More disk(s) fun


July 07, 2016 posted by Martin Husemann

When I got my Sun T1000 machine, it came with a ~80 GB hard disk - good enough for a NetBSD installation, but a bit challenged when you want to use logical domains. Time to expand disk space, or maybe make it faster? But these 1U server machines do not offer a lot of room for extensions, and it is sometimes tricky to get hold of the official extension options nowadays.

So I had fun with disks and modern replacements again...

[Read More] [5 comments]

 

What to do when you run out of (ancient) 50 pin SCSI disks?


May 27, 2016 posted by Martin Husemann

Unable to buy new 50 pin SCSI disks, and not willing to spend huge amounts of money on fast SCSI disks then slowed down by 50pin adapters, I looked for alternative solutions for the root disks of my mac68k and alpha machines.

[Read More] [4 comments]

 

talks about blacklistd


April 04, 2016 posted by Matthew Sporleder

Watch a video by Christos Zoulas (with good audio!) talking about blacklistd
blacklistd by Christos Zoulas [1 comment]

 

Happy 23rd Birthday, src!


March 21, 2016 posted by William J. Coldwell

And so it began...

revision 1.1
date: 1993-03-21 10:45:37 +0100; author: cgd; state: Exp;
branches: 1.1.1;

Initial revision

and we continue this legacy.

[1 comment]

 

Hands on experience with EdgeRouter ERLite-3


May 07, 2015 posted by Martin Husemann

My EdgeRouter ERLite-3 just has been delivered. Setup was easy (the NetBSD version of "plug & play"), and I really like this hardware.

Of course first testing showed up first errors - so this will be an interesting experience!

[Read More] [4 comments]

 

An Internet-Ready OS From Scratch in a Week — Rump Kernels on Bare Metal


August 08, 2014 posted by Antti Kantee

The most time-consuming part of operating system development is obtaining enough drivers to enable the OS to run real applications which interact with the real world. NetBSD's rump kernels allow reducing that time to almost zero, for example for developing special-purpose operating systems for the cloud and embedded IoT devices. This article describes an experiment in creating an OS by using a rump kernel for drivers. It attempts to avoid going into full detail on the principles of rump kernels, which are available for interested readers from rumpkernel.org.

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


December 17, 2013 posted by Matthew Sporleder

New interview with schmonz [0 comments]

 

Survey of rump kernel network interfaces


December 17, 2013 posted by Antti Kantee

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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PCI driver support for rump kernels on Xen


September 18, 2013 posted by Antti Kantee

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


September 17, 2013 posted by Antti Kantee

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.

[Read More] [5 comments]

 

Google Code-In 2012/2013 (from jdf)


July 02, 2013 posted by Matthew Sporleder

Google Code-In (GCi) is a project like Google Summer Of Code (GSoC), but for younger students. While GSoC is aimed at university students, i.e. for people usually of age 19 or older, GCi wants to recruit pupils for Open Source projects.

When applying for participation, every project had to create a large number of potentially small tasks for students. A task was meant to be two hours of work of an experienced developer, and feasible to be done by a person 13 to 18 years old. Google selected ten participating organisations (this time, NetBSD was the only BSD participating) to insert their tasks into Google Melange (the platform which is used for managing GCi and GSoC).

Then, the students registered at Google Melange, chose a project they wanted to work on, and claimed tasks to do. There were many chats in the NetBSD code channel for students coming in and asking questions about their tasks.

After GCi was over, every organisation had to choose their two favourite students who did the best work. For NetBSD, the choice was difficult, as there were more than two students doing great work, but in the end we chose Mingzhe Wang and Matthew Bauer. These two "grand price winners" were given a trip to Mountain View to visit the Google headquarters and meet with other GCi price winners.

You can see the results on the corresponding wiki page

There were 89 finished tasks, ranging from research tasks (document how other projects manage their documentation), creating howtos, trying out software on NetBSD, writing code (ATF tests and Markdown converters and more), writing manpages and documentation, fixing bugs and converting documentation from the website to the wiki.

Overall, it was a nice experience for NetBSD. On the one hand, some real work was done (for many of them, integration is still pending). On the other hand, it was a stressful time for the NetBSD mentors supervising the students and helping them on their tasks. Especially, we had to learn many lessons (you will find them on the wiki page for GCi 2012), but next time, we will do much better. We will try to apply again next year, but we will need a large bunch of new possible tasks to be chosen again.

So if you think you have a task which doesn't require great prior knowledge, and is solvable within two hours by an experienced developer, but also by a 13-18 year old within finite time, feel free to contact us with an outline, or write it directly to the wiki page for Code-In in the NetBSD wiki.

[1 comment]

 

jdf's Summer of Code project


June 27, 2013 posted by Matthew Sporleder

Julian Djamil Fagir wrote a blog post about his GSoC project

As one of five, I've been chosen for participating in Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) this year for NetBSD. My project is to write a binary upgrade tool for NetBSD, optionally with a “live update” functionality.

Why an upgrade tool? – Yes, updating currently is easy. You download the set tarballs from a mirror, unpack the kernel, reboot, unpack the rest, reboot, and done. But this is an exhausting procedure, and you have to know that there are actually updates, and what they affect.

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[0 comments]