NetBSD Bloghttps://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/feed/entries/atom2024-03-17T12:20:22+00:00Apache Roller (incubating)https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/fosdem_2023FOSDEM 2023Pierre Pronchery2023-02-08T17:25:39+00:002023-02-08T17:25:39+00:00FOSDEM took place last week-end, as an offline-first event again for the first time since 2020. It was located as usual at the university campus of the ULB in Brussels. It was packed with developers, users, passionate and professionals of Open Source software, and while NetBSD did not have a booth this year, its presence could be felt on Saturday morning at the BSD DevRoom.<p><a href="https://fosdem.org">FOSDEM</a> took place last week-end, as an offline-first event again for the first time since 2020. It was located as usual at the university campus of the ULB in Brussels. It was packed with developers, users, passionate and professionals of Open Source software, and while <a href="https://www.NetBSD.org">NetBSD</a> did not have a booth this year, its presence could be felt on Saturday morning at the <a href="https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/bsd/">BSD DevRoom</a> thanks to the many <a href="https://www.NetBSD.org/people/developers.html">developers</a> who made it to the conference.</p>
<p>Together with Rodrigo Osorio of the <a href="https://www.FreeBSD.org">FreeBSD project</a>, I had the pleasure to help manage the DevRoom, have a front seat for the talks, and even start the session by introducing the <a href="https://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/presentations/#2023">BSD Driver Harmony initiative</a>.</p>
<p>The staff and respective speakers are currently busy uploading slides and <a href="https://video.fosdem.org">reviewing videos</a>, so keep in mind to <a href="https://twitter.com/fosdem">check again</a> for <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@fosdem">new content</a> in the coming few days and weeks if you missed anything or need to dig further into any event from this awesome conference!</p>
<p>Finally, I would like to thank the <a href="https://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/">NetBSD Foundation</a> for sponsoring me to manage the room and attend the <a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/organizations/the-netbsd-foundation">GSoC meet-up</a>.</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/reproducible_builds_summit_venice_2022Reproducible Builds Summit Venice 2022Pierre Pronchery2023-01-02T06:22:08+00:002023-01-02T06:23:02+00:00<p>The sixth Reproducible Builds Summit took place exactly two months ago in Venice, Italy. These three days of workshops were filled with a succession of interactive sessions, where everyone attending had the opportunity to present or learn about anything related to Build Reproducibility. This included the status of specific Open Source projects, techniques to locate, analyse, and understand issues, or also how to explain and communicate better around this topic.</p><p>The <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/events/venice2022/">sixth Reproducible Builds Summit</a> took place exactly <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/events/venice2022/">two months ago</a> in Venice, Italy. These <b>three days of workshops</b> were filled with a <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/events/venice2022/agenda/">succession of interactive sessions</a>, where everyone attending had the opportunity to present or learn about anything related to <b>Build Reproducibility</b>. This included the status of specific Open Source projects, techniques to locate, analyse, and understand issues, or also how to explain and communicate better around this topic.</p>
<a href="http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/mediaresource/b9caa1e5-f797-4299-9eab-9932f7138322"><img src="http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/mediaresource/b9caa1e5-f797-4299-9eab-9932f7138322?t=true" alt="rb.svg"></img></a>
<h3>But what is this about?</h3>
<p>Reproducible Builds are a set of software development practices that create an <b>independently-verifiable path from source to binary code</b>.</p>
<h3>Why is this important?</h3>
<p>Anyone may inspect the source code of Free and Open Source Software for correctness or vulnerabilities. However, <b>most software is distributed pre-compiled</b>, with no method to confirm whether it actually corresponds to the source code published. <b>This allows attacks</b> in a number of different situations, from a malicious developer to network attacks, or the compromise of build infrastructure.</p>
<h3>What can be done about it?</h3>
<p>The purpose of Reproducible Builds is therefore to <b>allow the verification</b> that no vulnerabilities or backdoors have been introduced during the compilation process. By promising identical results for a given source, Build Reproducibility allows multiple third-parties to compare “correct” results, and to <b>flag any deviations as suspect</b> and worthy of scrutiny.</p>
<h3>How is NetBSD doing in this regard?</h3>
<p>The base system of <b>NetBSD can be built reproducibly</b> since its <a href="https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-8/NetBSD-8.0.html">8.0 release</a>! It can be enabled in <a href="https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.3/i386/mk.conf.5">mk.conf</a> when <a href="https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-build.html">building NetBSD</a> for instance.</p>
<h3>And in pkgsrc?</h3>
<p>A first step has been implemented, when using GCC on NetBSD to build packages. Some important tools have been packaged, such as <a href="https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/sysutils/py-diffoscope/">diffoscope</a>. However, <b>further aspects of build reproducibility are not covered in pkgsrc yet</b>, and <b>we welcome contributions</b> to improve this situation! This would help bring this additional security mitigation to the NetBSD community as well as to other systems and users of pkgsrc.</p>
<h3>Summary and conclusion</h3>
<p>If not already, you should definitely consider Build Reproducibility for your environment or software projects. It also applies to firmware, when sources are available. Thankfully NetBSD offers this ability for the base system already, but more work is required for packages.</p>
<p>As for myself, it was an honour and a pleasure to attend the Summit, <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-11/">keep in touch with the community</a>, participate to the event, learn from everyone attending, and obviously to represent the NetBSD Foundation there. I am looking forward to the <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org/events/">next Summit</a>, which should take place in Hamburg from October 30<sup>th</sup> to November 2<sup>nd</sup> of 2023.</p>
<p>In the meantime, do not hesitate to <a href="https://netbsd.org/community/">get in touch</a>, including to <a href="https://netbsd.org/foundation/">the NetBSD Foundation</a> or to <a href="https://pkgsrc.org/#index2h1">the pkgsrc community</a> specifically, if you want to get involved with any aspect of Build Reproducibility or represent the NetBSD or pkgsrc projects for the <a href="https://reproducible-builds.org">Reproducible Builds community</a>.</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2022EuroBSDCon 2022Nia Alarie2022-09-20T09:21:16+00:002022-09-20T09:38:48+00:00<p>After two years of trying, we managed to have a EuroBSDCon in Vienna. Here's how it went...</p><p>No videos are available yet to provide much-needed context to presentations, but we'll keep you posted.</p>
<h2>Day -2 - Arrival in Vienna</h2>
<p>After being thoroughly delayed by Deutsche Bahn, I hopped off an InterCity Express train to check out the hotel room for people speaking at EuroBSDCon, which was An Experience in itself. There was a mural of a shirtless man with a sword covered in snakes next to my bed, what else do you need in life? Lots of coffee, obviously.</p>
<p>Begin the march to the conference to listen to Marshall Kirk McKusick lecture on schedulers.</p>
<h2>Day -1 - NetBSD Developer Summit</h2>
<p>Around 16 NetBSD developers gathered in a room for the first time in two years. I was a little bit distracted and late due to Marshall Kirk McKusick's very detailed lecture on filesystems melting my brain somewhat, but we had the opportunity to present various informal presentations, after we'd finished showing off suspend/resume support on our ThinkPad laptops.</p>
<p><strong>Benny Siegert</strong> opened with a presentation on the <strong>state of the Go programming language on NetBSD</strong> (and whether it is "in trouble"), covering various problems with instability being detected inside the Go test suite. Go is particularly interesting (and maybe error-prone) because it mostly bypasses NetBSD libc, which is unusual for software running on NetBSD, instead preferring to implement its own wrappers around the kernel's system calls.</p>
<p>A few problems had been narrowed down to being (likely) AMD CPU bugs, others weren't reproducible in production (outside of the test suite) at all, and others <em>may</em> have been fixed in NetBSD 9.1 - the NetBSD machines running tests for Go do need to be updated. If you're from AMD, please get in touch.</p>
<p>We've got a very impressive test suite for NetBSD itself, but outside tests are always useful for identifying problems that we can't catch... that said, they do require a lot of work to maintain, and a lack of patience is understandable. We'd love any help we can get with this.</p>
<p>I pointed out that we get occasional failures bootstrapping Go in pkgsrc, and better debug output would be nice -- Benny was able to arrange this within the day, and we should get nice detailed bootstrapping logs for Go now.</p>
