Announcing NetBSD Hackathon - February 10th to 12th, 2012

The 16th NetBSD hackathon will be run from February 10th to February 12th. Our goal is fixing all the bugs that need fixing to get NetBSD-current ready for the creation of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch.

Everybody that has an interest in NetBSD, from developers, documentation writers, translators, to advanced users are invited to attend. To make sure that NetBSD users get the best possible experience of the new release we would like to fix as many bugs as possible. For a list of bugs and more information look at the Wiki Page please.

If you are able to help us fixing these bugs by supplying patches or testing fixes please consider to participate. We are also in need of people to supply documentation fixes, preferably in the form of patches. Release notes and/or manual pages!

Join us on the IRC channel #netbsd-code on freenode (irc.freenode.net). Just join, have a look around and ask your questions or what work needs to be done.

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Meet us at FOSDEM 2011

This weekend (Feb. 4 - 5) FOSDEM, The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the university of Brussels and NetBSD will be present with a booth and there will be NetBSD related talks and presentations in the BSD devroom on sunday.

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Running NetBSD on the LG-N2R1D NAS-family

Article about installing NetBSD on a small nas device LG NAS-N2R1D. This requires some soldering and other black magic but otherwise pretty good example of NetBSD portability.

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Plan and funding of SMP Networking projects

On September 13th, 2011, the Board of Directors posted a news item requesting project specifications to get rid of the big kernel lock surrounding the networking code. Unfortunately, nobody has taken advantage of the offer and, therefore, the Board has not received any applications to this date.

In order to lower the entry barrier, the Board has prepared a set of smaller project proposals that, in aggregate, help in achieving the goal of making the networking stack suitable for SMP systems. Please note that these projects cover a very wide range of topics: there are projects whose only purpose is to add new data structures to the kernel, while others involve refactoring parts of the existing code to make adding locking easier.

The list of projects for funding and the tentative plan can be found in the new SMP Networking project page.

All of the individual projects that can help in achieving the goal of SMP Networking are suitable for funding. If you are interested in applying for any of them, please contact board@ and core@ directly. The project application how-to may be of help.

Thank you.

Julio Merino,
On behalf of the Board of Directors

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Postfix 2.8.6 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.8.6 was imported into NetBSD-current last Friday. The changes since Postfix 2.8.5 are:

• The Postfix SMTP daemon sent "bare" newline characters instead of <CR><LF> when a header_checks REJECT pattern matched multi-line header. This bug was introduced with Postfix 1.1.

• The Postfix SMTP daemon sent "bare" newline characters instead of <CR><LF> when an smtpd_proxy_filter returned a multi-line response. This bug was introduced with Postfix 2.1.

• For compatibility with future EAI (email address internationalization) implementations, the Postfix MIME processor no longer enforces the strict_mime_encoding_domain check on unknown message subtypes such as message/global*. This check is disabled by default.

• The Postfix master daemon could report a panic error ("master_spawn: at process limit") after the process limit for some service was reduced with "postfix reload". This bug existed in all Postfix versions.

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GSoC 2011 roundup: Add kqueue support to GIO

As the Google Summer of Code 2011 (GSoC 2011) program concludes, we will be running a series of articles detailing the results of the projects mentored by The NetBSD Foundation.

Today's turn is the summary of Dmitry Matveev's project, "Add kqueue support to GIO", for which I was the mentor.

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Request for project specs to remove the big network lock

The Board of Directors is interested in improving the performance of the networking subsystem of the NetBSD kernel on multiprocessor machines. To help people interested in working towards this goal, the board is willing to fund related projects.

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Postfix 2.8.5 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.8.5 was imported into NetBSD-current today. The changes since Postfix 2.8.4 are:

• The Postfix Milter client logged a "milter miltername: malformed reply" error when a Milter sent an SMTP response without enhanced status code (i.e. "XXX Text" instead of "XXX X.X.X Text").
• The Postfix Milter client sent a random {client_connections} macro value when the remote SMTP client was not subject to any smtpd_client_* limit. As a workaround, it now sends a zero value instead.

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Fossil and Git mirrors of pkgsrc and src

The NetBSD CVS repository has seen a lot of work over the recent months to clean up various historic artefacts. Together with the improvements in cvs2fossil and the Fossil->Git conversion, it is now possible to provide a precise, up-to-date conversion.

The Git repositories can be found on github, checkout pkgsrc and src.

The Fossil repositories can be found at src (mirror) and pkgsrc (mirror). The raw database as faster alternative to cloning can be found on ftp.NetBSD.org.

This repositories are synchronised with a normal latency of 2h. The only differences between a checkout from CVS and Fossil/Git are supposed to be related to historic checkouts of files pulled from a vendor branch. The implemented behaviour is consistent with the changes in the file. RCS IDs are all expanded using the same rules CVS follows.

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Postfix 2.8.4 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.8.4 was imported into NetBSD-current today. The changes since Postfix 2.8.2 are:

• Performance: a high load of DSN success notification requests could slow down the queue manager. Solution: make the trace client asynchronous, just like the bounce and defer clients.
• The local(8) delivery agent ignored table lookup errors in mailbox_command_maps, mailbox_transport_maps, fallback_transport_maps and (while bouncing mail to alias) alias owner lookup.
• Workaround: dbl.spamhaus.org rejects lookups with "No IP queries" even if the name has an alphanumerical prefix. We play safe, and skip both RHSBL and RHSWL queries for names ending in a numerical suffix.
• The "sendmail -t" command reported "protocol error" instead of "file too large", "no space left on device" etc.
• The Postfix Milter client reported a temporary error instead of "file too large" in three cases.

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USB Keyboard Support for DDB

More and more modern computers don't come with a "real" keyboard interface anymore, and that makes our lives hard when we have to enter the kernel debugger DDB. Well, not anymore if you run -current. jmcneill@ committed code which lets you use DDB with USB keyboards. See

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2011/07/30/msg025233.html

for the full commit message.

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Core group composition change

The directors of the NetBSD Foundation and the Core group wish to welcome Alan Barrett as new member of the Core group.

He is replacing Antti Kantee; our sincerest thanks to Antti for all his efforts during his core tenure, specially for pushing through the tiered port support model and for making bug bounties a reality.

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