Outage of blog.NetBSD.org today

blog.NetBSD.org was not very available between ~13:00 and ~20:00 UTC today. One of its disks semi-failed and led to really exhaustive retries that left the httpds so exhausted they timed nearly everybody out instead. The faulty disk has been taken offline, and lo, we have a blog again. [0 comments]

 

Summer of Code results: Display Control and Acceleration

For a second consecutive year I mentored Jeremy Morse for NetBSD's Google Summer of Code project entitled Display Control and Acceleration.

This post will review the goals of the project and present the results.

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Summer of Code results: Generic file system mounting

This year I mentored Arnaud Ysmal's Summer of Code project entitled "Generic file system mounting". This post contains a recap of the goals and presents the results.

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Interview with Alistair G. Crooks

Our fourth edition of the "discussions with a NetBSD developer" series is a very special one, as we had the chance to talk to Alistair G. Crooks, president of The NetBSD Foundation.

Alistair gave us a historical point of view some of you might be unaware of, explaining "The NetBSD way" while telling us what is his analysis of NetBSD's status today and what he thinks about its future. A must read.

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FOSSLC's debate with David Maxwell

On 31 August 2009 our very own David Maxwell is taking part in the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre's debate 'Which open source license is best?'. Obviously, David is advocating for the BSD License. His opponents are Mike Milinkovich (for EPL License) and Matt Asay (for GPL License).

FOSSLC are allowing the public to participate in the event by either posing their own questions or voting on those already listed. For more information see http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=9faeb&t=94b79.

You can show your support by registering to either attend on the day or view the webcast stream.

For more information see the FOSSLC website.

Good luck David!

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Support for Keylocks, an Experimental Feature

Recently, generic support for electro-mechanical multi-position keylocks in the kernel has been added to NetBSD. Such locks can be turned into various positions, usually up to three or four position. They come with a set of keys that are different in so far as not all positions can be reached will all keys (which key can go up to which position is called the "locking program"). With the new keylock support, such locks can be used to tinker with the kernel security, much like the traditional securelevel variable...

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Interview with S.P. Zeidler

Here's the third edition of the "discussions with a NetBSD developer" series. This time, we had the chance to talk to S.P. Zeidler, admin and member of pkgsrc-releng.

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The NetBSD Blog now available via HTTPS

The NetBSD blog is now available via HTTPS as well as the non-encrypted HTTP protocol.

[2 comments]

 

Interview with Adam Hamsik

After our first interview with NetBSD-5.0 release engineer Soren Jacobsen, it is now Adam Hamsik's turn to be interviewed by NetBSDfr.

Adam is known for his work on porting LVM tools to NetBSD, and for porting ZFS as part of this year's Google Summer of Code.

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Google Summer of Code: Display control and Acceleration

Almost all modern display hardware feature various screen resolutions and some form of 2D hardware acceleration - usually as a "bitblit" function to move pixel data around video memory while the processor does something else. Unfortunately the only facility that can make use of this on NetBSD is X, and even then through it's own device drivers. Other popular operating systems (ie linux) feature accelerated framebuffer consoles and kernel display mode setting, as well as numerous display managers for embedded systems that use hardware acceleration (for example Qt/Embedded or DirectFB).

This project is to create a device independent framework to work with wscons, providing kernel mode setting, accelerated framebuffer console support, and allowing userland applications to use 2D acceleration features. More information about this can be found on the project web page

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BSDCan 2009: Kernel Development in Userspace - The Rump Approach

At BSDCan 2009 I gave a presentation about using rump for kernel development. The associated paper has two target audiences:

• regular users who wish to easily learn about how the kernel works without having to setup complex kernel development environments
• kernel developers who wish to learn how to use rump for kernel development and requesting more detailed information from users in problem reports

Downloads:

• paper
• slides

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Runnable Userspace Meta Programs in NetBSD 5.0

The rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program) framework, unique to NetBSD, provides lightweight virtualization of kernel components such a file systems and networking. This short article explores the key ideas behind rump and gives examples on how to use rump on NetBSD 5.

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