<p><strong>Pierre Pronchery</strong> (khorben@) discussed cross-BSD collaboration on synchronizing our device driver code bases, including his recent NetBSD Foundation-supported work on the <a href="https://man.netbsd.org/emuxki.4">emuxki(4)</a> sound card driver, where other BSDs have taken the same code base but improvements had not yet been universal. We all agreed that collaboration and keeping drivers in sync is important. We talked about the on-going project to synchronize NetBSD Wi-Fi drivers with FreeBSD.</p>
<p><strong>Martin Kjellstrand</strong> then gave us a very nice demonstration of his <a href="https://github.com/madworx/docker-netbsd">NetBSD docker images</a>, and how easy it is to spin up NetBSD on-demand to run a command (this also has wide potential for being useful for testing). In turn, I rambled a bit about my own experiments of <a href="https://github.com/alarixnia/mkimg-netbsd">dynamically creating NetBSD images</a>. This would lead to a later discussion about whether we need to prioritize improving the <a href="https://man.netbsd.org/resize_ffs.8">resize_ffs(8)</a> command's support for new filesystems.</p>
<p>The theme of creating NetBSD images "for the cloud" continued, with <strong>Benny Siegert</strong> presenting again about <a href="https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/bsiegert/netbsd-on-gce.pdf">NetBSD on Google Compute Engine</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Borrill</strong> then stepped up to give us an incredibly detailed history of the British computer company <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers">Acorn Computers</a>, complete with his personal experiences servicing Acorn machines in the early 90s. We discussed the history of the ARM CPU, and <a href="https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/acorn32/">NetBSD/acorn32</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Nia Alarie</strong> (surprise) finished up with a very short unplanned demonstration of some of the projects she's been working on lately - using NetBSD as a professional digital audio workstation, improving the default graphical experience of NetBSD with dynamically generated menus, and (again) creating customized micro-images of NetBSD. We discussed support for MIDI devices (I'd later chat with some of the FreeBSD people about collaborating on JACK MIDI).</p>
<p>We then retired to Thomas Klausner (wiz@)'s favorite ramen restaurant and discussed, among other things, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli">Studio Ghibli</a> films, and trains. Trains would be a recurring theme.</p>
<h2>Day 0 - start of talks</h2>
<p>We began the day with two NetBSD presentations scheduled back-to-back. This mostly meant that I got to talk about some of <a href="https://netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/nia/eurobsdcon2022/releng.html">NetBSD 10's upcoming features, and why it's taking so long</a> to a small crowd of interested people who didn't have much prior experience with NetBSD, while in another room <strong>Taylor R. Campbell</strong> (riastradh@) discussed his very dedicated efforts to make <a href="https://netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/riastradh/eurobsdcon2022/opendetach.pdf">suddenly disappearing devices</a> more reliable and not crash the kernel (we're still waiting for a live demonstration).</p>
<p>Next, <strong>Pierre Pronchery</strong> (khorben@) discussed the power of <a href="https://pkgsrc.org">pkgsrc</a> for creating consistent environments across platforms for software developers, serving as a nice portable, classic Unix alternative to technologies like Docker and Nix.</p>
<p>The final presentation of the day was riastradh@ again, this time providing a live lecture (from Emacs!) about <a href="https://netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/riastradh/eurobsdcon2022/membars.txt">memory barriers in the kernel</a>. We all learned to appreciate the nice abstractions technologies like mutexes provide to stop CPUs from re-ordering code on multi-processor machines in inexplicable ways.</p>
<h2>Day 1 - final talks</h2>
<p>The second day of EuroBSDCon presentations was mostly devoid of anything NetBSD-focused, so we had a nice opportunity for cross-pollination and to learn and collaborate with other BSD projects. I chatted a bit with an OpenBSD Ports developer about the challenge technologies like Rust pose to developing a cross-architecture packaging system, and with a FreeBSD person about the state of professional audio on our respective platforms. Michael Dexter finished the day of presentations with a very passionate speech about why we all need BSD in our lives, regardless of our preferred flavour.</p>
<p>More topics were discussed in the various break periods, including whether our newest update to the GPU drivers is stable enough to include in a release (verdict: works for me).</p>
<p>We then watched as various BSD t-shirts and boxes of chocolates were auctioned away to support a local refugee center. The organizing committee forgot to include the NetBSD Foundation on the list of sponsors, but we forgive them.</p>
<h2>Other news from the Project</h2>
<p>I've recently made sure the <a href="https://netbsd.org/changes/changes-10.0.html">NetBSD 10 changelog</a> is up to date with all the new goodness, so you should check that out.</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2018EuroBSDCon 2018 travel report and obligatory picsMaya Rashish2018-10-01T20:50:44+00:002018-10-01T23:48:13+00:00<p>
This was my first big BSD conference. We also planned - planned might be a big word -
thought about doing a devsummit on Friday. Since the people who were in charge of that
had a change of plans, I was sure it'd go horribly wrong.
</p>
<p>
The day before the devsummit and still in the wrong country, I mentioned the hours
and venue on the wiki, and booked a reservation for a restaurant.
</p>
<p>
It turns out that everything was totally fine, and since the devsummit was at the
conference venue (that was having tutorials that day), they even had signs pointing
at the room we were given. Thanks EuroBSDCon conference organizers!
</p>
<p>
At the devsummit, we spent some time hacking. A few people came with "travel laptops"
without access to anything, like Riastradh, so I gave him access to my own laptop.
This didn't hold very long and I kinda forgot about it, but for a few moments he
had access to a NetBSD source tree and an 8 thread, 16GB RAM machine with which to
build things.
</p>
<p>
We had a short introduction and I suggested we take some pictures, so here's the
ones we got. A few people were concerned about privacy, so they're not pictured.
We had small team to hold the camera :-)
</p>
<img width="100%" src="http://netbsd.org/~maya/devsummit1.jpg">
<p>
At the actual conference days, I stayed at the speaker hotel with the other speakers.
I've attempted to make conversation with some visibly FreeBSD/OpenBSD people, but
didn't have plans to talk about anything, so there was a lot of just following
people silently.
<br />
Perhaps for the next conference I'll prepare a list of questions to random BSD people
and then very obviously grab a piece of paper and ask, "what was...", read a bit from
it, and say, "your latest kernel panic?", I'm sure it'll be a great conversation
starter.
</p>
<p>
At the conference itself, was pretty cool to have folks like Kirk McKusick give first
person accounts of some past events (Kirk gave a talk about governance at FreeBSD),
or the second keynote by Ron Broersma.
</p>
<p>
My own talk was hastily prepared, it was difficult to bring the topic together into
a coherent talk. Nevertheless, I managed to talk about stuff for a while 40 minutes,
though usually I skip over so many details that I have trouble putting together a
sufficiently long talk.
</p>
<p>
I mentioned some of my coolest bugs to solve (I should probably make a separate
article about some!). A few people asked for the slides after the talk, so I guess
it wasn't totally incoherent.
</p>
<p>
It was really fun to meet some of my favourite NetBSD people. I got to show off my
now fairly well working laptop (it took a lot of work by all of us!).
</p>
<p>
After the conference I came back with a conference cold, and it took a few days to
recover from it. Hopefully I didn't infect too many people on the way back.
</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2017_travel_notes_afterEuroBSDcon 2017: "travel notes" after the conferenceLeonardo Taccari2017-10-11T13:05:53+00:002023-03-07T22:35:53+00:00<p>
Let me tell you about my experience at
<a href="https://2017.eurobsdcon.org/">EuroBSDcon 2017</a>
in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris">Paris</a>, <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France">France</a>. We will
see what was presented during the NetBSD developer summit on Friday
and then we will give a look to all of the
<a href="://www.NetBSD.org">NetBSD</a> and
<a href="://www.pkgsrc.org/">pkgsrc</a> presentations given during
the conference session on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, a lot of
fun also happened on the "hall track", the several breaks
during the conference and the dinners we had together with other
*BSD developers and community! This is difficult to describe and
I will try to just share some part of that with photographs that
we have taken. I can just say that it was a really beautiful
experience, I had a great time with others and, after coming back
home... ...I miss all of that! :) So, if you have never been in
any BSD conferences I strongly suggest you to go to the next ones,
so please stay tuned via
<a href="://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events.html">NetBSD Events</a>.
Being there this is probably the only way to understand these feelings!
