Qt/Embedded @ wscons

Some time ago I finally found a small box of round tuits and ported Qt/Embedded to run on top of wscons. Unfortunately, day job and other things have been sucking most of my time, so after sitting on these patches for almost a month I figured that may be someone out there may be interested enough to pick this up.

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NetBSD@CeBIT 2009

The CeBIT which is the biggest IT-related fair in Europe is currently on in Hannover/Germany. The allBSD Project which was founded to focus on marketing related things for all the different BSDs was able to get a small booth. The booth is showing a Xen 3 showcase based on NetBSD and provides informational material to the visitors of the fair. I joined them for one and a half days at the booth and tried to answer all the questions. All the reactions from the visitors show that there is an interest in the BSD based operating systems.

One thing which seems to be very important in these days are small flyers which can be taken by the visitors. We need to create more informational material, anyone who is willing to contribute is a great help.

CeBIT will close its doors on Sunday 8 March 2009, make sure to visit the BSD booth in Hall 6, F50.

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German Perlworkshop and a NetBSD related presentation

I attended the German Perlworkshop from 25th February to 27th February in Frankfurt. The German Perlworkshop follows the tradition of the YAPC conferences. It's listed on their webpage, however the name has been changed to represent the German localisation.

I gave two presentations about the different usage of Perl, one was related to the NetBSD project. I maintain quite a lot of Perl packages inside the pkgsrc repository and run our Perl package update list, too. As I encounter frequent problems with our Perl modules, like missing ChangeLogs, incorrect version numbering for pkgsrc, broken dependencies, etc I decided to give a talk about these problems. It's called "Maintaining the be*st" and it deals with some of the different aspects in maintaining Perl packages for pkgsrc. I translated the slides to English, so all the English readers of this blog are able to read them. The audio recording was done during the presentation, however, it is in German.

• Maintaining the best (German|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (English|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~21mb)
• Reverse Testing (German|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (English|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~9mb)

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dhcpcd-gtk now in pkgsrc

After slaving away with more GTK+ learning, I've finished a promising new dialog for dhcpcd-gtk.

I've also spent a lot of time polishing it with nicer icons, messages and titles. Unlike the previous version, this dialog works fully! It's looking so good, I've just released dhcpcd-gtk into pkgsrc for your pleasure - enjoy :)

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i386 PAE domain0 support

Missing pieces for a domain0 kernel supporting the i386 PAE extensions has been added to current. A new kernel XEN3PAE_DOM0 should show up in the next HEAD autobuild. This kernel can be used with a i386 PAE or x86_64 hypervisor. The sysutils/xenkernel3 and sysutils/xenkernel33 packages for i386 both provide i386 PAE hypervisor kernels. [0 comments]

 

Xen3 PCI pass-through

PCI pass-through support has been added for both domain0 and domU. domain0 kernel gets a pciback PCI drivers, to which device specified in the pciback.hide boot parameter will attach. DomU kernels gets a xpci device, to which pci busses will attach. More details in the NetBSD/xen Howto. [0 comments]

 

EuroBSDCon 2009

Since 2001 the yearly European BSD Conference provides a great opportunity to present new ideas and meet developers of all BSD projects. This year's European BSD conference takes place in Cambridge, UK.

If you have a paper that you would like to present at the conference or an idea for a tutorial please let the program committee know as the conference cannot succeed without your contributions.

In addition Stephen Borrill is organising a NetBSD developer summit in Cambridge before the EuroBSDCon.

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WAPBL fixes committed to NetBSD-current

Andrew Doran has committed some fixes which address a number of problems with the logging feature of the fast file system. Logging provides for very fast updates of file system control data, and removes the need to check file systems after a system outage. The full details can be found in Andrew's commit message.

Fixing these aspects of logging is one of the last remaining tasks to be done before the release of 5.0, and so these changes by Andrew bring that event a bit closer - the next stage is for them to be pulled up to the NetBSD-5 branch within the source code repository.

We're very excited to finally ship logging for FFS. For many applications it enables better performance and stronger atomicity guarantees. Additionally, avoiding file system checks is of real importance for servers and embedded systems, where delays in restarting the system cannot be tolerated.

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Soft dependencies removed

Removal of the soft dependencies feature of the fast file system (FFS) was today completed by Andrew Doran. It was announced in a mail and discussed several times at the NetBSD mailing lists.

Soft dependencies will continue to be available in NetBSD 5.0. From 6.0 onwards the preferred method of maintaining integrity and achieving optimal performance with fast file systems is logging (WAPBL).

The file system format is upwards compatible: existing systems will continue to operate with no configuration changes, and migration to logging will be a simple matter of changing /etc/fstab.

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LVM2 tools update

LVM2 tools and libdevmapper library in the base system have been updated to version 2.02.44 for lvm2 tools and 1.02.31 for libdevmapper lib. LVM2 tools are part of NetBSD logical volume management subsystem.

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Introducing dhcpcd-dbus and dhcpcd-gtk

So one of the highlights of NetBSD-5 is dhcpcd-4, a light weight alternative to the venerable ISC dhclient. dhcpcd-5 is nearing completion and will be rolled into NetBSD -current soon after NetBSD-5 is released. Some of the new features in dhcpcd-5 include the ability to manage more than one interface, listen and act on kernel events (such as adding a new interface or the link going up and down) and a control socket so other application can hook into dhcpcd. One such application is dhcpcd-dbus.

The goal of dhcpcd-dbus is to provide a DBus interface to dhcpcd. It also provides a DBus interface to wpa_supplicant because the base install in NetBSD does not support DBus. DBus allows other applications to trivially hook into dhcpcd. One such application is dhcpcd-gtk.

The goal of dhcpcd-gtk is to show the user the state of dhcpcd via a systray icon and to provide a GUI which allows the configuration of dhcpcd. It will also show a list of wireless access points in range and allow you to configure a WEP or WPA PSK key for each.

Linux has already had this functionality in NetworkManager for some time, but that is very Linux only, depending on libnl and hal. dhcpcd-gtk differs in that it only requires the OS to support dhcpcd (which is much simpler to port than hal). Then it's just a matter of ensuring that the base GNOME libraries work. A KDE/QT or EFL port of dhcpcd-gtk should also be possible.

Anyway, enough natter, here's some screenshots

The menu showing wireless networks is almost complete. The quality bar only shows if the driver reports quality. We need to show history of relative signal strength for the drivers which don't report quality.

The preferences screen is incomplete, but does read the dhcpcd-config correctly. The drop down boxes have configuration blocks for global, interface and ssid, the right hand block showing the interface or ssid in question. It will also have windows to request specific DHCP options and configure static IP, route and DHCP options.

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OpenJDK 7 binaries for NetBSD/i386 5.0

OpenJDK 7 binaries built on NetBSD/i386 5.0 for both the JRE and JDK are now available. Note that you may need to add the -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true parameter to the java command line for IPv4 networking to work properly on an IPv6-enabled kernel such as GENERIC.

jmcneill@endeavour:/export/home/jmcneill/jdk/jdk1.7.0 > ./bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-jmcneill_2009_01_29_15_36-b00)
OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b10, mixed mode)

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