New NetBSD flyers available

For informing our peers about NetBSD, for distributing at a conference or meet-up, or simply as a concise introduction – new NetBSD flyers are now available at http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/advocacy/. They are made to be printed on A4 paper and folded twice. English and German versions are provided.

At the moment, there are three flyers: "What is NetBSD?" gives an overview about the project and the OS, while "Tips and Tricks for NetBSD newcomers" and "NetBSD for Newcomers – Switching from GNU/Linux" are more aimed at people who already know similar operating systems, particularly GNU/Linux, and want to know more about the differences between these systems and NetBSD.

We are very grateful to Julian Fagir, who provided these flyers to the project.

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NetBSD 6.0_BETA binaries available for testing

On behalf of NetBSD developers, I'm happy to announce the availability of a public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for your testing pleasure.

This beta is substantially feature-complete; there may be some additional changes to the installer and possibly some additional hardware support if some is found missing and is easily added, but the major changes are done. What we need now is for you, the end users, to test it in your preferred configuration.

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posix_spawn syscall added

The posix_spawn kernel implementation, mostly developed by Charles Zhang during Google Summer of Code 2011, has now been committed.

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NetBSD 5.1.2 released

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.1.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.1.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

For full details, please see the 5.1.2 release notes.

To download 5.1.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

NetBSD 5.1.2 is dedicated to the memory of Yoshihiro Masuda, who passed away in May 2011. He was a spiritual pillar of the BSD community in Japan. Through an impressive number of books and articles on BSD, he gave courage to BSD developers. We remember his passion and deep love for BSD.

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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 2012

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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