GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally (Final report)

This report was prepared by Nikita Ronja Gillmann as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This is my second and final report for the Google Summer of Code project I am working on for NetBSD.

My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.

The initial and defined goal of this project was to make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, which had been completed in June. For the second part I was given the task to replace fork+exec calls in our standard shell (sh) in one scenario. Similar to the previous goal we determine through implementation if the initial motivation, to get performance improvements, is correct otherwise we collect metrics for why posix_spawn() in this case should be avoided. This second part meant in practice that I had to add and change code in the kernel, add a new public libc function, and understand shell internals.

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Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020

We nearly hit our donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000.
These donations have enabled us to fund significant paid work on NetBSD in 2020.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD

This report was written by Ayushu Sharma as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This post is a follow up of the first report and second report. Post summarizes the work done during the third and final coding period for the Google Summer of Code (GSoc’20) project - Enhance Syzkaller support for NetBSD

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 5)

The NetBSD developers maintain two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system that includes a significant set of local patches.
• Another one in pkgsrc whose patching is limited to mostly build fixes.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on local patching to work. I have set a goal to reduce the number of custom patches to bare minimum, ideally achieving the state of GDB working without any local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This post is the third update to the project RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing.

Part1 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls1

Part2 - https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_reports_fuzzing_rumpkernel_syscalls

The first and second coding period was entirely dedicated to fuzzing rumpkernel syscalls using hongfuzz. Initially a dumb fuzzer was developed to start fuzzing but it soon reached its limits.

For the duration of second coding peroid we concentrated on crash reproduction and adding grammar to the fuzzer which yielded in better results as we tested on a bug in ioctl with grammar. Although this works for now crash reproduction needs to be improved to generate a working c reproducer.

For the last coding period I have looked into the internals of syzkaller to understand how it pregenerates input and how it mutates data. I have continued to work on integrating buildrump.sh with build.sh. buildrump eases the task fo building the rumpkernel on any host for any target.

buildrump.sh is like a wrapper around build.sh to build the tools and rumpkernel from the source relevant to rumpkernel. So I worked to get buildrump.sh working with netbsd-src. Building the toolchain was successfull from netbsd-src. So binaries like rumpmake work just fine to continue building the rumpkernel.

But the rumpkernel failed to build due to some warnings and errors similar to the following. It can be due to the fact that buildrump.sh has been dormant recently I faced a lot of build issues.

nbmake[2]: nbmake[2]: don't know how to make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/dest.stage/usr/lib/crti.o. Stop

nbmake[2]: stopped in /root/buildrump.sh/src/lib/librumpuser
>> ERROR:
>> make /root/buildrump.sh/obj/Makefile.first dependall

Few of the similar errors were easily fixed but I couldn't integrate it during the time span of the coding period.

To Do

• Research more on grammar definition and look into the existing grammar fuzzers for a better understanding of generating grammar.
• Integrate syz2sys with the existing fuzzer to include grammar generation for better results.

GSoC with NetBSD has been an amazing journey throughout, in which I had a chance to learn from awesome people and work on amazing projects. I will continue to work on the project to achieve the goal of integrating my fuzzer with OSS Fuzz. I thank my mentors Siddharth Muralee, Maciej Grochowski, Christos Zoulas for their support and Kamil for his continuous guidance.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of the test framework of curses. This is the final blog report in a series of blog reports; you can look at the first report and second report of the series.

The first report gives a brief introduction of the project and some insights into the curses testframe through its architecture and language. To someone who wants to contribute to the test suite, this blog can act as the quick guide of how things work internally. Meanwhile, the second report discusses some of the concepts that were quite challenging for me to understand. I wanted to share them with those who may face such a challenge. Both of these reports also cover the progress made in various phases of the Summer of Code.

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 4)

The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.[Read More] [1 comment]

 

GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment

This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.

You can read the previous post/report here.

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GSoC 2020 Second Evaluation Report: Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of test framework of curses library. This blog report is second in series of blog reports; you can have a look at the first report. This report would cover the progress made in second coding phase along with providing some insights into the libcurses.

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GSoC Reports: Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls, Part 2

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

I have been working on Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls. This blogpost details the work I have done during my second coding period.

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GSoC Reports: Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 2

This report was prepared by Ayushi Sharma as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

As a part of Google summer code 2020, I have been working on Enhance the Syzkaller support for NetBSD. This post summarises the work done in the past month.

For work done in the first coding period, you can take a look at the previous post.

Automation for enhancement

With an aim of increasing the number of syscalls fuzzed, we have decided to automate the addition of descriptions for syscalls as well as ioctl device drivers in a customised way for NetBSD.

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 3)

The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]