See: Access Control List

See: Advanced Configuration and Power Interface

See: Automatic Mount Daemon

See: ACPI Machine Language

See: Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller

See: Advanced Power Management

See: Authenticated Post Office Protocol

See: ACPI Source Language

See: Advanced Technology Attachment

See: Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Pseudocode, interpreted by a virtual machine within an ACPI-compliant operating system, providing a layer between the underlying hardware and the documented interface presented to the OS.

The programming language AML is written in.

A specification which provides an abstraction of the interface the hardware presents to the operating system, so that the operating system should need to know nothing about the underlying hardware to make the most of it. ACPI evolves and supercedes the functionality provided previously by APM, PNPBIOS and other technologies, and provides facilities for controlling power consumption, machine suspension, device enabling and disabling, etc.

A daemon that automatically mounts a filesystem when a file or directory within that filesystem is accessed.

See: Berkeley Internet Name Domain

See: Basic Input/Output System

See: Berkeley Software Distribution

This is the name that the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at The University of California at Berkeley gave to their improvements and modifications to AT&T's 32V UNIX®. FreeBSD is a descendant of the CSRG work.

A phenomenon whereby many people will give an opinion on an uncomplicated topic, whilst a complex topic receives little or no discussion. See the FAQ for the origin of the term.

See: Carrier Detect

See: Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol

See: Classical IP over ATM

See: Common Object File Format

See: Central Processing Unit

See: Clear To Send

See: Concurrent Versions System

An RS232C signal indicating that a carrier has been detected.

An RS232C signal giving the remote system permission to send data.

See: Discretionary Access Control

See: Debugger

See: Data Encryption Standard

See: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

See: Domain Name System

See: Differentiated System Description Table

See: Data Set Ready

See: Data Terminal Ready

See: Distance-Vector Multicast Routing Protocol

See: Extended COFF

See: Executable and Linking Format

See: Encapsulated Security Payload

See: Fixed ACPI Description Table

See: File Allocation Table

See: File Allocation Table (16-bit)

See: File Transfer Protocol

See: Graphical User Interface

The name of a mutual exclusion mechanism (a sleep mutex) that protects a large set of kernel resources. Although a simple locking mechanism was adequate in the days where a machine might have only a few dozen processes, one networking card, and certainly only one processor, in current times it is an unacceptable performance bottleneck. FreeBSD developers are actively working to replace it with locks that protect individual resources, which will allow a much greater degree of parallelism for both single-processor and multi-processor machines.

A system where the user and computer interact with graphics.

See: HyperText Markup Language

See: HangUp

The markup language used to create web pages.

See: Input/Output

See: Intel's ASL compiler

See: Internet Message Access Protocol

See: Internet Protocol

See: IP Firewall

See: Internet Printing Protocol

See: IP Version 4

See: IP Version 6

See: Internet Service Provider

Intel's compiler for converting ASL into AML.

Japanese for “turtle”, the term KAME is used in computing circles to refer to the KAME Project, who work on an implementation of IPv6.

See: Key Distribution Center

See: Kernel ld(1)

See: Kernel Scheduler Entities

See: Kernel Virtual Address

See: Kilo Bits Per Second

A kernel-supported threading system. See the project home page for further details.

See: Local Area Network

See: Lock Order Reversal

See: Line Printer Daemon

The FreeBSD kernel uses a number of resource locks to arbitrate contention for those resources. A run-time lock diagnostic system found in FreeBSD-CURRENT kernels (but removed for releases), called witness(4), detects the potential for deadlocks due to locking errors. (witness(4) is actually slightly conservative, so it is possible to get false positives.) A true positive report indicates that “if you were unlucky, a deadlock would have happened here”.

True positive LORs tend to get fixed quickly, so check http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current and the LORs Seen page before posting to the mailing lists.

See: Mandatory Access Control

See: Multiple APIC Description Table

See: Merge From Current

See: Merge From Stable

See: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

See: Multi-Level Security

See: Message Of The Day

See: Mail Transfer Agent

See: Mail User Agent

To merge functionality or a patch from the -CURRENT branch to another, most often -STABLE.

In the normal course of FreeBSD development, a change will be committed to the -CURRENT branch for testing before being merged to -STABLE. On rare occasions, a change will go into -STABLE first and then be merged to -CURRENT.

This term is also used when a patch is merged from -STABLE to a security branch.

See Also: Merge From Current.

A message, usually shown on login, often used to distribute information to users of the system.

See: Network Address Translation

See: Project Evil

See: Network File System

See: New Technology File System

See: Network Time Protocol

A filesystem developed by Microsoft and available in its “New Technology” operating systems, such as Windows® 2000, Windows NT® and Windows XP.

See: Overtaken By Events

See: On-Demand Mail Relay

See: Operating System

Indicates a suggested change (such as a Problem Report or a feature request) which is no longer relevant or applicable due to such things as later changes to FreeBSD, changes in networking standards, the affected hardware having since become obsolete, and so forth.

See: Physical Address Extensions

See: Pluggable Authentication Modules

See: Password Authentication Protocol

See: Personal Computer

See: Personal Computer Network File System Daemon

See: Portable Document Format

See: Process ID

See: Principle Of Least Astonishment

See: Post Office Protocol

See: Post Office Protocol Version 3

See: PostScript Printer Description

See: Point-to-Point Protocol

See: PPP over ATM

See: PPP over Ethernet

See: Problem Report

See: Preboot eXecution Environment

A method of enabling access to up to 64 GB of RAM on systems which only physically have a 32-bit wide address space (and would therefore be limited to 4 GB without PAE).

A mythical piece of headgear, much like a dunce cap, awarded to any FreeBSD committer who breaks the build, makes revision numbers go backwards, or creates any other kind of havoc in the source base. Any committer worth his or her salt will soon accumulate a large collection. The usage is (almost always?) humorous.

As FreeBSD evolves, changes visible to the user should be kept as unsurprising as possible. For example, arbitrarily rearranging system startup variables in /etc/defaults/rc.conf violates POLA. Developers consider POLA when contemplating user-visible system changes.

A number, unique to a particular process on a system, which identifies it and allows actions to be taken against it.

The working title for the NDISulator, written by Bill Paul, who named it referring to how awful it is (from a philosophical standpoint) to need to have something like this in the first place. The NDISulator is a special compatibility module to allow Microsoft Windows™ NDIS miniport network drivers to be used with FreeBSD/i386. This is usually the only way to use cards where the driver is closed-source. See src/sys/compat/ndis/subr_ndis.c.

See: Router Advertisement

See: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

See: Random Access Memory

See: Received Data

See: Request For Comments

See: Reduced Instruction Set Computer

See: Remote Procedure Call

See: Recommended Standard 232C

See: Request To Send

A standard for communications between serial devices.

See: System Control Interrupt

See: Small Computer System Interface

See: Signal Ground

See: Server Message Block

See: Symmetric MultiProcessor

See: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

See: SMTP Authentication

See: Secure Shell

See: Suspend To RAM

An RS232 pin or wire that is the ground reference for the signal.

See: Transmission Control Protocol

See: Transmitted Data

See: Trivial FTP

See: Ticket-Granting Ticket

See: Time Stamp Counter

A profiling counter internal to modern Pentium® processors that counts core frequency clock ticks.

See: User Datagram Protocol

See: Unix File System Version 1

See: Unix File System Version 2

See: User ID

See: Uniform Resource Locator

See: Universal Serial Bus

A unique number assigned to each user of a computer, by which the resources and permissions assigned to that user can be identified.

See: Virtual Private Network