</p><p>
Let me tell you about my experience at
<a href="https://2017.eurobsdcon.org/">EuroBSDcon 2017</a>
in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris">Paris</a>, <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France">France</a>. We will
see what was presented during the NetBSD developer summit on Friday
and then we will give a look to all of the
<a href="//www.NetBSD.org">NetBSD</a> and
<a href="//www.pkgsrc.org/">pkgsrc</a> presentations given during
the conference session on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, a lot of
fun also happened on the "hall track", the several breaks
during the conference and the dinners we had together with other
*BSD developers and community! This is difficult to describe and
I will try to just share some part of that with photographs that
we have taken. I can just say that it was a really beautiful
experience, I had a great time with others and, after coming back
home... ...I miss all of that! :) So, if you have never been in
any BSD conferences I strongly suggest you to go to the next ones,
so please stay tuned via
<a href="//www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events.html">NetBSD Events</a>.
Being there this is probably the only way to understand these feelings!
</p>
<h2>Thursday (21/09): NetBSD developers dinner</h2>
<p>
Arriving in Paris via a night train from Italy I
literally sleep-walked through Paris getting lost again and again.
After getting in touch with other developers we had a dinner together and went
sightseeing for <del>a^W</del>several beers!
</p>
<h2>Friday (22/09): NetBSD developers summit</h2>
<p>
On Friday morning we met for the NetBSD developers summit kindly hosted by
<a href='http://www.arolla.fr/'>Arolla</a>.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/ArollaFr/status/911219875678433280">
<img alt="Photograph of the NetBSD develepors summit" src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/DKVNoHVXUAEe1X3_small.jpg' />
</a>
<br />
From left to right: <code>alnsn</code>, <code>sborrill</code>;
<code>abhinav</code>; <code>uwe</code> and <code>leot</code>;
<code>christos</code>, <code>cherry</code>, <code>ast</code> and
<code>bsiegert</code>; <code>martin</code> and <code>khorben</code>.
</p>
<p>
The devsummit was moderated by Jörg (<code>joerg</code>) and organized by
Jean-Yves (<code>jym</code>).
</p>
<h3>NetBSD on Google Compute Engine -- Benny Siegert (<code>bsiegert</code>)</h3>
<p>
After a self-presentation the devsummit presentations session started with the
talk presented by Benny (<code>bsiegert</code>) about <em>NetBSD on Google
Compute Engine</em>.
</p>
<p>
Benny first introduced
<a href='https://cloud.google.com/compute/'>Google Compute Engine (GCE)</a>
and then started describing how to run NetBSD on it.
</p>
<p>
At the moment there are no official NetBSD images and so users need to create
their own. However, <a href='https://github.com/google/netbsd-gce'>netbsd-gce</a>
script completely automatize this process that:
</p>
<ul>
<li>uses <a href='https://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/misc/py-anita/README.html'>Anita</a>
to stage an installation in <a href='https://www.qemu.org/'>QEMU</a></li>
<li>adjust several tweaks to ensure that networking and storage will work on GCE</li>
<li>packs the image into a <code>.tar.gz</code> file</li>
</ul>
<p>
The <code>.tar.gz</code> image then just need to be uploaded to a Cloud Storage
bucket, create a GCE image from it and then launch VMs based on that image.
</p>
<p>
He also discussed about GCE instance metadata, several problems founds and how
they were fixed (it's better to use NetBSD 8_BETA or -current!) and some future
works.
</p>
<p>
For more information
<a href='https://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/presentations/bsiegert/netbsd-on-gce.pdf'>slides (PDF)</a>
of the talk are also available.
</p>
<h3>Scripting DDB with Forth -- Valery Ushakov (<code>uwe</code>)</h3>
<p>
Valery (<code>uwe</code>) presented a talk about <em>Scripting DDB
with Forth</em>. It was based on a long story and actually the
first discussion about it appeared on
<a href='https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/'>tech-kern@</a>
mailing list in his
<a href='https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2016/05/02/msg020509.html'>Scripting DDB in Forth?</a>
thread (<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/ddb.4">ddb(4)</a>
is the NetBSD in-kernel debugger).
</p>
<p>
He showed how one can associate
<a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)'>forth</a>
commands/conditions with ddb breakpoints.
He used "pid divisible by 3" as an example of condition
for a breakpoint set in
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/getpid.2">getpid(2)</a>
system call:
</p>
<pre>
db{0}> forth
ok : field create , does> @ + ;
ok #300 field lwp>l_proc
ok #120 field proc>p_pid
ok : getpid curlwp lwp>l_proc @ proc>p_pid @ ;
ok : checkpid getpid dup ." > PID IS " . cr 3 mod 0= ;
ok bye
-- STACK: <empty>
db{0}> break sys_getpid_with_ppid
db{0}> command . = checkpid
db{0}> c
</pre>
<p>
...and then on a shell:
</p>
<pre>
# (:)
fatal breakpoint trap in supervisor mode
trap type 1 code 0 eip 0xc090df89 cs 0x8 eflags 0x246 cr2 0xad8ef2c0 ilevel 0 esp 0xc0157fbd
curlwp 0xc2b5c2c0 pid 798 lid 1 lowest kstack 0xdabb42c0
> PID IS 798
-- STACK:
0xffffffff -1
Breakpoint in pid 798.1 (ksh) at netbsd:sys_getpid_with_ppid: pushl %ebp
db{0}> c
# (:)
fatal breakpoint trap in supervisor mode
trap type 1 code 0 eip 0xc090df89 cs 0x8 eflags 0x246 cr2 0xad8ef2c0 ilevel 0 esp 0xc0157fbd
curlwp 0xc2b5c2c0 pid 823 lid 1 lowest kstack 0xdabb42c0
> PID IS 823
-- STACK:
0x00000000 0
Command returned 0
#
</pre>
<p>
If you are more interested in this presentation I strongly suggest to also give
a look to <code>uwe</code>'s
<a href='https://bitbucket.org/nbuwe/forth'>forth</a> Mercurial repository.
</p>
<h3>News from the version control front -- Jörg Sonnenberger (<code>joerg</code>)</h3>
<p>
The third presentation of the devsummit was a presentation about the recent work done by
Jörg (<code>joerg</code>) in the VCS conversions.
</p>
<p>
Jörg started the presentation discussing about the infrastructure
used for the CVS -> Fossil -> Git conversion and
CVS -> Fossil -> Mercurial conversion.
</p>
<p>
It's worth also noticing that the Mercurial conversion is fully integrated and
is regularly pushed to <a href='https://bitbucket.org/netbsd/'>Bitbucket</a> and
<a href='https://bitbucket.org/netbsd/src'>src</a> repository pushed some
scalability limits to <a href='https://bitbucket.org/'>Bitbucket</a>!
</p>
<p>
Mercurial performance were also compared to the Git ones in details for several
operations.
</p>
<p>
A check list that compared the current status of the NetBSD VCS migration to the
<a href='https://wiki.freebsd.org/VersionControl'>FreeBSD VCS wiki one</a> was
described and then Jörg discussed the pending work and answered several
questions in the Q&A.
</p>
<p>
For more information please give a look to the
<a href='https://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/presentations/joerg/eurobsdcon2017'><code>joerg</code>'s presentation slides (HTML)</a>.
If you would like to help for the VCS migration please also get in touch with
him!
</p>
<h3>Afternoon discussions and dinner</h3>
<p>
After the lunch we had several non-scheduled discussions, some time
for hacking, etc. We then had a nice dinner together (it was in a
restaurant with a very nice waiter who always shouted after
every order or after accidently dropping and crashing dishes!, yeah! That's
probably a bit weird but I liked that attitude! :)) and then did some
sightseeing and had a beer together.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/abhi9u/status/912330142541860864">
<img alt="Photograph of the Friday dinner, taken by Christos" src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/DKk_Y45XUAE1CcZ_small.jpg' />
</a>
<br />
From left to right: <code>uwe</code>, <code>bad</code>, <code>ast</code>,
<code>leot</code>, <code>martin</code>, <code>abhinav</code>,
<code>sborrill</code>, <code>alnsn</code>, <code>spz</code>.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/abhi9u/status/912330142541860864">
<img alt="Photograph of the Friday dinner, taken by Abhinav" src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/DKk_aPzXcAAk0pb_small.jpg' />
</a>
<br />
From left to right: <code>uwe</code>, <code>bad</code>, <code>ast</code>,
<code>christos</code>, <code>leot</code>, <code>martin</code>,
<code>sborrill</code>, <code>alnsn</code>, <code>spz</code>.
