NetBSD 1.6.1 ISOs are Online
Following the source and binary release of NetBSD 1.6.1, now the ISOs are up and ready for your downloading pleasure. Choose among almost 40 architectures.
NetBSD Archive
NetBSD 1.6.1 Released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 which provides the following updates relative to 1.6:
Open Source Alternative: NetBSD
NetBSD's main claim to fame, so to speak, is its portability. Although ports of Linux are available for several platforms, NetBSD blows the penguin's doors off when it comes to platform support. Read the article at NewsFactor.
Staying Current with NetBSD
Open source never stands still. Even the flexible and mature BSDs are continuing to evolve. In this article, Michael Lucas looks at the NetBSD upgrade process, demonstrating the most common steps to stay abreast of the current source code.
IRIX Binary Compatibility for NetBSD, Part 6
The sixth part of the interesting series of articles that discusses IRIX binary compatibility under NetBSD, is published at OnLamp.
UFS2 Ported to NetBSD
Frank van der Linden has committed UFS2 code (based on FreeBSD's UFS2 by Marshall Kirk McKusick) to NetBSD. UFS2 is an extension to FFS. It adds 64 bit block pointers (breaking the 1T barrier) and support for extended file storage. On other BSD news, OpenBSD got a port of XFree86 4.3.0, while Kerneltrap features an article about the new 1:1 threading implementation that has been merged into FreeBSD -current.
The NetBSD Project Celebrates its 10th Anniversary
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System. Erik Reid has been working on getting DRI support for NetBSD to work. Under NetBSD/i386 1.6P, a Matrox G450 has been reported to work, Radeon and Riva128 should be functional as well.
New ‘Topdown’ UVM in NetBSD-Current
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.
NetBSD 1.6.1 Underway, Experimental Support for ATA RAID
The NetBSD Project announced that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged and the release engineering process has begun.
NetBSD Now has Native pThreads
Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers.
NetBSD Now Supports SMP on Sparc32
NetBSD: Mach And Darwin Binary Compatibility
Emmanuel Dreyfus recently noted that progress has been made with NetBSD's Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer.
IRIX Binary Compatibility, Part 5
"Welcome back to our series on IRIX binary compatibility. In this part, we will study IRIX and NetBSD threading models. We will also examine how it is possible to emulate IRIX native threads on NetBSD, though NetBSD does not support a similar feature for its native binaries." Read the article at OnLamp.
Wasabi Ports NetBSD to the SuperH 64-bit SH-5 Processor
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.
IRIX Binary Compatibility for NetBSD, Part 4
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.
NetBSD-Current Now Supports SMP on x86
From Slashdot: "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement
on the current-users list."
IRIX Binary Compatibility for NetBSD, Part 3
"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 Released
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.
IRIX Binary Compatibility, Part 2
Now that our kernel is able to distinguish the difference between IRIX binaries and other programs, we need to arrange the program environment so that the IRIX binary is able to start up (read Part 1 first).
IRIX Binary Compatibility for NetBSD, Part 1
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.