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...

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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.]

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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...

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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.

[1 comment]

 

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.

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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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PCI driver support for rump kernels on Xen

Yesterday I wrote a serious, user-oriented post about running applications directly on the Xen hypervisor. Today I compensate for the seriousness by writing a why-so-serious, happy-buddha type kernel hacker post. This post is about using NetBSD kernel PCI drivers in rump kernels on Xen, with device access courtesy of Xen PCI passthrough.

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Running applications on the Xen Hypervisor

There are a number of motivations for running applications directly on top of the Xen hypervisor without resorting to a full general-purpose OS. For example, one might want to maximally isolate applications with minimal overhead. Leaving the OS out of the picture decreases overhead, since for example the inter-application protection offered normally by virtual memory is already handled once by the Xen hypervisor. However, at the same time problems arise: applications expect and use many services normally provided by the OS, for example files, sockets, event notification and so forth. We were able to set up a production quality environment for running applications as Xen DomU's in a few weeks by reusing hundreds of thousands of lines of unmodified driver and infrastructure code from NetBSD. While the amount of driver code may sound like a lot for running single applications, keep in mind that it involves for example file systems, the TCP/IP stack, stdio, system calls and so forth -- the innocent-looking open() alone accepts over 20 flags which must be properly handled. The remainder of this post looks at the effort in more detail.

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