</p>
<h2>Saturday (23/09): First day of conference session and Social Event</h2>
<h3>A Modern Replacement for BSD spell(1) -- Abhinav Upadhyay (<code>abhinav</code>)</h3>
<p>
Abhinav (<code>abhinav</code>) presented his work on the new
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/spell.1">spell(1)</a>
implementation he's working (that isn't just a <code>spell</code> replacement
but also a library that can be used by other programs!).
</p>
<p>
He described the current limitations of old <code>spell(1)</code> (to get an
idea please give a look to <a href='https://gnats.netbsd.org/48684'>bin/48684</a>),
described the project goals of the new <code>spell(1)</code>, additions to
<code>/usr/share/dict/words</code>, digged a bit in the implementation and
discussed several algorithms used and then provided a performance comparison
with other popular free software spell checkers
(<a href='http://aspell.net/'>aspell</a>,
<a href='https://hunspell.github.io/'>hunspell</a> and <a
href='https://www.gnu.org/software/ispell/'>ispell</a>).
</p>
<p>
He also showed an interactive demo of the new <code>spell(1)</code> in-action
integrated with a shell for auto-completion and spell check.
</p>
<p>
If you would like to try it please give a look to
<a href='https://github.com/abhinav-upadhyay/nbspell'>nbspell</a> Git repository
that contains the code and dicts for the new <code>spell(1)</code>!
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JPKZUcBl88'>Video recording (YouTube)</a>
of the talk and <a href='https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/abhinav/EuroBSDCon2017/a_modern_spell.pdf'>slides
(PDF)</a> are also available!
</p>
<h3>Portable Hotplugging: NetBSD's uvm_hotplug(9) API development -- Cherry G. Mathew (<code>cherry</code>)</h3>
<p>
Cherry (<code>cherry</code>) presented recent work done with Santhosh N.
Raju (<code>fox</code>) about
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/uvm_hotplug.9">uvm_hotplug(9)</a>.
</p>
<p>
The talk covered most "behind the scenes" work: how TDD (test driven
development) was used, how <code>uvm_hotplug(9)</code> was designed
and implemented (with comparisons to the old implementation),
interesting edge cases during the development and how
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/atf.7">atf(7)</a>
was used to do performance testing.
</p>
<p>
It was very interesting to learn how Cherry and Santhosh worked on that and on
the conclusion Cherry pointed out the importance of using existing Software
Engineering techniques in Systems Programming.
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cga3yAfzxmY'>Video recording (YouTube)</a>
and <a href='https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/cherry/eurobsdcon2017/uvm_hotplug.pdf'>slides (PDF)</a>
of the talk are also available!
</p>
<h3>Hardening pkgsrc -- Pierre Pronchery (<code>khorben</code>)</h3>
<p>
Pierre (<code>khorben</code>) presented a talk about recent pkgsrc security
features added in the recent months (and most of them also active on the just
released <code>pkgsrc-2017Q3</code>!).
</p>
<p>
He first introduced how security management and releng is handled
in pkgsrc, how to use
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/pkg_admin.1">pkg_admin(1)</a>
<code>fetch-pkg-vulnerabilities</code> and <code>audit</code>
commands, etc.
</p>
<p>
Then package signatures (generation, installation) and recent hardening
features in pkgsrc were discussed in details, first introducing them and then
how pkgsrc handles them:
</p>
<ul>
<li>SSP: Stack Smashing Protection (enabled via <code>PKGSRC_USE_SSP</code>
in <code>mk.conf</code>)</li>
<li>Fortify (enabled via <code>PKGSRC_USE_FORTIFY</code> in <code>mk.conf</code>)</li>
<li>Stack check (enabled via <code>PKGSRC_USE_STACK_CHECK</code> in
<code>mk.conf</code>)</li>
<li>Position-Independent Executables (PIE) (enabled via <code>PKGSRC_MKPIE</code>
in <code>mk.conf</code>)</li>
<li>RELRO and BIND_NOW (enabled via <code>PKGSRC_USE_RELRO</code> in
<code>mk.conf</code>)</li>
</ul>
<p>
Challenges for each hardening features and future works were discussed.
</p>
<p>
For more information
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os_46jVbIWk'>video recording (YouTube)</a>
and
<a href='https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/khorben/eurobsdcon2017/Hardening pkgsrc.pdf'>slides (PDF)</a>
of the talk are available. A good introduction and reference for all pkgsrc
hardening features is the <a href='https://wiki.NetBSD.org/pkgsrc/hardening/'>Hardening
packages</a> wiki page.
</p>
<h3>Reproducible builds on NetBSD -- Christos Zoulas (<code>christos</code>)</h3>
<p>
Christos (<code>christos</code>) presented the work about reproducible builds on
NetBSD.
</p>
<p>
In his talk he first provided a rationale about reproducible builds (to learn
more please give a look to
<a href='https://reproducible-builds.org/'>reproducible-builds.org</a>!), he
then discussed about the NetBSD (cross) build process, the
<a href='https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/netbsd/netbsd.html'>current status</a>
and build variations that are done in the <code>tests.reproducible-builds.org</code>
build machines.
</p>
<p>
Then he provided and described several sources of difference that were present
in non-reproducible builds, like file-system timestamps, parallel builds
headaches due directory/build order, path normalization, etc.
For each of them he also discussed in details how these problems were solved in
NetBSD.
</p>
<p>
In the conclusion the status and possible TODOs were also discussed (please note
that both <code>-current</code> and <code>-8</code> are all built with
reproducible flags (<code>-P</code> option of <code>build.sh</code>)!)
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1KTMNqB3FI'>Video recording (YouTube)</a>
of Christos' talk is available. Apart the resources discussed above a nice
introduction to reproducible builds in NetBSD is also the
<a href='https://blog.NetBSD.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_fully_reproducible_builds'>NetBSD
fully reproducible builds</a> blog post written by Christos last February!
</p>
<h3>Social event</h3>
<p>
The social event on Saturday evening took place on a boat that cruised on
the Seine river.
</p>
<p>
It was a very nice and different way to sightsee Paris, eat and enjoy some
drinks and socialize and discuss with other developers and community.
</p>
<p>
<img alt="Photograph from the boat, taken by Martin." src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/20170923_204355_small.jpg' />
</p>
<h2>Sunday (24/09): Second day of conference session</h2>
<h3>The school of hard knocks - PT1 -- [anonymous]</h3>
<p>
[anonymous] presented a talk about several notes and lessons learnt
whilst running tutorials to introduce NetBSD at several events
(<a href='http://oshug.org/event/46'>OSHUG #46</a> and
<a href='http://oshug.org/event/57'>OSHUG #57</a> and
<a href='http://oshug.org/event/58'>#58</a>) and experiences from past events
(<a href='http://chiphack.org/'>Chiphack 2013</a>).
</p>
<p>
He described problems a user may experience and how NetBSD was
introduced, in particular trying to avoid the steep learning curve
involved when experimenting with operating systems as a first step,
exploring documentation/source code, cross-building, scripting in
high-level programming languages
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)">Lua</a>)
and directly prototyping and getting pragmatic via
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/rumpkernel.7">rump</a>.
</p>
<h3>The LLDB Debugger on NetBSD -- Kamil Rytarowski (<code>kamil</code>)</h3>
<p>
Kamil (<code>kamil</code>) presented a talk about the recent <a
href='https://lldb.llvm.org/'>LLDB</a> debugger and a
lot of other related debuggers (but also
non-strictly-related-to-debugging!) works he's doing in the last
months.
</p>
<p>
He first introduced debugging concepts in general, provided several examples and
then he started discussing LLDB porting to NetBSD.
</p>
<p>
He then discussed about
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/ptrace.2">ptrace(2)</a>
and other introspection interfaces, the several improvements done and tests
added for <code>ptrace(2)</code> in
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/atf.7">atf(7)</a>.
</p>
<p>
He also discussed about tracking LLDB's trunk (if you are more curious please
give a look to <code>wip/llvm-git</code>,
<code>wip/clang-git</code>, <code>wip/lldb-git</code> packages in <a
href='https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/'>pkgsrc-wip</a>!) and about LLVM sanitizers
and their current status in NetBSD.
</p>
<p>
In the conclusion he also discussed various TODOs in these areas.
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNuJXjD9veQ'>Video recording (YouTube)</a>
and <a href='https://www.NetBSD.org/~kamil/eurobsdcon2017.html'>slides (HTML)</a>
of Kamil's talk are available.
