NetBSD's Google Summer of Code™ Projects 2013

The following projects have been chosen for Google Summer of Code™ this year (sorted by student's last name):

• Port Linux's drm/kms/gem/i915
• Student: Myron Aub

• System upgrade
• Student: gnrp

• Implement file system flags to scrub data blocks before deletion
• Student: Przemyslaw Sierocinski

• Make NetBSD a supported guest OS under VirtualBox
• Student: Haomai Wang

• Defragmentation for FFS in NetBSD
• Student: Manuel Wiesinger

We hope these students will have an interesting, successful, and also fun summer working with us, heap glory upon their names and do their mentors proud. :)

We thank all students who discussed and submitted proposals; as in every year, slots are limited and we have to let go worthy proposals. [1 comment]

 

World IPv6 Launch

Less than a year ago the Internet Society took leadership in organizing the World IPv6 Day, which was enthusiastically supported by many companies and organizations around the world. And now the world is switching to IPv6 again. This time forever.

Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

The NetBSD Project warmly supports this initiative and is fully ready for the new and shiny IPv6 world.

KAME IPv6 code was merged into NetBSD in June 1999, and is part of NetBSD. Since then, the GENERIC kernel configuration enables IPv6 support by default for most of the architectures (ports). Userland code includes IPv6 support where possible, by default, so no rebuild of userland is necessary even if you switch between an IPv4-only kernel and an IPv4/v6 kernel. The pkgsrc packages collection is also offering IPv6 support for many packages, making it optional where applicable.

Today NetBSD is known as source for a feature-rich mature IPv6 code base, which makes it attractive for networking applications as well as development.

The major Internet resources of the NetBSD Project are directly available via IPv6 through direct names (and have been for years, thanks to our providers). Please visit us at:

http://www.NetBSD.org

http://www.pkgsrc.org

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org, also available as http://ftp.NetBSD.org

ssh://anoncvs.NetBSD.org, also available as pserver://anoncvs.NetBSD.org

http://blog.NetBSD.org

http://wiki.NetBSD.org

Please visit the World IPv6 Launch site at:

http://www.worldipv6launch.org

[2 comments]

 

NetBSD's Google Summer of Code™ Projects 2012

The following projects have been chosen for Google Summer of Code™ this year (sorted by student's last name):

• Socket option to timestamp UDP packets in the kernel
• Student: Vlad Balan

• TLS (HTTPS) support in net/tnftp
• Student: Miklós HOMOLYA

• Port ASan to NetBSD
• Student: steve

• Sysinst enhancements
• Student: Eugene Lozovoy

• HTree directory indexing for Ext3
• Student: Vyacheslav Matyushin

• NAT-PMP and/or UPnP IGD support for NPF; MiniUPnP integration
• Student: Zoltan Arnold Nagy

• NAT64/46 and NPTv6 integration with NPF
• Student: mpp

Students: thanks for your quality proposals. We're looking forward to quality projects. :) We hope you'll have an interesting, successful, and also fun summer working with us. [1 comment]

 

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.

[Read More] [2 comments]

 

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.

[Read More] [1 comment]

 

Core group composition change

The directors of the NetBSD Foundation and the Core group wish to welcome Alan Barrett as new member of the Core group.

He is replacing Antti Kantee; our sincerest thanks to Antti for all his efforts during his core tenure, specially for pushing through the tiered port support model and for making bug bounties a reality.

[0 comments]

 

libcxxrt C++ runtime now available under BSD license

The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C, and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64, and MIPS. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license.

Read the press release for details.

[1 comment]

 

Interview with a NetBSD developer: today, Amitai Schlair, aka schmonz@

A few months after Thomas Klausner's interview, please welcome today Amitai, better known as schmonz@.

NetBSDfr: For those of our readers that don't know you, can you introduce
yourself briefly ?

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Both at school and at home, my
childhood computing skewed Appleward. The exception was Texas
Instruments graphing calculators. By the end of high school, I had a
nearly complete set.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

BSD Day 2010 in Budapest

This year's BSD-Day has been held in Budapest, Hungary at Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Informatics on November 20, 2010.

