terminfo has replaced termcap

NetBSD-6 will now sport the terminfo interface which removes a lot of the problems with the old termcap which is deprecated by The Open Group. Upgrading existing systems should be quite painless as the old termcap interface is still provided, but there are some caveats.

• $TERMCAP is no longer supported, tset -s no longer exports it. So if you maintain your own terminal definition, you'll need to use tic(1) on a small terminfo database in $HOME.
• NetBSD extensions to termcap are no longer supported. Only 3rd party applications that used these would be affected.

This should allow pkgsrc not to need ncurses for a fair few console applications, like say tmux.

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first boot into multiuser (amigappc)

For the first time an A3000 with Cyberstorm/PPC booted the current powerpc userland from a hard disk connected to the A3000 internal SCSI into multi user mode. [0 comments]

 

New package security checks

The pkgsrc tools have had, for a long time, the ability to validate the installed packages against a database of known vulnerabilities. We have encouraged administrators to add the proper commands to their crontabs to refresh the database and to run the package auditing command. But... the package tools are shipped with the system, and we ship a crontab for root... we could do better then, could we?

As of now, the /etc/daily script, which is part of the default root crontab, will refresh the vulnerabilities database. And the /etc/security script, executed by /etc/daily, will run the vulnerability and integrity checks provided by pkg_admin. The result is that you will get all the package auditing checks out of the box as soon as you start installing packages on a NetBSD system!

All of these settings are, of course, tunable through /etc/daily.conf and /etc/security.conf, and they will only run if they detect any installed packages.

[3 comments]

 

Kernel modules for macppc and shark

As of past night, the macppc and shark ports have support for the new-style kernel modules. I've added support for these through a workaround in the build system, which makes the compiler generate long jumps for all calls in the code, avoiding unsupported ELF relocation types. This allows us to use the modules even if the kernel-level loader is not able to deal with such relocations. The kernel-level support is now enabled by default in macppc and shark GENERIC kernels.

We'll need to revisit this in the future and implement real support for dealing with those relocation types. Why? The modules built with this flag are slower than they should be... but at least they do work.

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New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-001 (Module autoloading) and NetBSD-SA2010-002 (OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories have been released, affecting the NetBSD kernel file system module autoloader and OpenSSL.

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NetBSD LVM enabled by default

Next release of NetBSD has received major push on storage front today, because Logical Volume Manager was enabled in current NetBSD. LVM support was committed in -current for a long time now but it was disabled by default. Today I have set MKLVM variable to yes by default which means that LVM will by included in all builds from now.

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(shark) Accelerated X support

As announced by Michael Lorenz on the NetBSD blog, the shark port recently grew better support for X. Among other things, this means it is now possible to generate an X config file by running X -configure. For full details, see Michael's blog entry. [0 comments]

 

Hardware accelerated Xorg on Shark is back

Hardware accelerated X for Rev. 4 Sharks using the xf86-video-chips driver has been around for a while but Rev. 5 Sharks were stuck with a dumb framebuffer driver. This has changed, a few days ago I committed an Xorg driver for the IGS CyberPro 2010 graphics controller found in Rev. 5 Sharks.
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Interview with Christos Zoulas

In September this year, Guillaume Lasmayous spent 5 weeks in the US where he took the opportunity to meet with some developers from the NetBSD project. On a Saturday afternoon Guillaume met Christos Zoulas to answer a few questions about NetBSD.

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openresolv imported into NetBSD

openresolv has been imported into NetBSD, which allows more than one daemon to update /etc/resolv.conf sanely and configure local nameservers for enhanced DNS, especially if running on a VPN. dhcpcd already uses resolvconf when available and dhclient in NetBSD has been patched to use it.

This is important for NetBSD, as many packages support resolvconf, but only when /sbin/resolvconf exists. This meant that a lot of packages that supported resolvconf, failed to work with any resolvconf implementation from pkgsrc.

PPP users who maintain their own scripts are encouraged to try it out :)

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Quick procedure to run NetBSD/sun2 5.0.1 on TME

A pre-built disk image of NetBSD/sun2 5.0.1 release for TME is available for easy trial of NetBSD/sun2 on the machine emulator using pre-compiled tme binaries on modern machines. See annoucement message for details. [0 comments]

 

OpenGrok for NetBSD

The opengrok code search and cross reference service has been set up and is available at:

http://opengrok.netbsd.org

It contains the NetBSD sources which are updated every three hours.
This service is running on NetBSD-5 using opengrok with openjdk from pkgsrc.

Happy Grokking :)

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