Announcing NetBSD and the Google Summer of Code Projects 2017

We are very happy to announce that the selection process in this year's Summer of Code with its bargaining of slots and what student gets assigned to which project is over. As a result, the following students will take on their projects:

• Leonardo Taccari will work add multi-packages support to pkgsrc.
• Maya Rashish will work on the LFS cleanup.
• Utkarsh Anand will make Anita support multiple virtual machine systems and more architectures within them to improve testing coverage.

What follows now is a community bonding period until May 30th, followed by a coding period over the summer (it's Summer of Code, after all ) until August 21st, evaluations, code submission and an announcement of the results on September 6th 2017.

Good luck to all our students and their mentors - we look forward to your work results, and welcome you to The NetBSD Project!

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NetBSD fully reproducible builds

Today (2017-02-20) NetBSD got our first reproducible build on the debian build farm. Here's a short description how we got here, what implementation choices we made, and what we had to fix.[Read More] [4 comments]

 

Firefox 51 on sparc64 - we did not hit the wall yet

Keeping a current firefox working is a tough task. All NetBSD architectures are "tier 3" from the Mozilla foundations point of view.

Onodera-san (who does most of the pkgsrc work for mozilla based pkgs - and others) does a great job.

And on "strange" architectures like sparc64 it is even worse...

[Read More] [3 comments]

 

NetBSD.org outage 2017-01-16

NetBSD.org DNS is down because our secondary stopped serving our zone and the network of our primary went offline.

[Update, 2017-01-16 20:48 UTC: NetBSD.org is back up now.]

[Read More] [1 comment]

 

More disk(s) fun

When I got my Sun T1000 machine, it came with a ~80 GB hard disk - good enough for a NetBSD installation, but a bit challenged when you want to use logical domains. Time to expand disk space, or maybe make it faster? But these 1U server machines do not offer a lot of room for extensions, and it is sometimes tricky to get hold of the official extension options nowadays.

So I had fun with disks and modern replacements again...

[Read More] [5 comments]

 

What to do when you run out of (ancient) 50 pin SCSI disks?

Unable to buy new 50 pin SCSI disks, and not willing to spend huge amounts of money on fast SCSI disks then slowed down by 50pin adapters, I looked for alternative solutions for the root disks of my mac68k and alpha machines.

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talks about blacklistd

Watch a video by Christos Zoulas (with good audio!) talking about blacklistd
blacklistd by Christos Zoulas [1 comment]

 

Happy 23rd Birthday, src!

And so it began...

revision 1.1
date: 1993-03-21 10:45:37 +0100; author: cgd; state: Exp;
branches: 1.1.1;

Initial revision

and we continue this legacy.

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Hands on experience with EdgeRouter ERLite-3

My EdgeRouter ERLite-3 just has been delivered. Setup was easy (the NetBSD version of "plug & play"), and I really like this hardware.

Of course first testing showed up first errors - so this will be an interesting experience!

[Read More] [4 comments]

 

An Internet-Ready OS From Scratch in a Week — Rump Kernels on Bare Metal

The most time-consuming part of operating system development is obtaining enough drivers to enable the OS to run real applications which interact with the real world. NetBSD's rump kernels allow reducing that time to almost zero, for example for developing special-purpose operating systems for the cloud and embedded IoT devices. This article describes an experiment in creating an OS by using a rump kernel for drivers. It attempts to avoid going into full detail on the principles of rump kernels, which are available for interested readers from rumpkernel.org.

[Read More] [8 comments]

 

Interview with Amitai Schlair member of The NetBSD Foundation’s Board of Directors

New interview with schmonz [0 comments]

 

Survey of rump kernel network interfaces

A cyclic trend in operating systems is moving things in and out of the kernel for better performance. Currently, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of userspace being the locus of high performance. The anykernel architecture of NetBSD ensures that the same kernel drivers work in a monolithic kernel, userspace and beyond. One of those driver stacks is networking. In this article we assume that the NetBSD networking stack is run outside of the monolithic kernel in a rump kernel and survey the open source interface layer options.

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