Summer of Code results: GPT-aware boot loader support

Mike Volokhov developed initial support for booting i386 and amd64 systems from GPT-formatted disks on legacy PC BIOS-based systems for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

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Summer of Code Results: XML command-line utilities

This summer I mentored Nhat Minh Lê's project, XML Command-Line Utilities for NetBSD. Here is my summary of the project goals and results.

The main idea of the project was to bring the UNIX text-processing idiom to XML, helping users to employ pipelines, elementary filters, and shell scripts in XML processing tasks.

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Summer of Code results: Efficient Wide-Character Regular Expressions

The 2009 Summer of Code project to implement efficient wide-character regular expressions for NetBSD was carried out by Matthias-Christian Ott, mentored by myself. This blog entry gives an overview of the progress and results of the project.

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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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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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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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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 ....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Google Summer of Code: Improving RAIDframe parity handling

A NetBSD system, in order to tolerate disk failures, can use the software RAID driver raid(4). Currently, if that system is shut down uncleanly (e.g., loses power or crashes), then when it comes back up it will have to check the entire RAID set's redundancy information. This process can take many hours, during which it imposes a substantial load on the system. It is also a distinct disadvantage to using NetBSD in server applications, and the inclusion of a journaling filesystem in NetBSD 5 makes it all the more prominent.

The goal of my Summer of Code project is to shorten that check from hours to minutes.

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