NetBSD Archive

Gavan Fantom of NetBSD, has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree, the new NetBSD/iyonix port. The IYONIX pc is an ARM-based desktop machine. It offers virtually silent operation, low heat, and all the other odds and ends offered by a modern PC. NetBSD is one port closer to a NetBSD/toaster port.

A new release candidate RC4 of NetBSD 2.0 has been tagged. The changes since RC3 include fixes for IP Filter (concerning IPv6 and better backwards compatibility with existing configurations), checksum processing for bridge interfaces, support for the Adaptec AAR 2810SA raid controller, linux compatibility and changes to the pagedaemon in order to improve performance under heavy disk load.

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's third quarterly status report, covering the months July through September of 2004.

The much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0 is getting closer and closer.

Some NetBSD 2.0-RC1 builds for those how wants to try this RC1 for the i386 and sparc64. These are unofficial builds without extra patches, made by a NetBSD enthusiast/developer. UPDATE: Jan Schaumann of NetBSD writes:

James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailinglist. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed. This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs.

During the last few months Chuck Silvers has refined the support for non-executable mappings on NetBSD. Non-executable mappings make parts of the stack and heap non-executable when they are marked writable. This makes exploiting potential buffer overflows harder.

NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK. Read the rest of the article here.

Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.

Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See here for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.

NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on my Sun Ultra 5. This will be the first in a series of operating system reviews for the SPARC platform. You can find the specifics of my evaluation machine here.

Preliminary support for Interix, a UNIX-like environment for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, has been added to NetBSD's Packages Collection. The support is still new and incomplete, but it is now possible to bootstrap pkgsrc and install simple packages. Interix is part of Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX package. See Todd Vierling's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.

NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.

On February 7th, The NetBSD Foundation held it's annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what things are planned for the coming year.