NetBSD 10.0 RC1 available!

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release anouncement for details.

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FOSDEM 2023

FOSDEM took place last week-end, as an offline-first event again for the first time since 2020. It was located as usual at the university campus of the ULB in Brussels. It was packed with developers, users, passionate and professionals of Open Source software, and while NetBSD did not have a booth this year, its presence could be felt on Saturday morning at the BSD DevRoom.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Reproducible Builds Summit Venice 2022

The sixth Reproducible Builds Summit took place exactly two months ago in Venice, Italy. These three days of workshops were filled with a succession of interactive sessions, where everyone attending had the opportunity to present or learn about anything related to Build Reproducibility. This included the status of specific Open Source projects, techniques to locate, analyse, and understand issues, or also how to explain and communicate better around this topic.

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NetBSD 10.0 BETA available

After nearly 3 whole years of development (work started on NetBSD 10 in late 2019), BETA snapshots have finally been published for interested users to test. More changes will be backported from the development branch over the next few months before we tag a final release, so the BETA images will keep getting updated.

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NetBSD Arm on Oracle Cloud

Support for running NetBSD on Oracle Cloud Arm-Based Compute Instances has been added to NetBSD -current.

A build of NetBSD/evbarm64 after 2022-10-15 will generate a bootable image (arm64.img.gz) that can be converted to a Custom Image that can run on Oracle Cloud. See full post for details.

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The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like

I recently had to replace my oldish WS2300 weather station, which was connected via a long serial cable (running from my kitchen to the machine room in the basement) with a modern device, a WS3500. This now connects to my wifi network and logs data to a postgres server running on a tiny aarch64 SoC, which also provides a website to query the data.

This all was done with minimal base systems means, plus very few additional pkgs from pkgsrc: in my case the postgres server, obviously, (or at least databases/postgresql14-client, if a postgres server already runs somewhere) and misc/sunwait used for a few site related calculations I found interesting to display. The only other suprising component used is pom(6) from the games set, used to calculate the phase of moon. The weather station displays this on its console, but it is not part of the reported weather data - but easy to recalculate.

Part of this work was to analyze details of the ecowitt or the weather underground protocol and extracting data from it.

The other part was creating two websites that display the current weather or some parts of the weather history.

For the two last parts I took inspiration from previous work done on this by others, and overall it turned out to be straight forward.

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EuroBSDCon 2022

After two years of trying, we managed to have a EuroBSDCon in Vienna. Here's how it went...

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NetBSD 9.3 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.3, the third release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.2 in May 2021, as well some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.2 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade.

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Announcing Google Summer of Code 2022 projects

The NetBSD Foundation has finalized the list of projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code. The contributors and projects are the following:

• Brian Schnepp - Raspberry Pi GPU Driver
• Arjun Bemarkar - inetd enhancements
• Piyush Sachdeva - Emulating missing linux syscalls
• Vihas Makwana - Introduce a new Wi-Fi driver
• Vivek Kumar Sah - Automating donor acknowledgement and information storage

The community bonding period has already started (from May 20) and it will last until June 12. During this time, the contributors are expected to coordinate with their mentors and community.

This will be immediately followed by the coding period from June 13 to September 4. After which, the contributors are expected to submit their final work, evaluate their mentors, and get evaluated by their mentors as well. Results will be announced on September 20.

For more information about the Google Summer of Code 2022 kindly refer to the official GSoC website.

We would like to express our gratitude to Google for organizing the yearly GSoC, and to The NetBSD Foundation mentors and administrators for their efforts and hardwork!

Let us welcome all the contributors to our growing NetBSD community!

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The NetBSD Foundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Fundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022!

Would you like to contribute to NetBSD or pkgsrc during the summer? Please give a look to NetBSD wiki Google Summer of Code page with possible ideas list and/or please join #NetBSD-code IRC channel on libera or get in touch with us via mailing lists to propose new projects!

Please note that unlike past years where Google Summer of Code was opened only to university students since this year if you are 18 or older you can be a GSoC contributor.

For more information about Google Summer of Code please give a look to the official GSoC website.

Looking forward to have a nice Google Summer of Code!

