Interview with Alistair G. Crooks

Our fourth edition of the "discussions with a NetBSD developer" series is a very special one, as we had the chance to talk to Alistair G. Crooks, president of The NetBSD Foundation.

Alistair gave us a historical point of view some of you might be unaware of, explaining "The NetBSD way" while telling us what is his analysis of NetBSD's status today and what he thinks about its future. A must read.

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The state of accelerated graphics on NetBSD/sparc

Now that NetBSD/sparc switched to wscons in -current it can finally run the Xorg Xserver out of the box. This means we will support accelerated graphics in X and the kernel console on a lot more hardware than before with Xsun and friends, many with acceleration and in 24 bit colour if the hardware supports it.

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Postfix 2.6.5 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.6.5, the latest stable version of the popular mail transport agent, was imported into NetBSD-current today. The following bugs have been fixed since version 2.6.2:

• The Postfix Milter client got out of step with a Milter application after the application sent a "quarantine" request at end-of-message time. The Milter application would still be in the end-of-message state, while Postfix would already be working on the next SMTP event, typically, QUIT or MAIL FROM. In the latter case, Milter responses for the previously-received email message would be applied towards the next MAIL FROM transaction. This problem was diagnosed with help from Alban Deniz.
• The Postfix SMTP server would abort with an "unexpected lookup table" error when an SMTPD policy server was mis-configured in a particular way.

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FOSSLC's debate with David Maxwell

On 31 August 2009 our very own David Maxwell is taking part in the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre's debate 'Which open source license is best?'. Obviously, David is advocating for the BSD License. His opponents are Mike Milinkovich (for EPL License) and Matt Asay (for GPL License).

FOSSLC are allowing the public to participate in the event by either posing their own questions or voting on those already listed. For more information see http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=9faeb&t=94b79.

You can show your support by registering to either attend on the day or view the webcast stream.

For more information see the FOSSLC website.

Good luck David!

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Support for Keylocks, an Experimental Feature

Recently, generic support for electro-mechanical multi-position keylocks in the kernel has been added to NetBSD. Such locks can be turned into various positions, usually up to three or four position. They come with a set of keys that are different in so far as not all positions can be reached will all keys (which key can go up to which position is called the "locking program"). With the new keylock support, such locks can be used to tinker with the kernel security, much like the traditional securelevel variable...

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Interview with S.P. Zeidler

Here's the third edition of the "discussions with a NetBSD developer" series. This time, we had the chance to talk to S.P. Zeidler, admin and member of pkgsrc-releng.

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The NetBSD Blog now available via HTTPS

The NetBSD blog is now available via HTTPS as well as the non-encrypted HTTP protocol.

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Announcing NetBSD 5.0.1

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0.1 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

Please note that due to changes in pkg_install, users upgrading from previous releases are strongly encouraged to run "pkg_admin rebuild" after the upgrade is complete.

For full details, please see the 5.0.1 release notes.

To download 5.0.1, head over to http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

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Google Summer of Code: Miniaturise NetBSD

NetBSD has a reputation for being somewhat minimalist, and it is widely used in embedded systems. The high level concepts behind miniaturising an operating system are quite straight forward and well understood. This project aims to provide NetBSD with an integrated system for constructing embedded systems so that system developers can get on with the job of implementing their application specific features.

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New security advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-011 through NetBSD-SA2009-013

Three new security advisories have been released, affecting ISC dhcpd, ISC bind and the NetBSD libc SHA2 implementation.

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GPIO Revisited

NetBSD has had support for General Purpose Input/Output devices since the 4.0 release, when the GPIO framework from OpenBSD 3.6 was imported. GPIO devices, or gpios for short, provide an easy way to interface electronic circuits which can be as simple as a LED or that provide more complex functionality like a 1-Wire or I2C bus.

Since the import of the GPIO framework into NetBSD, I have reworked larger parts of that subsystem in OpenBSD to address some problems and drawbacks. I have now imported these changes into NetBSD and continued to improve on them. The new GPIO framework retains backwards compatibility while adding new features; integrates with the kauth(9) security framework, and has it's own config file format gpio.conf(5) and integrates with system startup scripts in /etc/rc.d.

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New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-010 ISC dhclient subnet-mask flag stack overflow

One new security advisory was published:

• NetBSD-SA2009-010 ISC dhclient subnet-mask flag stack overflow

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

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