Running NetBSD on the LG-N2R1D NAS-family

Article about installing NetBSD on a small nas device LG NAS-N2R1D. This requires some soldering and other black magic but otherwise pretty good example of NetBSD portability.

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Fossil and Git mirrors of pkgsrc and src

The NetBSD CVS repository has seen a lot of work over the recent months to clean up various historic artefacts. Together with the improvements in cvs2fossil and the Fossil->Git conversion, it is now possible to provide a precise, up-to-date conversion.

The Git repositories can be found on github, checkout pkgsrc and src.

The Fossil repositories can be found at src (mirror) and pkgsrc (mirror). The raw database as faster alternative to cloning can be found on ftp.NetBSD.org.

This repositories are synchronised with a normal latency of 2h. The only differences between a checkout from CVS and Fossil/Git are supposed to be related to historic checkouts of files pulled from a vendor branch. The implemented behaviour is consistent with the changes in the file. RCS IDs are all expanded using the same rules CVS follows.

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USB Keyboard Support for DDB

More and more modern computers don't come with a "real" keyboard interface anymore, and that makes our lives hard when we have to enter the kernel debugger DDB. Well, not anymore if you run -current. jmcneill@ committed code which lets you use DDB with USB keyboards. See

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2011/07/30/msg025233.html

for the full commit message.

[1 comment]

 

NetBSD's Google Summer of Code Projects 2011

The following projects have been chosen for Google Summer of Code™ this year (sorted by student's last name):

• Implementing the algorithms described in RFC 6056 within the NetBSD
• Student: Vlad Balan
• Mentor: Christos Zoulas

• Socket option to timestamp UDP packets in NetBSD kernel
• Student: Dmitry Cherkassov
• Mentor: Marc Balmer

• pkgsrc cross-building: connecting the dots
• Student: Efstathios Kamperis
• Mentor: Aleksej Saushev

• Add kqueue support to GIO
• Student: Dmitry Matveev
• Mentor: Julio Merino

• Userspace file system and device driver code sharing
• Student: Vyacheslav Matyushin
• Mentor: Alistair Crooks

• IPv6 support for NPF firewall
• Student: Zoltan Arnold Nagy
• Mentor: Martin Husemann, Mindaugas Rasiukevicius

• Add support for FreeBSD package format, RPM and Debian packages(if time allows) to pkgsrc
• Student: Anton Panev
• Mentor: Jeremy C. Reed

• Apropos replacement based on mandoc and SQLite's FTS
• Student: Abhinav Upadhyay
• Mentor: Jörg Sonnenberger

• In-kernel implementation of posix_spawn
• Student: Charles Zhang
• Mentor: Martin Husemann

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Port tier system introduced

The NetBSD core team has announced a tier system for the hardware architectures supported by NetBSD. The tier system classifies ports into three tiers. Summarizing, the tiers consist of ports that NetBSD will support, ports that NetBSD does its best to support, and ports which may be desupported soon. The purpose of this classification is to clarify the development roles between old and new architectures. By making modern architectures an official development priority, the tier system ensures that NetBSD will continue to be the top choice for a fast, secure and portable free OS on the hardware of today and tomorrow.

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Rump: Distributed Kernel Services For NetBSD

Rump is a componentization of the NetBSD kernel. It lends itself to multiple uses, such as running kernel code as services in userspace and for example makes the high-quality NetBSD kernel code base available for use in multiserver microkernel operating systems.

Running unmodified NetBSD kernel code in standalone userspace applications has been possible for years. Recently, it also became possible to use unmodified userland binaries as remote clients for these lightweight and modular kernel server instances. Things work straight out of the default NetBSD installation. For example, it is possible to run an unmodified web browser against a rump TCP/IP server and restart the TCP/IP server with minimal impact to the browser. Furthermore, it is possible to run a dedicated TCP/IP server for every networking application on the system. The combined flexibility of using proven kernel drivers in lightweight virtual servers is completely unique to NetBSD.

• article
• tutorial

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NetBSD now runs under Amazon EC2

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce the release of the first NetBSD Amazon Images for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (better known as Amazon EC2) for all currently available regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

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Support for Microsoft eMIPS ("Extensible MIPS") platform committed

Support for Microsoft Research's extensible MIPS architecture has been committed to the NetBSD source tree. eMIPS allows dynamic loading and scheduling of application-specific circuits for the purpose of accelerating computations based on the current workload. NetBSD/emips runs on FPGA-based hardware and the Giano system simulator.

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nxr update

Dear Readers,

The NetBSD Cross Reference service has recently
been updated to use the latest version of OpenGrok from pkgsrc.

In addition to the main NetBSD-current sources, the
following development branches have now been indexed:

rmind-uvmplock
uebayasi-xip
ad-audiomp2

Have fun searching and grokking !

[1 comment]

 

The Lua Scripting Language

About a week ago, I imported the Lua programming language, version 5.1.2, into NetBSD-current as a component of the base system.

Lua is a scripting language with a very small memory footprint that has been designed as an embedded (or hosted) language from the ground up. As such, it's integration into software written in e.g. C or C++ is straightforward. Lua is very fast, it is recognized as one of the fastest scripting languages. The language has a clear and simple syntax with some very powerful concepts; the libraries (called packages) that come with it are themselves reasonable small. Lua compiles programs to a bytecode which is executed by a very small virtual machine. Lua scripts can be precompiled to bytecode for faster load times (but not faster execution). The first versions of Lua date back in 1993, so the language is stable and mature.

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Announcing NetBSD Hackathon in Paris - 6 and 7th of November, 2010.

On the 6 and 7th November 2010 will be run the first NetBSD Hackathon in Paris, France. The event will be held at ESPCI Paris.

Everybody that has an interest in NetBSD, from developers, documentation writers, translators, to advanced users, are invited to attend.
If you just want to come and discuss NetBSD with some NetBSD enthusiasts, you are also welcome.

The idea is to take this opportunity to meet with the French and French-speaking NetBSD community, for a hacking week-end: contributions to src, pkgsrc, xsrc, wiki, documentation in French on NetBSDfr wiki, submitting or closing PRs, etc.. Let's meet on Saturday, November 6th, starting at 9 am in ESPCI Paris Tech (thanks manu@ for hosting us).

If you wish to join us, please send a mail to guigui _AT_ netbsdfr _DOT_ org (as we need to provide a list of attendees in order to get access to the ESPCI premises).

NB: Accommodation and food will be the responsibility of the attendee. However the organisers are currently looking into a meal at a local restaurant on Saturday night.

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The BSD Show featuring Adam Hamsik

Adam Hamsik talks about NetBSD with Guillermo Amaral from Webbaverse on this week's episode of The BSD show.

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