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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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Making RockPro64 a NetBSD Server
The time has come to upgrade my SunBlade 2500s to something more power friendly and faster. I'd already removed one CPU and thus half the ram from two of these systems to reduce their power consumption, but it's still much higher than it could be.
After much searching, I've decided on Pine64's RockPro64 4GiB ram model (technically, only 3.875GiB ram.) Pine64 make SBCs, laptops, phones, and various other mostly ARM gadgets, and the RockPro64 has the fastest CPU they ship (Rockchip RK3399), and can use a small "NAS Case", that is sufficient to house 2 HDDs and, at a stretch, upto 6 SSDs (cooling would become quite an issue at this point.)
In my SATA setup, I have 3 SSDs with a JMicron 585 card in the PCIe slot, two SSDs in the NAS case SSD region, and the third is in the HDD region with an adapter. I have used two SATA power splitters to convert the NAS case's 2 SATA power ports into 4, with the 4th one also powering a Noctua case fan. The cabling is not great with this, with enough SATA power cabling for 6 devices to lay. Probably a bespoke power cable to connect to the RockPro64 would make this nicer and probably improve cooling slightly, but I'm just using off-the-shelf components for now.
In the last year or so I've been working on making NetBSD/arm64 big-endian more featureful. In particular, I've added support for:
- other-endian access disklabels, FFS file-systems in the NetBSD libsa
- the "look 64 sectors later" for RAIDFrame partitions in MI efiboot (the x86 specific efiboot has more extensive support for this that should be ported over)
- other-endian access to RAIDFrame labels in the kernel
- updated the U-Boot package and featureset to include AHCI/SATA support, workaround some bugs and fix the newer U-Boot SPI loader location, and figured out how to default loading from either SATA or NVMe
There are not too many special actions needed for this sort of setup compared to a normal NetBSD or Arm system. While I built my installations by hand, the standard NetBSD Arm images are suitable for this task. It's easiest to start from an SD card with the RockPro64 u-boot installed. There are two U-Boot images available, one for SD/eMMC, and one for SPI (there is an odd problem with the early SPI loader that requires a portion of the image to be different.) The pkgsrc package for sysutils/u-boot-rockpro64 version 2022.01 has these suggested methods for installing the U-Boot image (this package should be buildable on any supported pkgsrc platform).
To install U-Boot into the SD/eMMC card (can run on any system, the image must be written at 32KiB into the device):
# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rksd_loader.img seek=64 of=/dev/rld0c
To install U-Boot into the SPI flash (must be run on the host, and lives at the very start of the device:
# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rkspi_loader.img bs=64k of=/dev/spiflash0
When booting from NVMe or SATA, one must drop to the U-Boot prompt and adjust the "boot_targets" value to put scsi* (SATA) or nvme* ahead of the mmc* and usb* options.
The original value for me:
=> printenv boot_targets boot_targets=mmc1 usb0 mmc0 nvme0 scsi0 pxe dhcp sf0
Which is then adjusted and saved with eg:
=> setenv boot_targets nvme0 scsi0 mmc1 usb0 mmc0 pxe dhcp sf0 => saveenv Saving Environment to SPIFlash... Erasing SPI flash...Writing to SPI flash...done OK
(In this list, mmc1 is the SD slot, mmc0 is the eMMC card, pxe and dhcp are netbooting, and sf0 attempts to load further U-Boot scripts from SPI.)
There are some minor issues with the RockPro64. It has no ability to use ECC memory. It only comes with 1 PCIe 4x slot, and Rockchip errata limited this to PCIe 1.x (though no NetBSD users encounted any issues with PCIe 2.x enabled, and this can be forced back on via a DTS patch.) It is possible to use a PCIe bridge (I have never done this, though I would like to try in the future) to enable more devices for booting, or to enable both a network and storage device.
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Public NetBSD IRC chat channels moved to Libera
Due to the unfortunate situation regarding changes in administration on freenode.net, and the resulting chaos, we have decided to move the public NetBSD IRC channels from freenode to irc.libera.chat.
This includes:
- #NetBSD - general discussion
- #netbsd-code - development discussion
- #pkgsrc - pkgsrc (primarily development) discussion
You can find information on connecting to Libera at https://libera.chat/
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Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship
Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.
He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.
Allen lived in Blacksburg Virginia with his wife and twin boys and was active with various community volunteer groups. His family touched the families of many other NetBSD developers and those friendships have endured beyond his passing.
We have received the following from Allen's family and decided to share it with the NetBSD community. If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.
https://www.ncssm.edu/donate/distance-education/allen-k-briggs-88-memorial-scholarship
The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen's friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.
Two quick notes on donating: Important! When donating, you must
select "Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship" under designation
for the donation to be routed to the scholarship If you have the
option to use employer matching (i.e., donating to NCSSM through
an employer portal to secure a match from your employer), please
email the NCSSM Foundation's Director of Development, April Horton
(april.horton@ncssm.edu), after donating to let her know you want
your gift and employer match to go to the Allen K. Briggs Memorial
Scholarship Thanks in advance for your help. I'd be happy to answer
any questions you or any others have about this.
Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current
For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.
In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.
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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report
This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.
This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report and GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report blogs, and describes my progress in the final phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.
In the third phase, I upgraded to the latest stable version Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) 9.8.0 in pkgsrc-wip, resolved the TODOs and created patches for more test-profiles to fix their installation and runtime errors on NetBSD-current.
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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report
This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.
This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report blog and describes my progress in the second phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.
In this phase, I worked on the automation of the regression suite made using Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and its integration with Anita.
The automation framework consists of two components Phoromatic server, provided by Phoronix Test Suite in pkgsrc, and Anita, a Python tool for automating NetBSD installation.
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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report
This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.
My GSoC project under NetBSD involves developing an automated regression and performance test framework for NetBSD that offers reproducible benchmarking results with detailed history and logs across various hardware & architectures.
To achieve this performance testing framework, I am using the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) which is an open-source, cross-platform automated testing/benchmarking software for Linux, Windows and BSD environments. It allows the creation of new tests using simple XML files and shell scripts and integrates with revision control systems for per-commit regression testing.
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Announcing Google Summer of Code 2020 projects
We are very happy to announce
The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:
- Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD
- Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing
- Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally
- Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD
- Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing
- Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment
- Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite
The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.
Please welcome all our students and a big good luck to students and mentors!
A big thank you to Google and The NetBSD Foundation organization mentors and administrators!
Looking forward to having another nice Google Summer of Code!
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