NetBSD 6.1.3, NetBSD 6.0.4, NetBSD 5.2.2, and NetBSD 5.1.4 patch releases

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce:

• NetBSD 6.1.3, the third security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch,
• NetBSD 6.0.4, the fourth security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch,
• NetBSD 5.2.2, the second security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 5.2 release branch,
• and NetBSD 5.1.4, the fourth security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch

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Interview with Amitai Schlair member of The NetBSD Foundation’s Board of Directors

New interview with schmonz [0 comments]

 

Survey of rump kernel network interfaces

A cyclic trend in operating systems is moving things in and out of the kernel for better performance. Currently, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of userspace being the locus of high performance. The anykernel architecture of NetBSD ensures that the same kernel drivers work in a monolithic kernel, userspace and beyond. One of those driver stacks is networking. In this article we assume that the NetBSD networking stack is run outside of the monolithic kernel in a rump kernel and survey the open source interface layer options.

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Call for Presentations: BSD devroom at FOSDEM 2014

FOSDEM 2014 will take place on 1–2 February, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium. Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth and a developer's room (on Saturday).

The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world examples and presentations about new and shiny features. The default duration for talks will be 45 minutes including discussion. Feel free to ask if you want to have a longer or a shorter slot.

If you already submitted a talk last time, please note that the procedure is slightly different.

To submit your proposal, visit

https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14/

and follow the instructions to create an account and an “event”. Please select “BSD devroom” as the track. (Click on “Show all” in the top right corner to display the full form.)

Please include the following information in your submission:

• The title and subtitle of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with ~500 from other projects)
• A short abstract of one paragraph
• A longer description if you wish to do so
• Links to related websites/blogs etc.

The deadline for submissions is December 20, 2013. The talk committee, consisting of Daniel Seuffert, Marius Nünnerich and Benny Siegert, will consider the proposals. If yours has been accepted, you will be informed by e-mail before the end of the year.

[1 comment]

 

Google Summer of Code 2013 report: Defragmentation for FFS

The following report is by Manuel Wiesinger:

First of all, I like to thank the NetBSD Foundation for enabling me to successfully complete this Google Summer of Code. It has been a very valuable experience for me.

My project is a defragmentation tool for FFS. I want to point out at the beginning that it is not ready for use yet.

What has been done:

Fragment analysis + reordering. When a file is smaller or equal than the file system's fragment size, it is stored as a fragment. One can think of a fragment as a block. It can happen that there are many small files that occupy a fragment. When the file systems changes over time it can happen that there are many blocks containing fewer fragments than they can hold. The optimization my tool does is to pack all these fragments into fewer blocks. This way the system may get a little more free space.

Directory optimization. When a directory gets deleted, the space for that directory and its name are appended to the previous directory. This can be imagined like a linked list. My tool reads that list and writes all entries sequentially.

Non-contiguous files analysis + reordering strategy. This is what most other operating systems call defragmentation - a reordering of blocks, so that blocks belonging to the same file or directory can be read sequentially.

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NetBSD 6.1.2 and NetBSD 6.0.3 are out!

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1.2, the second security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch, and NetBSD 6.0.3, the third security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch. They represent a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, and if you are running a prior release of NetBSD 6.x3, you are recommended to update.

For more details, please see the NetBSD 6.1.2 release notes or NetBSD 6.0.3 release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 6.1.2 and NetBSD 6.0.3 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]

 

NetBSD 5.2.1 and NetBSD 5.1.3 patch releases

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 5.2.1, the first security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 5.2 release branch, and NetBSD 5.1.3, the third security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. They represent a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, and if you are running a release of NetBSD prior to 5.1.3, you are recommended to update to a supported NetBSD 5.x or NetBSD 6.x version.

For more details, please see the NetBSD 5.2.1 release notes or NetBSD 5.1.3 release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.2.1 and NetBSD 5.1.3 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/.

Updates to NetBSD 6.x will be coming in the next few days.

[1 comment]

 

Firefox on sparc64 update

Just a small update on the previous post about firefox on sparc64: after a bit more work, the brand new version 24 ESR builds straight from pkgsrc (so should be included in the next set of binary pkgs).

All open issues (wrong colours on scaled images, failing https, ...) have been resolved.

Here is a new screeenshot:

[3 comments]

 

PCI driver support for rump kernels on Xen

Yesterday I wrote a serious, user-oriented post about running applications directly on the Xen hypervisor. Today I compensate for the seriousness by writing a why-so-serious, happy-buddha type kernel hacker post. This post is about using NetBSD kernel PCI drivers in rump kernels on Xen, with device access courtesy of Xen PCI passthrough.

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Running applications on the Xen Hypervisor

There are a number of motivations for running applications directly on top of the Xen hypervisor without resorting to a full general-purpose OS. For example, one might want to maximally isolate applications with minimal overhead. Leaving the OS out of the picture decreases overhead, since for example the inter-application protection offered normally by virtual memory is already handled once by the Xen hypervisor. However, at the same time problems arise: applications expect and use many services normally provided by the OS, for example files, sockets, event notification and so forth. We were able to set up a production quality environment for running applications as Xen DomU's in a few weeks by reusing hundreds of thousands of lines of unmodified driver and infrastructure code from NetBSD. While the amount of driver code may sound like a lot for running single applications, keep in mind that it involves for example file systems, the TCP/IP stack, stdio, system calls and so forth -- the innocent-looking open() alone accepts over 20 flags which must be properly handled. The remainder of this post looks at the effort in more detail.

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NetBSD 6.1.1 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1.1, the first security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons.

For more details, please see the 6.1.1 release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 6.1.1 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]

 

SX support added

Support for Sun's SX rendering engine ( found in the SparcStation 20 and 10SX's memory controllers ) has been added, both for the console and X. Both drivers support basic acceleration ( block copy, rectangle fill, character drawing in the kernel ), the Xorg driver also supports Xrender acceleration. This probably makes SX the oldest supported hardware which can do that.

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