The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2026!

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2026!

Would you like to learn how to contribute to open source? Google Summer of Code is a great chance to contribute to NetBSD and/or pkgsrc!

You can find a list of possible projects at Google Summer of Code project page. Please do not limit yourself to the project list... If have any cool idea/project about NetBSD and/or pkgsrc please also propose your one!

Please reach us via #netbsd-code IRC channel on Libera.Chat and/or via mailing lists.

If you are more interested about Google Summer of Code, please also check the homepage at g.co/gsoc.

Looking forward to a great Summer!

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Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD

This report was written by Vasyl Lanko as part of Google Summer of Code 2025.

As of the time of writing, there is no real sandboxing technique available to NetBSD. There is chroot, which can be considered a weak sandbox because it modifies the root directory of the process, effectively restricting the process' view of the file system, but it doesn't isolate anything else, so all networking, IPC, and mounts inside this restricted file system are the same as of the system, and are accessible.

There has already been some research on implementing kernel-level isolation in NetBSD with tools like gaols, mult and netbsd-sandbox, but they haven't been merged to NetBSD. Other operating systems have their own ways to isolate programs, FreeBSD has jails, and Linux has namespaces.

The goal of this project is to bring a new way of sandboxing to NetBSD. More specifically, we want to implement a mechanism like Linux namespaces. These namespaces allow the isolation of parts of the system from a namespace, or, as the user sees it, from an application.

NetBSD has compat_linux to run Linux binaries on NetBSD systems, and the implementation of namespaces can also be utilized to emulate namespace-related functionality of Linux binaries.

A simple example to visualize our intended result is to consider an application running under an isolated UTS namespace that modifies the hostname. From the system's view, the hostname remains the same old hostname, but from the application's view it sees the modified hostname.

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Google Summer of Code 2025 Mentor Summit in Munich, Germany: travel notes

I just came back home from Google Summer of Code 2025 Mentor Summit. We were 185 mentors from 133 organizations and it was amazing!

After nearly a decade being part of GSoC for The NetBSD Foundation, first as student and then as mentor and org admin, I finally attended my first GSoC Mentor Summit! That was a fantastic, very intense and fun experience! I met with a lot of new folks and learned about a lot of other cool open source projects.

Let's share my travel notes!

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Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD, part 2

This report was written by Dennis Onyeka as part of Google Summer of Code 2025.

This is the 2nd blog post about his work. If you have missed the first blog post please read Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD.

This report will dig on how the npf.conf(5) syntax will looks like and details of its implementation.

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Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Asynchronous I/O Framework

This report was written by Ethan Miller as part of Google Summer of Code 2025.

The goal is to improve the capabilities of asynchronous IO within NetBSD. Originally the project espoused a model that pinned a single worker thread to each process. That thread would iterate over pending jobs and complete blocking IO. From this, the logical next step was to support an arbitrary number of worker threads. Each process now has a pool of workers recycled from a freelist, and jobs are grouped per-file so that we do not thrash multiple threads on the same vnode which would inevitably lock. This grouping also opens the door for future optimisations in concurrency. The guiding principle is to keep submission cheap, coalesce work sensibly, and only spawn threads when the kernel would otherwise block.

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The NetBSD Foundation 2025 Annual General Meeting summary and logs

On May 17, 21:00 UTC we had The NetBSD Foundation Annual General Meeting on #netbsd-agm IRC channel on Libera.Chat.

We had presentations from:

• board (billc)
• secteam (billc)
• releng (martin)
• core (riastradh)
• finance-exec (riastradh)
• membership-exec (martin, christos)
• pkgsrc-pmc (wiz)
• pkgsrc-security (tm, leot)
• gnats (dh)

At the end we also had a Q&A session open to anyone.

If you have missed it you can find the IRC logs here.

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Welcome to Google Summer of Code 2025 contributors!

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2025 with 3 projects!

Here the list of the projects and contributors:

• Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD - Dennis O.I
• Asynchronous I/O Framework - Ethan Miller
• Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD - Vasyl Lanko

For the next 3 weeks mentors and contributors will get in touch for the community bonding period. Mentors will help contributors to get started with the project, introduce them to the community and get more familiar with the codebase and adjusting deliverables for the the project.

Welcome Dennis, Ethan and Vasyl!

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The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2025!

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2025!

Would you like to contribute to NetBSD and/or pkgsrc in the next months? Google Summer of Code is a great chance for that!

You can find a list of possible projects at Google Summer of Code project page. Of course, you can also propose your own!

Please reach us via #netbsd-code IRC channel on Libera.Chat and/or via mailing lists.

If you are more interested about Google Summer of Code please also check official homepage at g.co/gsoc.

Looking forward to a great Summer!

[0 comments]

 

X.Org on NetBSD - the state of things

A few years ago, I wrote a "state of things" blog post about Wayland on NetBSD. It's only natural that I should do one about X11, which is used by far more people to get a graphical environment on NetBSD.

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The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like

I recently had to replace my oldish WS2300 weather station, which was connected via a long serial cable (running from my kitchen to the machine room in the basement) with a modern device, a WS3500. This now connects to my wifi network and logs data to a postgres server running on a tiny aarch64 SoC, which also provides a website to query the data.

This all was done with minimal base systems means, plus very few additional pkgs from pkgsrc: in my case the postgres server, obviously, (or at least databases/postgresql14-client, if a postgres server already runs somewhere) and misc/sunwait used for a few site related calculations I found interesting to display. The only other suprising component used is pom(6) from the games set, used to calculate the phase of moon. The weather station displays this on its console, but it is not part of the reported weather data - but easy to recalculate.

Part of this work was to analyze details of the ecowitt or the weather underground protocol and extracting data from it.

The other part was creating two websites that display the current weather or some parts of the weather history.

For the two last parts I took inspiration from previous work done on this by others, and overall it turned out to be straight forward.

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Announcing Google Summer of Code 2022 projects

The NetBSD Foundation has finalized the list of projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code. The contributors and projects are the following:

• Brian Schnepp - Raspberry Pi GPU Driver
• Arjun Bemarkar - inetd enhancements
• Piyush Sachdeva - Emulating missing linux syscalls
• Vihas Makwana - Introduce a new Wi-Fi driver
• Vivek Kumar Sah - Automating donor acknowledgement and information storage

The community bonding period has already started (from May 20) and it will last until June 12. During this time, the contributors are expected to coordinate with their mentors and community.

This will be immediately followed by the coding period from June 13 to September 4. After which, the contributors are expected to submit their final work, evaluate their mentors, and get evaluated by their mentors as well. Results will be announced on September 20.

For more information about the Google Summer of Code 2022 kindly refer to the official GSoC website.

We would like to express our gratitude to Google for organizing the yearly GSoC, and to The NetBSD Foundation mentors and administrators for their efforts and hardwork!

Let us welcome all the contributors to our growing NetBSD community!

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The NetBSD Foundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Fundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022!

Would you like to contribute to NetBSD or pkgsrc during the summer? Please give a look to NetBSD wiki Google Summer of Code page with possible ideas list and/or please join #NetBSD-code IRC channel on libera or get in touch with us via mailing lists to propose new projects!

Please note that unlike past years where Google Summer of Code was opened only to university students since this year if you are 18 or older you can be a GSoC contributor.

For more information about Google Summer of Code please give a look to the official GSoC website.

Looking forward to have a nice Google Summer of Code!

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