[Read More] [2 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code 2010 wrap-up report

All six students this year completed their project requirements successfully and on time.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Interview with Thomas Klausner

The last interview, Christos', is almost 08 months old. For the first interview of this year, Thomas Klausner, also know as wiz@, has accepted to answer NetBSDfr team's our questions.

NetBSDfr: For those of our readers that don't know you, can you introduce
yourself ?
wiz: I'm Thomas Klausner. I've been a NetBSD developer for over ten years
now, focusing mostly on pkgsrc and documentation.
I've founded pkgsrc-wip, a project to get more people actively
involved with packaging for pkgsrc, see pkgsrc-wip.sf.net. Everyone
can get an account there and try out packaging for themselves.
I've also found pkgsrc-security, the pkgsrc security team, responsible
for keeping pkgsrc users informed about security problems with
packages; and pkg-bug-handler, the team responsible for managing incoming
problem reports.

NetBSDfr: How did you discover NetBSD ? How long have you been using it ?
wiz: Friends of mine pointed it out to me; I tried it out, and on the
second try (when one of them helped me setting it up ;) ) stuck with
it. That was around 1998/1999.

NetBSDfr: How did you become a NetBSD developer ?
wiz:I started using pkgsrc and found some problems, or new versions of
packages, about which I sent problem reports. After enough of those,
Hubert Feyrer preferred me to commit them myself :)

NetBSDfr:Do you have an idea of the time you spend working
on the NetBSD project daily, weekly, monthly ?
wiz:It varies quite a bit. Sometimes it's half days at a time, sometimes I
don't get to work actively on it for a few weeks. There were periods
when I spent most of my waking hours on it; nowadays I'd guess about
an hour a day, on average.

NetBSDfr:Can you explain us the role of pkgsrc-pmc, and your role in this
organisation ?
wiz:
I'm a member of the pkgsrc-pmc, the Project Management Committee for
pkgsrc. It currently consists of Alistair Crooks, our fearless leader,
Dieter Baron, Amitai Schlair and myself.

The point of the PMC is to decide in technical issues, when consent
cannot be achieved by the pkgsrc developers, and to handle the pkgsrc
freeze.

NetBSDfr:Can you tell us what lead to the decision of creating the
-wip repository ? Do you have any statistics about the number of
package, overall quality.. ?
wiz:There were two main ideas for creating pkgsrc-wip.
One was that there was no place to collaborate on incomplete packages,
e.g. packages where most of the work was done, but some final steps
were missing, or build problems I couldn't fix where I hoped someone
else could continue instead of starting from scratch.
The other one was to get more people actively involved with pkgsrc.
The barrier for becoming a NetBSD developer is quite high, usually,
and if you just want to work on a few packages, you normally won't
reach it. In pkgsrc-wip you can get access by just sending email to me
with your sourceforge username and can get working on packages right
away; also, your work will be immediately and easily available for
other people.

NetBSDfr:What are the criterion that make a package move from -wip to pkgsrc ?
Who makes the decision ?
wiz:Mainly that it works, passes pkglint and a review by an experienced
developer.
Requests for reviews should be sent to the pkgsrc-wip-review mailing
list. There's no formal procedure in place, so the import step happens
when a developer becomes interested enough in the package.

NetBSDfr:In your professional environment, do you work with
NetBSD ?
wiz:Sadly not. I use it as my main desktop at home though.

NetBSDfr:As a conclusion, can you tell us how you do foresee NetBSD's future ?
wiz:I'm not very good with this kind of questions :)
I see NetBSD as a very high quality operating system with great and
motivated developers, and I think that this is very good base for the
future :)

[1 comment]

 

Six NetBSD projects choosen for Google Summer of Code 2010

Google's Summer of Code project is intended to involve students in Open Source projects, and we are proud that the following projects are selected for this summer:

[Read More] [0 comments]