Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current

For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.

In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This post is the third update to the project RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing.

Part1 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls1

Part2 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls

The first and second coding period was entirely dedicated to fuzzing rumpkernel syscalls using hongfuzz. Initially a dumb fuzzer was developed to start fuzzing but it soon reached its limits.

For the duration of second coding peroid we concentrated on crash reproduction and adding grammar to the fuzzer which yielded in better results as we tested on a bug in ioctl with grammar. Although this works for now crash reproduction needs to be improved to generate a working c reproducer.

For the last coding period I have looked into the internals of syzkaller to understand how it pregenerates input and how it mutates data. I have continued to work on integrating buildrump.sh with build.sh. buildrump eases the task fo building the rumpkernel on any host for any target.

buildrump.sh is like a wrapper around build.sh to build the tools and rumpkernel from the source relevant to rumpkernel. So I worked to get buildrump.sh working with netbsd-src. Building the toolchain was successfull from netbsd-src. So binaries like rumpmake work just fine to continue building the rumpkernel.

But the rumpkernel failed to build due to some warnings and errors similar to the following. It can be due to the fact that buildrump.sh has been dormant recently I faced a lot of build issues.

nbmake[2]: nbmake[2]: don't know how to make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/dest.stage/usr/lib/crti.o. Stop

nbmake[2]: stopped in /root/buildrump.sh/src/lib/librumpuser
>> ERROR:
>> make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/Makefile.first dependall

Few of the similar errors were easily fixed but I couldn't integrate it during the time span of the coding period.

To Do

• Research more on grammar definition and look into the existing grammar fuzzers for a better understanding of generating grammar.
• Integrate syz2sys with the existing fuzzer to include grammar generation for better results.

GSoC with NetBSD has been an amazing journey throughout, in which I had a chance to learn from awesome people and work on amazing projects. I will continue to work on the project to achieve the goal of integrating my fuzzer with OSS Fuzz. I thank my mentors Siddharth Muralee, Maciej Grochowski, Christos Zoulas for their support and Kamil for his continuous guidance.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of the test framework of curses. This is the final blog report in a series of blog reports; you can look at the first report and second report of the series.

The first report gives a brief introduction of the project and some insights into the curses testframe through its architecture and language. To someone who wants to contribute to the test suite, this blog can act as the quick guide of how things work internally. Meanwhile, the second report discusses some of the concepts that were quite challenging for me to understand. I wanted to share them with those who may face such a challenge. Both of these reports also cover the progress made in various phases of the Summer of Code.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report and GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report blogs, and describes my progress in the final phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In the third phase, I upgraded to the latest stable version Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) 9.8.0 in pkgsrc-wip, resolved the TODOs and created patches for more test-profiles to fix their installation and runtime errors on NetBSD-current.

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 4)

The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.[Read More] [1 comment]

 

GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment

This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.

You can read the previous post/report here.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report blog and describes my progress in the second phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In this phase, I worked on the automation of the regression suite made using Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and its integration with Anita.

The automation framework consists of two components Phoromatic server, provided by Phoronix Test Suite in pkgsrc, and Anita, a Python tool for automating NetBSD installation.

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GSoC 2020 Second Evaluation Report: Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of test framework of curses library. This blog report is second in series of blog reports; you can have a look at the first report. This report would cover the progress made in second coding phase along with providing some insights into the libcurses.

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GSoC Reports: Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls, Part 2

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

I have been working on Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls. This blogpost details the work I have done during my second coding period.

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GSoC Reports: Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 2

This report was prepared by Ayushi Sharma as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

As a part of Google summer code 2020, I have been working on Enhance the Syzkaller support for NetBSD. This post summarises the work done in the past month.

For work done in the first coding period, you can take a look at the previous post.

Automation for enhancement

With an aim of increasing the number of syscalls fuzzed, we have decided to automate the addition of descriptions for syscalls as well as ioctl device drivers in a customised way for NetBSD.

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 3)

The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves developing an automated regression and performance test framework for NetBSD that offers reproducible benchmarking results with detailed history and logs across various hardware & architectures.

To achieve this performance testing framework, I am using the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) which is an open-source, cross-platform automated testing/benchmarking software for Linux, Windows and BSD environments. It allows the creation of new tests using simple XML files and shell scripts and integrates with revision control systems for per-commit regression testing.

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