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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Preliminary PROM function based framebuffer text console support

After ~12 years since initial import, finally I've comitted working framebuffer console support using PROM functions. It was demonstrated on NetBSD booth at Open Source Conference Kansai @ Kyoto back in July, with the resurrected OMRON LUNA. See an announcement on port-news68k mailing list for details. [0 comments]

 

(sandpoint) Altboot enhancements

Altboot V1.8 supports new IDE devices (VT6410, IT821x) and NAS hardware (Iomega). A critical bug was fixed and some new debugging features were included. [0 comments]

 

Completion of LUNA-II support

After ~12 years since initial import, finally we have got NetBSD/luna68k working on 68040 based LUNA-II. The working LUNA-II was demonstrated on NetBSD booth at Kansai Open Source 2011. See an event driven commit log for details. [0 comments]

 

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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FastATA 1200 driver

FastATA 1200 Mk-III/Mk-IV EIDE controllers from ELBOX Computer are now supported by the new efa(4) driver. [0 comments]

 

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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An X68030 day

Three X68030s (including one with 060turbo accelerator) running NetBSD/x68k on NetBSD booth at Open Source Conference 2011 Hiroshima. See pictures on Togetter for details. [0 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.

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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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Prometheus PCI driver

The Prometheus PCI bridge is now supported by mppb(4) driver. It is theoretically possible to use all non-DMA cards supported by MI PCI drivers. [0 comments]

 

PCI bus support (amiga)

Basic support for PCI bus was commited in -current, along with the driver for Phase5 PCI bridge, present on CyberVision PPC and BlizzardVision PPC cards. [0 comments]