Kamil also regularly write status update blog posts on
<a href='https://blog.NetBSD.org/'>blog.NetBSD.org</a> and
<a href='https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-toolchain/'>tech-toolchain@</a> mailing
list, so please stay tuned! :)
</p>
<h3>What's in store for NetBSD 8.0? -- Alistair Crooks (<code>agc</code>)</h3>
<p>
Alistair (<code>agc</code>) presented a talk about what we will see in NetBSD
8.0.
</p>
<p>
He discussed about new hardware supported (really "new", not new "old" hardware!
Of course also support for VAXstation 4000 TURBOchannel USB and GPIO is actually
new hardware as well! :)), LLVM/Clang, virtualization, PGP signing, updated
utilities in NetBSD, new networking features (e.g. <code>bouyer</code>'s
<code>sockcan</code> implementation), <code>u-boot</code>,
<a href="//man.NetBSD.org/dtrace.1">dtrace(1)</a>,
improvements and new ports testing, reproducible builds,
FDT (Flattened Device Tree) and a lot of other news!
</p>
<p>
The entire presentation was done using the Socratic method (Q&A) and it was
very interactive and nice!
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrtOYqJpEKI'>Video recording (YouTube)</a>
and <a href='https://www.NetBSD.org/~agc/EuroBSDcon-20170919.pdf'>slides (PDF)</a>
of Alistair's talk are available.
</p>
<h3>Sunday dinner</h3>
<p>
After the conference we did some sightseeing in Paris, had a dinner together and
then enjoyed some beers!
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/abhi9u/status/912039595906293760">
<img alt="Photograph of the Sunday dinner, taken by Martin." src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/DKg3BQGVwAAL1IV_small.jpg' />
</a>
<br />
On the left side: <code>abhinav</code>, <code>ast</code>, <code>seb</code>, <code>christos</code>
<br />
On the right side: <code>leot</code>, <code>Riastradh</code>, <code>uwe</code>, [anonymous], <code>agc</code>, <code>sborrill</code>
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://twitter.com/abhi9u/status/912039595906293760">
<img alt="Photograph of the Sunday dinner, taken by Abhinav." src='https://www.NetBSD.org/~leot/blog-posts/imgs/DKg3FG4VoAAXwI0_small.jpg' />
</a>
<br />
On the left side: <code>martin</code>, <code>ast</code>, <code>seb</code>, <code>christos</code>
<br />
On the right side: <code>leot</code>, <code>Riastradh</code>, <code>uwe</code>, [anonymous], <code>agc</code>, <code>sborrill</code>
</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>
It was a very nice weekend and conference. It is worth to mention that
EuroBSDcon 2017 was the biggest BSD conference (more than 300 people attended it!).
</p>
<p>
I would like to thank the entire EuroBSDcon organising committee (Baptiste
Daroussin, Antoine Jacoutot, Jean-Sébastien Pédron and Jean-Yves
Migeon), EuroBSDcon programme commitee (Antoine Jacoutot, Lars Engels,
Ollivier Robert, [anonymous], Jörg Sonnenberger, Jasper Lievisse
Adriaanse and Janne Johansson) and EuroBSDcon Foundation for organizing such a
wonderful conference!
</p>
<p>
I also would like to thank the speakers for presenting very
interesting talks, all developers and community that attended the
NetBSD devsummit and conference, in particular Jean-Yves and
Jörg, for organizing and moderating the devsummit and
<a href='http://www.arolla.fr/'>Arolla</a> that kindly hosted us for the
NetBSD devsummit!
</p>
<p>
A special thanks also to Abhinav (<code>abhinav</code>) and Martin
(<code>martin</code>) for photographs and locals Jean-Yves (<code>jym</code>)
and Stoned (<code>seb</code>) for helping us in not get lost in Paris'
<em>rues</em>! :)
</p>
<p>
Thank you!
</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/pkgsrccon_2017_reportpkgsrcCon 2017 reportSevan Janiyan2017-07-08T23:51:08+00:002017-07-09T02:22:57+00:00
<p>This years pkgsrcCon returned to London once again. It was last held in London back in 2014. The 2014 con was the first pkgsrcCon I attended, I had been working on Darwin/PowerPC fixes for some months and presented on the progress I'd made with a 12" G4 PowerBook. I took away a G4 Mac Mini that day to help spare the PowerBook for use and <a href="https://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=1597">dedicate a machine for build and testing</a>. The offer of PowerPC hardware donations was repeated at this years con, thanks to jperkin@ who showed up with a backpack full of Mac Minis (more on that later).</p>
<p>Since 2014 we have held cons in <a href="https://pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/2015/">Berlin (2015)</a> & <a href="https://pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/2016/">Krakow (2016)</a>. In Krakow we had talks about a wide range of projects over 2 days, from Haiku Ports to Common Lisp to midipix (building native PE binaries for Windows) and back to the BSDs. I was very pleased to continue the theme of a diverse program this year.</p>
<p>Aside from pkgsrc and NetBSD, we had talks about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware Linux, and Plan 9.<br/>
Things began with a pub gathering on the Friday for the pre-con social, we hung out and chatted till almost midnight on a wide range of topics, such as supporting a system using NFS on MS-DOS, the origins of pdksh, corporate IT, culture and many other topics.</p>
<p>On parting I was asked about the starting time on Saturday as there was some conflicting information. I learnt that the registration email had stated a later start than I had scheduled for & advertised on the website, by 30 minutes.<br/>
Lesson learnt: register for your own event!<br/>
Not a problem, I still needed to setup a webpage for the live video stream, I could do both when I got back. With some trimming here and there I had a new schedule, I posted that to the pkgsrcCon website and moved to trying to setup a basic web page which contained a snippet of javascript to play a live video stream from Scale Engine.<br/>
2+ hours later, it was pointed out that the <acronym title="Cross-Site Scripting">XSS</acronym> protection headers on pkgsrc.org breaks the functionality. Thanks to jmcneill@ for debugging and providing a working page.</p>
<p>Saturday started off with Giovanni Bechis speaking about pledge in OpenBSD and adding support to various packages in their ports tree, <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/people/developers.html#alnsn">alnsn@</a> then spoke about installing packages from a repo hosted on the Tor network.</p>
<p>After a quick coffee break we were back to hear <a href="http://www.vitanuova.com/index.html">Charles Forsyth</a> speak about how Plan 9 and Inferno dealt with portability, building software and the problem which are avoided by the environment there. This was followed by a very energetic rant by David Spencer from the Slackbuilds project on packaging 3rd party software. Slackbuilds is a packaging system for Slackware Linux, which was inspired by FreeBSD ports.</p>
<p>For the first slot after lunch, <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/people/developers.html#agc">agc@</a> gave a talk on the early history of pkgsrc followed by <a href="https://twitter.com/docscream">Thomas Merkel</a> on using vagrant to test pkgsrc changes with ease, locally, using vagrant. <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/people/developers.html#khorben">khorben@</a> covered his work on adding security to pkgsrc and <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/people/developers.html#bsiegert">bsiegert@</a> covered the benefits of performing our bulk builds in the cloud and the challenges we currently face.<br/>
My talk was about some topics and ideas which had inspired me or caught my attention, and how it could maybe apply to my work.The title of the talk was taken from the name of Andrew Weatherall's Saint Etienne remix, possibly referring to two different styles of track (dub & vocal) merged into one or something else. I meant it in terms of applicability of thoughts and ideas. After me, agc@ gave a second talk on the evolution of the Netflix Open Connect appliance which runs FreeBSD and Vsevolod Stakhov wrapped up the day with a talk about the technical implementation details of the successor to pkg_tools in FreeBSD, called pkg, and how it could be of benefit for pkgsrc.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Netflix confirms it: BSD is not dying <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/pkgsrcCon?src=hash">#pkgsrcCon</a></p>— Benny Siegert (@bentsukun) <a href="https://twitter.com/bentsukun/status/881188183257620481">July 1, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p>For day 2 we gathered for a hack day at the London Hack Space.<br/>
I had burn't some some CD of the most recent macppc builds of NetBSD 8.0_BETA and -current to install and upgrade Mac Minis. I setup the donated G4 minis for everyone in a <a href="http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2017/07/07/msg002425.html">dual-boot configuration</a> and moved on to taking apart my MacBook Air to inspect the wifi adapter as I wanted to replace it with something which works on FreeBSD. It was not clear from the ifixit teardown photos of cards size, it seemed like a normal mini-PCIe card but it turned out to be far smaller. Thomas had also had the same card in his and <a href="https://garbage.fm/episodes/40">we are not alone</a>. Thomas has started putting together a driver for the Broadcom card, the project is still in its early days and lacks support for encrypted networks but hopefully it will appear on <a href="https://review.freebsd.org">review.freebsd.org</a> in the future.<br/>
