NetBSD Archive

Andrew Brown has committed changes to -current implementing a new 'topdown' uvm. With these changes, the areas for heap growth and mmap(2)'ed allocations, which used to be separate, are now one and the same, allowing either one to grow much larger than before. As an example, on i386 it is now possible to mmap(2) over 2GB of memory.

The NetBSD Project announced that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged and the release engineering process has begun.

Jim wrote to tell us: "Until now, only Sun Microsystems's OSes and Linux have supported multiple processors on 32-bit Sparc machines. Now NetBSD has joined them!" Read the message that was posted on the netbsd.ports.sparc newsgroup.

Emmanuel Dreyfus recently noted that progress has been made with NetBSD's Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer.

Wasabi Systems, a provider of embedded BSD products and services, today announced completion of a port of NetBSD to the 64-bit SH-5 processor from SuperH, Inc., on the Cayman Development System. In June, Wasabi Systems became a founding member of the SuperH Partner Program for providing services to SuperH Licensees.

Signals are the difficult of part IRIX emulation. However, before examining the way they work on IRIX, let us study the signals implementation in NetBSD/mips. A user process enters the kernel by a trap. When a trap is caught, the hardware transfers control to the kernel. Assembly code in sys/arch/mips/mips/locore.S builds a trap frame (this is a struct frame, defined in sys/arch/mips/include/proc.h) on the kernel stack, in which CPU registers are saved. Then the trap() function from sys/arch/mips/mips/trap.c is called to handle the trap. Read the article at OnLamp.

"Now that we are able to launch dynamic binaries, the goal is to get them linking. The dynamic linker has to do a lot of system calls before actually launching the program. Most of them are plain SVR4, and hence are taken from sys/compat/svr4. Here, we will deal with IRIX-specific system calls." Read the rest fo the article at ONLamp. Part 1 and Part 2 also available.

NetBSD 1.6 has been released, with binary releases for 39 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6 release announcement and in the following blurb.

This article at OnLamp details the IRIX binary compatibility implementation for the NetBSD operating system. This includes the creation of a new emulation subsystem inside the NetBSD kernel and a lot of reverse engineering to understand and reproduce how IRIX internals work.

The NetBSD team has decided to do away with any selective moderation for postings originating from the openbsd.org domain based on an email announcement on behalf of NetBSD. This rule was instated to protect the NetBSD mailing lists from abuse or denial of service attacks by the founder of OpenBSD, Theo De Raadt, who some time ago threatened to attack the NetBSD project machines. The original report can be found at BSDForums.org.

"Even though the BSD/OS and NetBSD operating systems have been mostly developed by different developers with some different goals over the past nine years, they share many similarities due to their near identical open source origins and the open source software that complements the systems." Read the article at BSDNewsLetter.

From Daemonnews: Jason Thorpe has committed some socket code to the NetBSD-current source tree, and bumped the OS revision to 1.6C. For some apps, this can be a major performance improvement.

Found this interesting link regarding NetBSD's kernel scheduler over at BSDForums: "This paper presents the design and implementation of a two-level thread scheduling system on NetBSD. This system provides a foundation for efficient and flexible threads on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. The work is based on the scheduler activations kernel interface proposed by Anderson et al. for user-level control of parallelism in the presence of multiprogramming and multiprocessing."

NetBSD/mvmeppc is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola MVME PowerPC Single Board Computers. This was made possible through a donation by Gan Starling of two (plus one loaner) MVME160x boards so that a porting effort could be made. Due to NetBSD's highly portable architecture, the operating system was up and running multi-user after just two weeks worth of part-time effort.