PAE support for native i386

With kernel revision 5.99.37, the options(4) PAE was added to native i386. It is currently disabled by default.

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Google Summer of Code project Implementing HTTP support for libsa

Zoltan Arnold NAGY has been busy coding away on his project to add support for booting over HTTP to libsa. Early on in his work he found that the current libsa PXE support used the UDP support functions in the PXE ROM which is unsuitable for HTTP as this requires a TCP transport. Zoltan has written a net_if driver for libsa that uses the PXE UNDI functions to allows both UDP and TCP network packets to be sent. Using the new net_if he was able to boot a kernel using tftp which proved that the basic networking functions were working correctly.

Once the underlying network layer was available Zoltan moved on to the primary aim of the project, booting over HTTP. He has made good progress on this and reports that he can boot a kernel three out of four times via HTTP, clearly one of the goals for the remainder of the Summer of Code is to get this to a 100% hit rate for booting.

There is still a fair bit of work to be done but I believe that Zoltan is on track to providing a useful factility to libsa. Zoltan posted a link to his patches in a posting to the tech-net mailing list

[1 comment]

 

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]

 

Testing NetBSD: Easy Does It

It requires only one command to run the NetBSD test suite on a fresh installation or to check if code changes have caused regressions. This article explains why and how, and looks into the ATF and Anita tools which make testing so easy everyone should be doing it.

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Changed charter to focus on NAS products

The primary hardware platform is now consumer NAS systems, running on Freescale MPC8241 and MPC8245 CPUs. Initially the KuroBox/Linkstation and the Synology product family is known to work. QNAP TS and Iomega StorCenter support is prepared, but untested. Read also the official announcement on port-sandpoint. [0 comments]

 

Postfix 2.7.1 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.7.1 was imported into NetBSD-current today. The major changes since Postfix 2.6.6 are:

• Improved before-queue content filter performance. With smtpd_proxy_options = speed_adjust, the Postfix SMTP server receives the entire message before it connects to a before-queue content filter. Typically, this allows Postfix to handle the same mail load with fewer content filter processes.
• Improved address verification performance. The verify database is now persistent by default, and it is automatically cleaned periodically. Under overload conditions, the Postfix SMTP server no longer waits up to 6 seconds for an address probe to complete.
• Support for reputation management based on the local SMTP client IP address. This is typically implemented with FILTER transportname: actions in access maps or header/body checks, and mail delivery transports in master.cf with unique smtp_bind_address values.

[0 comments]

 

EuroBSDCon 2010 - Call for Papers

The following information was received from the organisers of EuroBSDCon 2010.

This year the 9th European BSD Conference will be held on October 8 - 10, 2010 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

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NetBSD 5.1_RC3

The third (and hopefully final) release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC3/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC3 tag is available as well.

See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC2 to RC3.

Please help us test this release candidate as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment. That said, we hope your feedback is positive, as we would like this to be the final release candidate before 5.1.

Enjoy!

[7 comments]

 

pkgsrcCon 2010 - More Than pkgsrc

pkgsrcCon 2010, the technical conference for people working on pkgsrc, took place may 28 - 30 at the Departement Informatik, University of Basel, Switzerland. Packed with interesting talks and in-depth discussions about the matter, the confence was a great success.

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Portable C Compiler

After reading about progress with the Portable C Compiler (PCC) last year, I was inspired to try building it on NetBSD. Gregory McGarry had done some work integrating it into the toolchain though it is not yet useable to build a full release, but the native build framework in external/bsd/pcc was incomplete.

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NetBSD 5.1_RC2

The second release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC2/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC2 tag is available as well.

See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC1 to RC2.

Please help us test this and any upcoming release candidates as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment.

Enjoy!

[3 comments]

 

NetBSD 5.1_RC1 available

The first release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC1/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC1 tag is available as well.

There have been quite a lot of changes since 5.0. See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the full list, or your platform's INSTALL notes for a summary.

Please help us test this and any upcoming release candidates as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment.

Enjoy!

[4 comments]