aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news

aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news

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GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally (Final report)

This report was prepared by Nikita Ronja Gillmann as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This is my second and final report for the Google Summer of Code project I am working on for NetBSD.

My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.

The initial and defined goal of this project was to make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, which had been completed in June. For the second part I was given the task to replace fork+exec calls in our standard shell (sh) in one scenario. Similar to the previous goal we determine through implementation if the initial motivation, to get performance improvements, is correct otherwise we collect metrics for why posix_spawn() in this case should be avoided. This second part meant in practice that I had to add and change code in the kernel, add a new public libc function, and understand shell internals.

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Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020

We nearly hit our donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000.
These donations have enabled us to fund significant paid work on NetBSD in 2020.

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Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship

Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.

He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.

Allen lived in Blacksburg Virginia with his wife and twin boys and was active with various community volunteer groups. His family touched the families of many other NetBSD developers and those friendships have endured beyond his passing.

We have received the following from Allen's family and decided to share it with the NetBSD community. If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.

https://www.ncssm.edu/donate/distance-education/allen-k-briggs-88-memorial-scholarship

The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen's friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.

Two quick notes on donating: Important! When donating, you must select "Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship" under designation for the donation to be routed to the scholarship If you have the option to use employer matching (i.e., donating to NCSSM through an employer portal to secure a match from your employer), please email the NCSSM Foundation's Director of Development, April Horton (april.horton@ncssm.edu), after donating to let her know you want your gift and employer match to go to the Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship Thanks in advance for your help. I'd be happy to answer any questions you or any others have about this.

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NetBSD 9.1 released

NetBSD 9.1, the first maintenance update for the NetBSD 9 branch, has been released

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD

This report was written by Ayushu Sharma as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This post is a follow up of the first report and second report. Post summarizes the work done during the third and final coding period for the Google Summer of Code (GSoc’20) project - Enhance Syzkaller support for NetBSD

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 5)

The NetBSD developers maintain two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system that includes a significant set of local patches.
• Another one in pkgsrc whose patching is limited to mostly build fixes.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on local patching to work. I have set a goal to reduce the number of custom patches to bare minimum, ideally achieving the state of GDB working without any local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Wayland on NetBSD - trials and tribulations

After I posted about the new default window manager in NetBSD I got a few questions, including "when is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?", Wayland being X11's "new" rival. In this blog post, hopefully I can explain why we aren't yet!

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Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current

For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.

In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This post is the third update to the project RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing.

Part1 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls1

Part2 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls

The first and second coding period was entirely dedicated to fuzzing rumpkernel syscalls using hongfuzz. Initially a dumb fuzzer was developed to start fuzzing but it soon reached its limits.

For the duration of second coding peroid we concentrated on crash reproduction and adding grammar to the fuzzer which yielded in better results as we tested on a bug in ioctl with grammar. Although this works for now crash reproduction needs to be improved to generate a working c reproducer.

For the last coding period I have looked into the internals of syzkaller to understand how it pregenerates input and how it mutates data. I have continued to work on integrating buildrump.sh with build.sh. buildrump eases the task fo building the rumpkernel on any host for any target.

buildrump.sh is like a wrapper around build.sh to build the tools and rumpkernel from the source relevant to rumpkernel. So I worked to get buildrump.sh working with netbsd-src. Building the toolchain was successfull from netbsd-src. So binaries like rumpmake work just fine to continue building the rumpkernel.

But the rumpkernel failed to build due to some warnings and errors similar to the following. It can be due to the fact that buildrump.sh has been dormant recently I faced a lot of build issues.

nbmake[2]: nbmake[2]: don't know how to make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/dest.stage/usr/lib/crti.o. Stop

nbmake[2]: stopped in /root/buildrump.sh/src/lib/librumpuser
>> ERROR:
>> make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/Makefile.first dependall

Few of the similar errors were easily fixed but I couldn't integrate it during the time span of the coding period.

To Do

• Research more on grammar definition and look into the existing grammar fuzzers for a better understanding of generating grammar.
• Integrate syz2sys with the existing fuzzer to include grammar generation for better results.

GSoC with NetBSD has been an amazing journey throughout, in which I had a chance to learn from awesome people and work on amazing projects. I will continue to work on the project to achieve the goal of integrating my fuzzer with OSS Fuzz. I thank my mentors Siddharth Muralee, Maciej Grochowski, Christos Zoulas for their support and Kamil for his continuous guidance.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of the test framework of curses. This is the final blog report in a series of blog reports; you can look at the first report and second report of the series.

The first report gives a brief introduction of the project and some insights into the curses testframe through its architecture and language. To someone who wants to contribute to the test suite, this blog can act as the quick guide of how things work internally. Meanwhile, the second report discusses some of the concepts that were quite challenging for me to understand. I wanted to share them with those who may face such a challenge. Both of these reports also cover the progress made in various phases of the Summer of Code.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report and GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report blogs, and describes my progress in the final phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In the third phase, I upgraded to the latest stable version Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) 9.8.0 in pkgsrc-wip, resolved the TODOs and created patches for more test-profiles to fix their installation and runtime errors on NetBSD-current.

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