Interview with Adam Hamsik

After our first interview with NetBSD-5.0 release engineer Soren Jacobsen, it is now Adam Hamsik's turn to be interviewed by NetBSDfr.

Adam is known for his work on porting LVM tools to NetBSD, and for porting ZFS as part of this year's Google Summer of Code.

[Read More] [2 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code: Display control and Acceleration

Almost all modern display hardware feature various screen resolutions and some form of 2D hardware acceleration - usually as a "bitblit" function to move pixel data around video memory while the processor does something else. Unfortunately the only facility that can make use of this on NetBSD is X, and even then through it's own device drivers. Other popular operating systems (ie linux) feature accelerated framebuffer consoles and kernel display mode setting, as well as numerous display managers for embedded systems that use hardware acceleration (for example Qt/Embedded or DirectFB).

This project is to create a device independent framework to work with wscons, providing kernel mode setting, accelerated framebuffer console support, and allowing userland applications to use 2D acceleration features. More information about this can be found on the project web page

[Read More] [2 comments]

 

NetBSD gets getdelim(3) and getline(3)

Last night I added getdelim(3) and getline(3) to NetBSD.

A few programs in base system needed to be changed due to having their own getline function, most of which aren't anything like getline(3). Hopefully there won't be much fallout in pkgsrc as a result.

getline(3) is prefered over over functions such as fgetln(3) and fgets(3) because it's standards based and you get a dynamic buffer for really really long lines. However, POSIX did drop the ball on making it a standard from the GNU extension - it should return 0 on EOF and more importantly be called fgetline. Oh well.

I shall be rolling getline(3) support into dhcpcd later, but I'll have to do a link test in the Makefile to see if we can use it. I'm unsure if I want to have a mini configure for dhcpcd or to keep using just make extensions ....

[0 comments]

 

Announcing EuroBSDcon 2009

EuroBSDcon 2009
Friday 18th - Sunday 20th September,
University of Cambridge, UK

A day of tutorials followed by 2 days of conference talks covering a wide variety of BSD related topics. This is the European BSD Community's annual event to meet, share and interact across the projects and between friends.

This year's line up features...

• ISC and *BSD
• OpenBSD malloc
• How FreeBSD finds oil
• NetBSD's LVM
• faster packets in OpenBSD
• Wireless Mesh networks
• Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Guide

... and more. The full talk list and schedule: http://2009.euroBSDcon.org

Discounted Early Bird registration runs until 2nd September. Book your place now at http://2009.euroBSDcon.org

Final programme may be subject to alteration. EuroBSDcon is a not for profit event open to everyone so please help spread the word online and offline.

If you're interested to read this far, you can sign up for future announcements about EuroBSDcons by sending an email to eurobsdcon-announce-subscribe@lists.ukuug.org . Your address will only be used to contact you about European BSD events.

EuroBSDcon 2009 : September 18-20th, Cambridge, England.
http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/

[1 comment]

 

UDF enhancements (read-write CD/DVD file system)

UDF is a full read-write operating system independent file system to be used on CD and DVD media but also very usable on `flash media'. See the OSTA website and Wikipedia for a more in depth overview. A read-only version made it to NetBSD-4.0 and a full read-write version made it to NetBSD-5.0

Recent enhancements to UDF available in NetBSD-current and pulled up to netbsd-5 are

Accurate disc space calculation that won't allow overfilling discs that could previously panic the machine.

Rewritten read-modify-write backend.

Significant reduction of system time spend when encountering huge numbers of nodes.

[0 comments]

 

New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-008 and NetBSD-2009-009 (concerning OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories were published concerning OpenSSL:

• NetBSD-SA2009-008 OpenSSL ASN1 parsing denial of service and CMS signature verification weakness
• NetBSD-SA2009-009 OpenSSL DTLS Memory Exhaustion and DSA signature verification vulnerabilities

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

[0 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code zfs-port project status update 2

ZFS as whole has 2 major parts the first one is ZVOL and the second one is ZPL. In my first status update I said that I had ported ZVOL layer to NetBSD, and I was able to create and use ZFS Zpools and Zvols (Logical partitions exported from one disk storage pool called zpool).

Over the last few weeks I have worked on a ZPL port. ZPL is ZFS file system layer. I have ported zfs_vfsops.c file and zfs_vnops.c file to NetBSD. Today I have ZFS to state where I can mount ZFS data set, copy whole kernel source tree there and finally build NetBSD kernel on it.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code: GPT bootloader

The GUID Partition Table is a new standard for disk partitioning. The GPT layout provides a set of advanced partitioning features including, but not limited to:

• modern logical block addressing (LBA)
• 64-bit LBA pointers, allowing partitions up to 8 Zbytes in size, and even bigger
• suitable for disks with sector size, other than 512 bytes
• by default up to 128 partitions per disk
• backup partition table.

The NetBSD already has support for GPT disks via dkwedges, but can't boot off a GPT partitioned disk. My GSoC project is to implement a GPT aware bootloader for the NetBSD operating system by extending its existing MBR/disklabel BIOS-based multistaged kernel loader.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-005 through NetBSD-2009-007

Three new security advisories were published, covering OpenSSH, ntpd, ntpq and hack:

• NetBSD-SA2009-005 Plaintext Recovery Attack Against SSH
• NetBSD-SA2009-006 Buffer overflows in ntp
• NetBSD-SA2009-007 Buffer overflows in hack(6)

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

[0 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code: Improve and Extend resize_ffs

The utility resize_ffs is a program intended to resize Berkeley Fast File Systems (FFS) by either growing or shrinking them. This filesystem is the standard filesystem for the NetBSD operating system -- a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

USENIX 2009 - Rump File Systems: Kernel Code Reborn

At USENIX 2009 I talked about rump file systems. The paper (html) and slides are available. Additionally, USENIX members can view a video of the presentation.

[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code: Efficient wide character regular expressions

During this year’s Google Summer of Code I’m improving the performance of NetBSD’s regular expression library and add support to it for wide characters.

We made good progress and I’m glad that I can announce that tre is very likely to replace the regular expression code in libc

[Read More] [0 comments]