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Making RockPro64 a NetBSD Server

The time has come to upgrade my SunBlade 2500s to something more power friendly and faster. I'd already removed one CPU and thus half the ram from two of these systems to reduce their power consumption, but it's still much higher than it could be.

After much searching, I've decided on Pine64's RockPro64 4GiB ram model (technically, only 3.875GiB ram.) Pine64 make SBCs, laptops, phones, and various other mostly ARM gadgets, and the RockPro64 has the fastest CPU they ship (Rockchip RK3399), and can use a small "NAS Case", that is sufficient to house 2 HDDs and, at a stretch, upto 6 SSDs (cooling would become quite an issue at this point.)

In my SATA setup, I have 3 SSDs with a JMicron 585 card in the PCIe slot, two SSDs in the NAS case SSD region, and the third is in the HDD region with an adapter. I have used two SATA power splitters to convert the NAS case's 2 SATA power ports into 4, with the 4th one also powering a Noctua case fan. The cabling is not great with this, with enough SATA power cabling for 6 devices to lay. Probably a bespoke power cable to connect to the RockPro64 would make this nicer and probably improve cooling slightly, but I'm just using off-the-shelf components for now.

In the last year or so I've been working on making NetBSD/arm64 big-endian more featureful. In particular, I've added support for:

• other-endian access disklabels, FFS file-systems in the NetBSD libsa
• the "look 64 sectors later" for RAIDFrame partitions in MI efiboot (the x86 specific efiboot has more extensive support for this that should be ported over)
• other-endian access to RAIDFrame labels in the kernel
• updated the U-Boot package and featureset to include AHCI/SATA support, workaround some bugs and fix the newer U-Boot SPI loader location, and figured out how to default loading from either SATA or NVMe

There are not too many special actions needed for this sort of setup compared to a normal NetBSD or Arm system. While I built my installations by hand, the standard NetBSD Arm images are suitable for this task. It's easiest to start from an SD card with the RockPro64 u-boot installed. There are two U-Boot images available, one for SD/eMMC, and one for SPI (there is an odd problem with the early SPI loader that requires a portion of the image to be different.) The pkgsrc package for sysutils/u-boot-rockpro64 version 2022.01 has these suggested methods for installing the U-Boot image (this package should be buildable on any supported pkgsrc platform).

To install U-Boot into the SD/eMMC card (can run on any system, the image must be written at 32KiB into the device):

# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rksd_loader.img seek=64 of=/dev/rld0c

To install U-Boot into the SPI flash (must be run on the host, and lives at the very start of the device:

# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rkspi_loader.img bs=64k of=/dev/spiflash0

When booting from NVMe or SATA, one must drop to the U-Boot prompt and adjust the "boot_targets" value to put scsi* (SATA) or nvme* ahead of the mmc* and usb* options.

The original value for me:

=> printenv boot_targets
boot_targets=mmc1 usb0 mmc0 nvme0 scsi0 pxe dhcp sf0

Which is then adjusted and saved with eg:

=> setenv boot_targets nvme0 scsi0 mmc1 usb0 mmc0 pxe dhcp sf0
=> saveenv
Saving Environment to SPIFlash... Erasing SPI flash...Writing to SPI flash...done
OK

(In this list, mmc1 is the SD slot, mmc0 is the eMMC card, pxe and dhcp are netbooting, and sf0 attempts to load further U-Boot scripts from SPI.)

There are some minor issues with the RockPro64. It has no ability to use ECC memory. It only comes with 1 PCIe 4x slot, and Rockchip errata limited this to PCIe 1.x (though no NetBSD users encounted any issues with PCIe 2.x enabled, and this can be forced back on via a DTS patch.) It is possible to use a PCIe bridge (I have never done this, though I would like to try in the future) to enable more devices for booting, or to enable both a network and storage device.

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Project Report: Add support for chdir(2) support in posix_spawn(3)

Piyush Sachdeva finished the "add chdir support to posix_spawn(3)" project and reports about his work and experience. His code is already in -current and will be part of NetBSD 10.

Originally submitted as a proposal for GSoC, but unfortunately (due to low slot allocations) this project was not part of GSoC.

The NetBSD Foundation decided to nevertheless run the project and funded it.

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