NetBSD 7.1 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

Some highlights of NetBSD 7.1 are:

• Support for Raspberry Pi Zero.
• Initial DRM/KMS support for NVIDIA graphics cards via nouveau (Disabled by default. Uncomment nouveau and nouveaufb in your kernel config to test).
• The addition of vioscsi, a driver for the Google Compute Engine disk.
• Linux compatibility improvements, allowing, e.g., the use of Adobe Flash Player 24.
• wm(4):
  • C2000 KX and 2.5G support.
  • Wake On Lan support.
  • 82575 and newer SERDES based systems now work.
• ODROID-C1 Ethernet now works.
• Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[2 comments]

 

ptrace(2) tasks segment finished

During this month I've finished the needed work in the base distribution in order to host fully featured LLDB. Currently the ptrace(2) interfaces in NetBSD are, in terms of features, closely related to FreeBSD and Linux. There are only few bugs left with filed Problem Reports and alerting regression tests, however they do not interfere with the needed functions to move the port of the debugger forward.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

NetBSD 7.1_RC2 available

NetBSD 7.1_RC2 is now available, bringing numerous security fixes.[Read More] [1 comment]

 

NetBSD fully reproducible builds

Today (2017-02-20) NetBSD got our first reproducible build on the debian build farm. Here's a short description how we got here, what implementation choices we made, and what we had to fix.[Read More] [4 comments]

 

The first patch-bulk upstreamed to LLDB

The LLVM project is a quickly moving target, this also applies to the LLVM debugger -- LLDB. It's actively used in several first-class operating systems, while - thanks to my spare time dedication - NetBSD joined the LLDB club in 2014, only lately the native support has been substantially improved and the feature set is quickly approaching the support level of Linux and FreeBSD. During this work 12 patches were committed to upstream, 12 patches were submitted to review, 11 new ATF were tests added, 2 NetBSD bugs filed and several dozens of commits were introduced in pkgsrc-wip, reducing the local patch set to mostly Native Process Plugin for NetBSD.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Firefox 51 on sparc64 - we did not hit the wall yet

Keeping a current firefox working is a tough task. All NetBSD architectures are "tier 3" from the Mozilla foundations point of view.

Onodera-san (who does most of the pkgsrc work for mozilla based pkgs - and others) does a great job.

And on "strange" architectures like sparc64 it is even worse...

[Read More] [3 comments]

 

Summary of the preliminary LLDB support project

Operating systems can be called monitors as they handle system calls from userland processes. A similar task is performed by debuggers as they implement monitors for traced applications and interpret various events that occurred in tracees and are messaged usually with signals to their tracers. During this month I have started a new Process Plugin within LLDB to incept NativeProcessNetBSD - copied from NativeProcessLinux - implementing basic functionality and handling all the needed events in the MonitorCallback() function. To achieve these tasks, I had to add a bunch of new ptrace(2) interfaces in the kernel to cover all that is required by LLDB monitors. The current Process Plugin for NetBSD is capable to start a process, catch all the needed events correctly and if applicable resume or step the process.[Read More] [1 comment]

 

NetBSD.org outage 2017-01-16

NetBSD.org DNS is down because our secondary stopped serving our zone and the network of our primary went offline.

[Update, 2017-01-16 20:48 UTC: NetBSD.org is back up now.]

[Read More] [1 comment]

 

Google Summer of Code 2016 summary

The NetBSD Foundation took part in the 2016 Google Summer of Code.

Hrishikesh Goyal worked on the project "Implement Ext4fs support in ReadOnly mode". He tackled two features of an ext4fs implementation: extents and HTree DIR read/write support. His work was committed into the NetBSD source tree in multiple commits.

charles cui worked on adding tests for better "POSIX Test Suite Compliance". This involved porting the Open Posix benchmark suite to NetBSD. Many of the tests showed missing features, and Charles worked with his mentors to improve the results. See his summary for details.

Leonardo Taccari worked on "Split debug symbols for pkgsrc builds". He already blogged about this in much detail on this blog.

A big thank you to Google for sponsoring the students to work on NetBSD, the students for working on the projects, and the mentors that were helping them along! [0 comments]

 

NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available

7.1_RC1 is out! Help us by testing it![Read More] [1 comment]

 

Summary of the ptrace(2) project

In short, we are already in a good state with the existing ptrace(2) interfaces, as most necessary functions in LLDB are representable by existing NetBSD specific interfaces. We can fully implement core LLDB functionality without further extensions in ptrace(2). During this project dozen of bugs were investigated & fixed and several hundreds of ATF tests added. The major addition is newly added support for hardware assisted watchpoints API for ptrace(2) on amd64 and preliminary code for i386 and XEN.[Read More] [6 comments]

 

NetBSD 7.0.2 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0.2, the second security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 7.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 7.0.2.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[2 comments]