weidi@ worked on fixing SunOS bugs in various packages and later in the night we setup a NetBSD/macppc bulk build environment together on his Mac Mini.<br/>
Thomas setup an <a href="https://opengrok.github.io/OpenGrok/">OpenGrock</a> <a href="https://grok.pkgsrc.pub/source/">instance</a> to index the source code of all the software available for packaging in pkgsrc. This helps make the evaluation of changes easier and the scope of impact a little quicker without having to run through a potentially lengthy bulk build with a change in mind to realise the impact.<br/>
bsiegert@ cleared his ticket and email backlog for pkgsrc and alnsn@ got NetBSD/evbmips64-eb booting on his EdgeRouter Lite.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/pkgsrcCon?src=hash">#pkgsrcCon</a> hackathon work by <a href="https://twitter.com/docscream">@docscream</a>: <a href="https://t.co/3GY3TRtdNV">https://t.co/3GY3TRtdNV</a> code search over everything (still indexing)</p>— Wiedi (@wied0r) <a href="https://twitter.com/wied0r/status/881568372324003842">July 2, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p>On Monday we reconvened at the Hack Space again and worked some more. I started putting together the talks page with the details from Saturday and the the slides which I had received, in preperation for the videos which would come later in the week. By 3pm pkgsrcCon was over. I was pretty exhausted but really pleased to have had a few days of techie fun.</p>
<p>Many thanks to <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/foundation/">The NetBSD Foundation</a> for purchasing a camera to use for streaming the event and a speedy response all round by the board. The <a href="http://ossg.bcs.org/">Open Source Specialist Group at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT</a> and the <a href="https://london.hackspace.org.uk/">London Hack Space</a> for hosting us. <a href="https://www.scaleengine.com/">Scale Engine</a> for providing streaming facility. <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/people/developers.html#wiedi">weidi@</a> for hosting the recorded videos.<br/>
<a href="https://twitter.com/allanjude">Allan Jude</a> for pointers, Jared McNeill for debugging, <a href="http://www.nycbug.org">NYCBUG</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/bsdtv">Patrick McEvoy</a> for tips on streaming, the attendees and speakers. This year we had speakers from USA, Italy, Germany and London E2.<br/>
Looking forward to pkgsrcCon 2018!</p>
<p>The videos and slides are available <a href="http://www.pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/2017/talks.html">here</a> and the <a href="http://archive.org/details/pkgsrcCon-2017">Internet Archive</a>.</p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/google_summer_of_code_2016Google Summer of Code 2016 summaryThomas Klausner2017-01-14T15:13:06+00:002017-01-14T15:13:06+00:00The NetBSD Foundation took part in the <a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2016/organizations/6363144104443904/#projects">2016 Google Summer of Code</a>.
<p>
Hrishikesh Goyal worked on the project <a href="https://hrishikeshgoyal.blogspot.com/2016/08/blog-post.html?view=sidebar">"Implement Ext4fs support in ReadOnly mode"</a>.
He tackled two features of an ext4fs implementation: extents and
HTree DIR read/write support. His work was committed into the NetBSD
source tree <a href="https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2016/06/03/msg075131.html">in</a> <a href="https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2016/06/24/msg075634.html">multiple</a> <a href="https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2016/08/13/msg076847.html">commits</a>.
<p>
charles cui worked on adding tests for better <a href="https://github.com/ycui1984/posixtestsuite">"POSIX Test Suite
Compliance"</a>. This involved porting the <a href="http://posixtest.sourceforge.net/">Open Posix benchmark
suite</a> to NetBSD. Many of the tests showed missing features, and
Charles worked with his mentors to improve the results. See his
<a href="https://github.com/ycui1984/posixtestsuite">summary</a> for details.
<p>
Leonardo Taccari worked on <a href="https://github.com/iamleot/pkgsrc/commits/debugpkg?author=iamleot">"Split debug symbols for pkgsrc builds"</a>. He already blogged about this in <a href="https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2016_reports_split_debug">much</a> <a href="https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2016_reports_split_debug2">detail</a> on this blog.
<p>
A big thank you to Google for sponsoring the students to work on
NetBSD, the students for working on the projects, and the mentors that
were helping them along!
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/announcing_pkgsrccon_2015_in_berlinAnnouncing pkgsrcCon 2015 in BerlinSebastian Wiedenroth2015-05-25T20:25:56+00:002015-05-25T20:25:56+00:00<img src="http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/mediaresource/9ddb1260-938d-415c-9571-b970783f99c7?t=true" alt="pkgsrccon2015" style="float: right; margin-left: 2em; width: 250px;">
<p>
The 10th pkgsrcCon is happening on the weekend of July 4th and 5th 2015 in Berlin.
Developers, contributors, and users are all welcome to attend.
</p>
<p>
More details can be found on the <a href="http://pkgsrc.org/pkgsrcCon/2015/">pkgsrcCon 2015 website</a>.
</p>
<h4>Call for presentations</h4>
<p>
Everyone is welcome to make a presentation. So please do!
If you already have title or topic please send an email to <a href="mailto:wiedi@frubar.net">wiedi@frubar.net</a>.
</p>
<p>
I look forward to seeing you there!
</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/asiabsdcon_2015AsiaBSDCon 2015Justin Cormack2015-03-30T22:22:55+00:002015-03-30T22:22:55+00:00Trip report from AsiaBSDCon 2015<p><a href="http://2015.asiabsdcon.org/">AsiaBSDCon 2015</a> was held in Tokyo on 12-15 March. It was my first time attending, and with a big NetBSD community in Japan I was very interested to go. Links to most of the talks and slides mentioned below are <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/#asiabsdcon2015">on the main NetBSD presentations site</a>.
<p>On Friday we had both a closed NetBSD developer session in the morning and an open NetBSD birds of a feather session in the evening. We had developers from Europe, the US and Canada as well as Japan. The BoF session, with around 25 attendees, had a talk by Kazuya Goda, who is not yet a developer but will apply soon, on Development of vxlan(4) using rumpkernel. Vxlan tunnels ethernet frames over UDP and is often used in datacentre multi-tenant applications and for VPN applications. Using the rump kernel made porting from the FreeBSD code extremely easy, with the code being tested in userspace with a tunnel to a FreeBSD box to test interoperability and no changes needed to make it run in kernel.
<p>Taylor Campbell (riastradh@) talked about the staus of DRM/KMS, the direct rendering framework for graphics that is in NetBSD current and will be in 7.0. He had fixed several bugs in the days before the talk, so now is a good time to try out the code on your hardware before 7.0 is out. Porting to non x86 platforms that have compatible cards (radeon) would also be useful at this point.
<p>Makoto Fujiwara (mef@) and Ryo Onodera (ryoon@) talked about pkgsrc, including how to package up software in github, which is now really easy. With the closure of Google Code an whole lot more projects are moving to Github, so it is useful that packaging is so easy.
<p>Jun Ebihara (jun@) gave an overview of the Japan NetBSD users group, which travels all around Japan to a large number of events with a large collection of mainly very small machines which run NetBSD current. These include new machines like the Raspberry Pi and Cubieboard as well as old favourites such as the Zaurus, Jornada and Dreamcast. These were also on display at the conference, and got rather more attention than the very noisy blade server running FreeBSD opposite.
<p>The conference proper, on Friday and Saturday had many NetBSD related talks. A highlight was Dennis Ferguson's (dennis@) keynote on modernising the BSD network stack, based on his experience building commercial BSD based routers; he was a founding engineer at Juniper. We got some history, as well as some detailed recommendations about structuring the network stack structures to match modern protocol hierarchies.
<p>Still on networking, Ryota Ozaki (ozaki@) talked about the work that IIJ, conference sponsors and home to many of the Japanese developers, were doing on supporting MSI interrupts and multi-queue devices, improving performance on multicore systems. Martin Husemann (martin@) talked about running big endian ARM on new hardware, a platform that is not used much and found some bugs.
<p>On Sunday, Taylor talked about doing cross compilation in pkgsrc properly. FreeBSD has taken the aproach of using qemu userspace emulation, but there are problems with this that have to be fudged around, while almost everything can be cross compiled properly with dedication. Perl and Python are an issue, and need volunteers. I (justin@) gave a talk about the rump kernel, and how to make driver development and debugging easier.
