NetBSD Archive

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce a number of students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers. The students working on this year's projects were mentored by various NetBSD developers with extensive experience in the respective work areas."

The NetBSD team has released the second release candidate of NetBSD 4.0. "There have been many fixes since the previous release candidate, RC1. The most important ones are: ICH9 support in wm(4); enhanced Speedstep support for VIA C7/Eden and amd64; many bugfixes for IPF; FAST_IPSEC fixes; wpi(4) bugfix; proplib local DoS fix; and much more."

"The NetBSD Foundation announces that it has hired Andrew Doran to work full-time on improving symmetrical multi-processing in NetBSD. This work is made possible through a generous donation by Force10 Networks and internal funding by The NetBSD Foundation. Andrew Doran is an independent, Dublin based Unix systems consultant with special interest in building scalable systems. He has been a NetBSD developer since 1999 and is currently working on the transition from a big-lock SMP implementation to a fine-grained model, which allows multiple CPUs to execute code in kernel context simultaneously. Hiring Andrew full-time will boost work in this area, with the final result of a SMP implementation that is ready for tomorrow's multi-core-CPUs."

The NetBSD Project has published the first 'quarterly' status report in 2007, covering the months January through June of 2007. "NetBSD is an actively developed operating system. With 54 different system architectures in total and binary support of 53 architectures in our last official release (NetBSD 3.1), our widely portable Packages Collection 'pkgsrc' and large userbase there is a lot going on within the project. In order to allow our users to follow the most important changes over the last few months, we provide a brief summary in these official status reports, released with irregular regularity. These reports are suitable for reproduction and publication in part or in whole as long as the source is clearly indicated. This status report summarizes the changes within NetBSD from January until June 2007."

The NetBSD Project is glad to participate in the Google Summer of Code for the third time in a row as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer (full details in the press release). Development on these projects will begin shortly, so make sure to follow the relevant mailing lists.

Multiboot is a specification that defines a protocol between boot loaders and operating system kernels. The idea behind it is to let any compliant boot loader load and execute any compliant OS kernel, decoupling these two system components. This way, boot loaders can be simpler by only having to know a single load protocol, and OS development is easier because there is no need to write a custom boot loader. This article details how NetBSD was made Multiboot-compliant, allowing it to be booted directly from within GRUB, and thus making it easier to install NetBSD alongside a Linux system in a single machine.

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. The NetBSD Packages Collection is a framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 6400 packages. It is used to enable freely available software to be configured and built easily on supported platforms. Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q4 announcement in Alistair Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users m-l for more information.

The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.

NetBSD 3.0.2 and 3.1 have been released simultaneously. NetBSD 3.0.2 is a critical/security-only update for NetBSD 3.0, while NetBSD 3.1 brings much broader fixes and improvements, including: Xen3 domU support, LFS stability improvements, Postfix 2.2.11, BIND 9.3.2, msdosfs write optimization, addition of scan_ffs/scan_lfs tools, driver updates, and many, many other bug fixes and enhancements. Binaries and ISO's for both releases are available via FTP and BitTorrent.

There is a new release candidate for the NetBSD 3.1 release, due to a series of recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities. There are more interesting improvements however, see the announcement mail for details. You can expect NetBSD 3.1, alongside NetBSD 3.0.2, to be released within two weeks.

NetBSD is the oldest and least-used of the three major BSD derivatives. David Chisnall takes a look at how it's survived for so long and where it's going in preparation for the next release.

"Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper will focus on those aspects relating to security."

NetBSD held a public 'Bugathon' this weekend: developers and users gathered together on a public IRC channel where they discussed and fixed a lot of PR's (270 bugs closed in just two days). It was such a success that the NetBSD developers plan to organize such event regularly. There's also a website (still under construction).

"Although we'd all like it to be otherwise, the process of porting an operating system to new hardware is hardly an instantaneous one, and it is not always easy. You might run into a number of potential difficulties, especially if you are coming to the problem for the first time. This article, and likely the next couple in the Testing and measuring the TAMS 3011 series, details my experience porting NetBSD to the TAMS 3011. These articles are not about the finished port, but about the process of developing it. I can only hope you find the hilarious errors as funny as I found them frustrating at the time."