunOS Full support for all Solaris 7 systems, including 5.7) 64-bit (UltraSPARC) systems. IRIX 6.5 Add support for IRIX 6.5. Linux 2.0 on x86 This is the first version of SysInfo to include support for Linux. All but device (hardware) information is available. Linux 2.1 should also work, but hasn't been tested. See Linux Notes for more information. FreeBSD on x86 Introducing support for FreeBSD on x86 systems. FreeBSD versions 2.2.x are supported. Version 3.0 will be supported in the next release. BSD/OS on x86 Introducing support for BSDi's BSD/OS on x86 systems. BSD/OS 3.1 and 4.0 are supported. HP-UX 11.0 Add support for HP-UX 11.0. Supported Platforms The following table indicates what platforms are supported for this release of SysInfo. This platform list is subject to change with each dot dot release of SysInfo. SysInfo Class of Information Man. OS Hard- Gen- Ker- Sys- Dev- Notes ware eral nel conf ice Solaris Sun 1.x SPARC Y Y Y Y Not fully tested, (SunOS but should work. 4.1.x) Solaris Solaris 2.5.1 - 7 (SunOS 5.5.1 - Sun 2.x SPARC Y Y Y Y 5.7) verified (SunOS 5.x) working. See Platform Notes Solaris Solaris 2.6 (SunOS Sun 2.x x86 Y Y Y Y 5.6) tested on (SunOS 5.x) limited hardware. IBM AIX 3.x, RS6000 Y N Y Y 4.x IRIX 5.x may no SGI IRIX 5.3, MIPS Y N Y Y longer work. 6.x Tested on IRIX 6.2 and 6.5. HP HP-UX 9.x hp9000 Y Y N Y 10.x 11.x BSD/OS x86 Y Y Y Y 3.1, 4.0 FreeBSD 2.2.x, x86 Y Y Y Y See Platform Notes 3.0 Linux 2.0 x86 Y Y Y P See Platform Notes KEY: Y - Yes, it's supported N - No, it's not supported P - Planned Major New Features/Improvements A complete list of changes in this release is available by reading the CHANGES file provided with the distribution. HPUX Full device (hardware) support is now provided for HP-UX 10 and later systems. New -msglevel option A major revamp of how messages are output from SysInfo has been performed. All output is now classified and output through the SImsg() call. The -msglevel option modifies what types of messages are output. New /etc/sysinfo.cf A new file called /etc/sysinfo.cf has been introduced to make binary distributions of SysInfo more easily installed. This file uses the same syntax as described in sysinfo.cf(5) which now supports the ConfDir PathName directive. By specifing a PathName you can override the value of CONFDIR compiled into SysInfo. For example, to use /net/sysinfoserver/conf as your SysInfo configuration directory, you could create a file /etc/sysinfo.cf with the line: ConfDir /net/sysinfoserver/conf New Device Fields Devices now have several new fields: Vendor, Serial, Revision, ClassType, Driver. The Model name no longer includes the Vendor name in most cases. These should be visible in "-level all" output as well as in the DevInfo_t data type. New General Field A new field called OS Distribution has been added. This field shows information about a particuliar distribution of a version of an OS. For instance, Solaris 2.6 HW2 SPARC. New and Improved SCSI The existing SCSI query support for SunOS has been Support greatly improved and new information added. The code is now generalized and is now used on BSD/OS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and IRIX. Improved Monitor Info SysInfo can now process VESA Extend Display Identification Data (EDID) to provide lots of information about monitors. This information is so far only available on Sun hardware. See the Sun EDID note below. Improved PCI Device Information about PCI devices in general has been Info consolidated and generalized across multiple OSs. See config/pci.cf. HW+SW Disk Info SysInfo now differentiates between disk information (geometry, etc.) obtained directly from the hardware (such as via a SCSI query) versus what is obtained from the OS. Output from "-level all" is marked as "HW" for hardware and "SW" for software. New RunTime Platform SysInfo now checks at runtime to make sure it's Check running on the same platform (Kernel Arch, OS Name, OS Version) as it was compiled on. New RunTime Root SysInfo now checks at runtime to make sure it's Check being run as root (uid==0) on most platforms. If it's not, a warning message is issued. Performance Performance should be noticable improved, Improvements especially on systems with lots of hardware. Several key changes where made to how SysInfo builds its list of devices which should reduce CPU and the real amount of time it takes to run SysInfo. Reduced Stack, Buffer A review of static buffer size usage was done and Handling many items where fixed. A more comprehensive review should still be done. DOS FDISK Partitions Generalized support for showing DOS FDISK partition on x86 information on x86 machines was added. Sun dual port disks Dual ported disks on Sun's should now only show up once. This code should work on all other platforms also, since it uses the hardware device Serial Number to uniquely identify each disk. Platform Specific Notes Solaris 7 Starting with Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7), you will need two binaries for each version of the OS - one for 32-bit systems and one for 64-bit systems (all Ultra machines are 64-bit). You can check which version you are running by looking at the first line of /etc/motd for the phrase "64-bit". To build a binary of sysinfo for a system running a 64-bit kernel, you must have a compatible compiler. Sun Compiler 5.0 is the first Sun compiler to support this via the -xarch=v9 option. At the time this document was written there was no version of GCC which supports 64-bit compiles. Sun/SPARC EDID VESA Extend Display Identification Data (EDID) for monitors appears to only be available from Creator Series 2 (FFB2) and later Creator frame buffers. No sign of EDID data on any other Sun framebuffer so far. Linux There is no support for devices in SysInfo on Linux platforms at this time. This is due to lack of a consistant kernel interface for acquiring such information. The Linux core developers are aware of this lack and plan to add appropriate plumbing in a future Linux kernel. That is likely to be Linux 2.4, but may not make that release. FreeBSD There is currently support for finding devices on PCI and ISA buses. There is no EISA support. ------------------------------------------------------------------------