<p>There was also lots of excellent food, interesting talks about the rest of the BSD family, and a lot of conversations about many aspects of NetBSD. I highly recommend coming along next year. The call for papers will be earlier, so start planning now.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_developer_summit_at_eurobsdconNetBSD developer summit at EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sofiamartin2014-09-30T19:39:36+00:002023-03-07T22:38:35+00:00More than twenty NetBSD developers gathered at EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sofia<p>There was a nice, friendly and informal summit of NetBSD developers (and interested users) in Sofia on Friday, September 26, 2014.</p>
<p>Bernd Ernesti (veego@) took this photo:</p>
<a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~martin/devsummit_sofia_2014.jpg">
<image width="100%" src="http://www.netbsd.org/~martin/devsummit_sofia_2014.jpg"/>
</a>
<p>In the back row from left to right:<br>
Masao Uebayashi (uebayasi), Thomas Klausner (wiz), Yann Sionneau, Marc Balmer (mbalmer), Justin Cormack (justin), Jaap Boender (jaapb), Adrian Steinmann (ast), Martin Husemann (martin), Taylor R Campbell (riastradh), Michael van Elst (mlelstv), [anonymous], Alexander Nasonov (alnsn).<br>
In the front row, from left to right:<br>
Julian Coleman (jdc), Joerg Sonnenberger (joerg), Valeriy E. Ushakov (uwe), Christoph Badura (bad), S.P.Zeidler (spz), Pierre Pronchery (khorben), Stephen Borrill (sborrill)</p>
<p>
Some Developers made it to the conference only after the summit, so Emmanuel Dreyfus (manu),
Luke Mewburn (lukem) and Lourival Neto (lneto) are unfortunately missing on that picture.
</p>
<p>
Marc Balmer presented some slides prepared by Masanobu SAITOH about <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~msaitoh/EurBSDCon2014-devsummit-IIJ-ext.pdf">ongoing work at IIJ</a>.
</p>
<p>Marc also proposed some extensions to the in-tree httpd (aka bozohttpd) to allow creation of simple dynamic content via "Lua templates". The question whether it would be possible to serve www.netbsd.org by bozohttpd was discussed, and only administrative reasons seem to prevent it - which was overall considered "good enough".</p>
<p>Pierre Pronchery presented his work on EdgeBSD - and why he does not consider it a fork, but more a playground for experimentation. He also reported on some of his experiences with using git on the NetBSD source tree.
</p>
<p>Two more slightly TNF internal issues were discussed, and after that the whole crowd moved to dinner (including a bit of Bulgarian wine).</p>
<p>Having an in-person meeting of a relative huge number of NetBSD developers was considered very useful and we will try to repeat it at other occasions. Next time, if similar attendance is likely, we will plan for more time (like a full day) and also create a schedule of talks/presentations up front, still with the option to add ad-hoc ones.</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/call_for_presentations_bsd_devroomCall for Presentations: BSD devroom at FOSDEM 2014Benny Siegert2013-11-16T17:37:54+00:002013-11-16T17:37:54+00:00<p>FOSDEM 2014 will take place on 1–2 February, 2014, in Brussels,
Belgium. Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth
and a developer's room (on Saturday).</p>
<p>The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every
talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world
examples and presentations about new and shiny features. The default
duration for talks will be 45 minutes including discussion. Feel free
to ask if you want to have a longer or a shorter slot.</p>
<p>If you already submitted a talk last time, please note that the
procedure is slightly different.</p>
<p>To submit your proposal, visit</p>
<p style="margin-left: 2em"><a href="https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14/">https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14/</a></p>
<p>and follow the instructions to create an account and an “event”.
Please select “BSD devroom” as the track. (Click on “Show all” in
the top right corner to display the full form.)</p>
<p>Please include the following information in your submission:</p>
<ul>
<li>The title and subtitle of your talk (please be descriptive,
as titles will be listed with ~500 from other projects)</li>
<li>A short abstract of one paragraph</li>
<li>A longer description if you wish to do so</li>
<li>Links to related websites/blogs etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>The deadline for submissions is <b>December 20, 2013</b>. The talk committee,
consisting of Daniel Seuffert, Marius Nünnerich and Benny Siegert,
will consider the proposals. If yours has been accepted, you will be
informed by e-mail before the end of the year.</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/announcing_netbsd_hackathon_february_10thAnnouncing NetBSD Hackathon - February 10th to 12th, 2012Matthias Scheler2012-02-03T19:05:32+00:002012-02-03T19:05:32+00:00<p>
The 16th NetBSD hackathon will be run from February 10th to February 12th. Our goal is fixing all the bugs that need fixing to get <a href="http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/current/">NetBSD-current</a> ready for the creation of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch.
</p>
<p>
Everybody that has an interest in NetBSD, from developers, documentation writers, translators, to advanced users are invited to attend. To make sure that NetBSD users get the best possible experience of the new release we would like to fix as many bugs as possible. For a list of bugs and more information look at the <a href="http://wiki.netbsd.org/hackathon/">Wiki Page</a> please.
</p>
<p>
If you are able to help us fixing these bugs by supplying patches or testing fixes please consider to participate. We are also in need of people to supply documentation fixes, preferably in the form of patches. Release notes and/or manual pages!
</p>
<p>
Join us on the IRC channel #netbsd-code on <a href="http://freenode.net/">freenode</a> (irc.freenode.net). Just join, have a look around and ask your questions or what work needs to be done.
</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/meet_us_at_fosdem_2011Meet us at FOSDEM 2012Marc Balmer2012-02-03T10:41:35+00:002012-02-27T07:44:38+00:00This weekend (Feb. 4 - 5) FOSDEM, The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the university of Brussels and NetBSD will be present with a booth and there will be NetBSD related talks and presentations in the BSD devroom on sunday.
<p>
This weekend (Feb. 4 - 5), FOSDEM, The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the university of Brussels and NetBSD will be present with a booth and there will be NetBSD related talks and presentations in the BSD devroom on sunday.
<p>
This is a good occasion to meet and discuss with NetBSD and pkgsrc developers, or, to use the occasion to buy NetBSD merchandise and / or to donate to the project.
<p>
For more details about FOSDEM, visit <a href="http://www.fosdem.org/">www.fosdem.org</a>. The schedule of the BSD devroom is available <a href="http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/bsd_devroom">here</a>.
<p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_participating_in_google_summerNetBSD participating in Google Summer of Code™ 2011S.P.Zeidler2011-03-19T13:57:03+00:002011-03-19T13:58:07+00:00<p>NetBSD participates in Google Summer of Code 2011 for the 7th year running.</p><p>Google Summer of Code is a <a href="http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/faqs#what_is">program</a> that offers student developers stipends for a 3 month programming project with the participating open source mentoring organization of their choice.</p>
<p>NetBSD is among the 175 projects chosen to be mentor organizations for Google Summer of Code 2011.</p>
<p>Look at the <a href="http://wiki.NetBSD.org/projects/gsoc_2011/">list of suggested projects</a>, and if you are <a href="http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/faqs#eligibility">eligible</a> to participate, hit the appropriate mailing list(s) to discuss those projects that appeal to you. If you have a project idea that is not listed: it's entirely allowed™ to propose your own project. Please also discuss your own project idea on the appropriate mailing list before applying for it.</p>
<p>If you're not eligible but know people who are and who would be interested in working on a project, but are too shy to apply: nudge them :)</p>
<p>And lastly: if you are eligible and want to participate, but the projects possible in NetBSD are really not in your current scope: there are 174 other worthy projects where the set of programming languages you know today may be highly welcome.</p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_at_the_17th_linuxtagNetBSD at the 17th LinuxTag in BerlinMarc Balmer2011-03-14T11:33:44+00:002011-03-14T11:33:44+00:00The 17th LinuxTag takes place from May 11th - 14th, 2011 in Berlin.
<p>
There will be a BSD booth and NetBSD will be present with merchandise. Visit us there
to discuss NetBSD and have a good time.
<p>The 17th LinuxTag takes place from May 11th - 14th, 2011 in Berlin.
<p>
In the last years there were 10,000 - 11,500 visitors from all over the
world in the Berlin Exhibition Grounds. There are a lot of exhibitioner
all around open source software.
<p>
The slogan oft the LinuxTag convention is "Where .com meets .org". Not
only established and ambitious free projects take part, but also
companies, which support free software.
<p>
Every day the visitors can choose between different workshops, keynotes
and lectures.
<p>
More about the programm you can read on www.linuxtag.org.
<p>
NetBSD is presented together with other BSD's.
<p>
If you staying in Berlin during this time, then visit the LinuxTag!
<p>
Do you want to get some more informations or help on the NetBSD-booth?
Please, contact Thomas Kaepernick (mast_1 (at) gmx.net).
<p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_fosdem_2011NetBSD@FOSDEM 2011Marc Balmer2011-02-24T07:44:15+00:002011-02-24T07:44:15+00:00On the first weekend of february, FOSDEM, the biggest european open source developers gathering, was again held in Brussels, Belgium.
<p>
NetBSD was very well represented with a booth, together with the FreeBSD folks, an a talk covering the recent addition of the Lua programming language to the base system.
<p>On the first weekend of february, FOSDEM, the biggest european open source developers gathering, was again held in Brussels, Belgium. With several thousand attendees from all over the world, though most from europe, FOSDEM is one of the highlights of the year.
<p>
NetBSD was very well represented with a booth, together with the FreeBSD folks, and a talk covering the recent addition of the Lua programming language to the base system.
<p>
Guillaume Lasmayous (gls@), Vera Hardmeier, and myself were almost constantly at the booth selling T-Shirts, CD-ROMs, and other merchandise and using the occasion for marketing NetBSD a bit and having technical discussions with NetBSD users (and prospective users, I hope).
<p>
During the BSD devroom I gave a talk "Lua in NetBSD", outlining language details, techniques to incorporate Lua into existing software, and also why Lua in NetBSD makes a lot of sense for certain applications. That talk was very well received and attracted a lot of people.
<p>
FOSDEM 2011 was a big success, again!
<p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2010_call_for_papersEuroBSDCon 2010 - Call for Paperssarah2010-06-17T19:28:39+00:002010-06-17T19:28:39+00:00<p>The following information was received from the organisers of EuroBSDCon 2010. </p>
<p>This year the 9th European BSD Conference will be held on October 8 - 10, 2010 in Karlsruhe, Germany. </p>
9th European BSD Conference<br>
October 8 - 10, 2010<br>
Karlsruhe, Germany<br>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The European BSD Community will meet again this year for the ninth
conference in the EuroBSDCon series. This is a great opportunity
to present new ideas to the community, inform your fellow BSD
enthusiasts about the newest developments and work for the continued
success of your favorite operating system. The two day conference program
(October 9 - 10) will be preceeded by a tutorial day (Oct 8).</p>
<h2>Call for Papers</h2>
<p>We are inviting contributions on all areas relating to the BSD family
of operating systems, e.g. applications, architecture, implementation,
administration and security of *BSD operating systems ranging from
embedded systems to mainframes. Investigations on economic aspects
regarding the operation of BSD systems are also welcome.</p>
<p>Prospective authors of contributions to the technical program are
requested to submit an abstract via <a href="http://2010.eurobsdcon.org">http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/</a>.
Presentations should last about 40 minutes including time for questions
from the audience. Authors of accepted submissions should provide a full
paper for publication in the conference proceedings and give permission
to the organizers to publish the results in the printed proceedings and
on the conference web site at <a href="http://www.eurobsdcon.org">http://www.eurobsdcon.org</a>.</p>
<h2>Call for Tutorial Proposals</h2>
<p>Selected tutorials will be offered on the day before the conference.
If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please submit your
suggestion on the conference website using the same mechanism as
for submitting a paper. Please indicate if this would be a half-
or full-day tutorial.</p>
<h2>Sponsorship Opportunities</h2>
<p>We are seeking companies or institutions to sponsor various elements of
the conference in order to keep delegate fees as low as possible.
Sponsorship opportunities include: paying for a speaker's travel or
accommodation; providing bursaries for delegates who cannot pay the
conference fee themselves; sponsoring the social event or the printing
of proceedings. Please see the conference website for details.</p>
<h2>Important Dates</h2>
Final abstract deadline: July 6th 2010<br>
Final tutorial deadline: July 6th 2010<br>
Final papers due: September 1st 2010<br>
Tutorial day: October 8th 2010<br>
Conference: October 9th - 10th 2010<br>
<p>For more, see <a href="http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/">http://2010.eurobsdcon.org</a></p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2009_cambridge_ukEuroBSDCon 2009 - Cambridge, UKsarah2009-10-01T22:17:38+00:002009-10-02T07:30:20+00:00<p>The 8th EuroBSD Con was held at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom on 18 - 20 September 2009. This year four NetBSD Developers Alistair Crooks, Adam Hamsik, Joerg Sonnenberger and Arnaud Ysmal presented a range of topics including Role Based Access Control, Journaling FFS, NetBSD LVM, The pkgsrc wrapper framework, A BSD licensed PGP library, and fs-utils: File systems access tools in userland. This post contains a short summary and links to their slides and papers.</p><p>The 8th EuroBSDCon was held at University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom on 18 - 20 September 2009. This year four NetBSD Developers, Alistair Crooks, Adam Hamsik, Joerg Sonnenberger and Arnaud Ysmal, presented a range of topics including Role Based Access Control, Journaling FFS, NetBSD LVM, The pkgsrc wrapper framework, A BSD licensed PGP library, and fs-utils: File systems access tools in userland.
<h3> Role Based Access Control - Alistair Crooks</h3>
<p>This talk describes the design, implementation and real-world experience of implementing Role-Based Access Control in the NetBSD kernel. Using the existing kauth(9) facility, root's privileged operations have been split into 57 separate roles, and this talk will explain the different role groupings, the development process, design and implementation decisions, kernel and user level changes necessary, and practical lessons learned.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/agc/eurobsdcon2009/RBACtalk-20090919.pdf">Slides</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~agc/RBAC_20090831.pdf">Paper</a></p>
<h3>Journalling FFS - Joerg Sonnenberger</h3>
<p>The talk reintroduces FFS and the consistency constraints for meta data
updates. It introduces the WAPBL changes, both in terms of the on-disk
format and the implementation in NetBSD. Finally the implementation is
compared with other file systems and specific issues of and plans for
the current implementation are discussed.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/joerg/bsdcan2009/wapbl.html">Slides</a></p>
<h3>NetBSD LVM - Adam Hamsik</h3>
<p>
This talk introduces LVM as a method of allocating disk space on a disk storage devices. Which is more flexible than conventional ones. Logical Volume Manager can usually stripe, mirror or othervise combine disk partitions to bigger virtual partitions which can be easily moved, resized or manipulated in different ways while in use. Volume Management is one form of disk storage virtualization used in Operating Systems.
</p>
<p>
The NetBSD LVM has two parts user land tools and a kernel driver. Kernel driver is called device- mapper. User land part is based on Linux lvm tools developed by a community managed by Redhat inc.
</p>
<p>
The Device-mapper driver can create virtual disk devices according to device table loaded to it. This table specifies which devices are used as a backend, on which offset on particular device virtual device starts. Device-mapper configuration is not persistent and must be loaded to kernel after each reboot by lvm the tools.
</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~haad/eurobsdcon.pdf">Slides</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~haad/eurobsdcon_paper.pdf">Paper</a></p>
<h3> The pkgsrc wrapper framework - Joerg Sonnenberger</h3>
<p>The wrapper framework in pkgsrc serves two central roles: - abstracting
compiler specifica - limiting visibility of installed packages in
combination with buildlink. It helps making package builds a lot more
reproducable and decreases the number of patches for platforms that are
not using GCC or ELF. The offered flexibility comes at a price, both in
terms of execution speed and code complexity. This talk explains how the
wrapper framework interacts with the rest of pkgsrc, analyzes the
performance of the existing implementation and introduces a simpler and
faster reimplementation.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/joerg/eurobsdcon2009/wrapper.html">Slides</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/joerg/eurobsdcon2009/wrapper.pdf">Paper</a></p>
<h3>netpgp - BSD-licensed privacy software - Alistair Crooks</h3>
<p>This talk introduces the netpgp library, a BSD-licensed PGP library, which is compatible with the GNU Privacy Guard program (GPG or GNUPG). The library itself is described, and the suite of userland programs built around it, such as the signing/verification/encryption and decryption program, a program to manage keys, and a separate standalone verification program. Possible practical uses for the library are also provided, along with a demonstration of some of these uses.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/agc/eurobsdcon2009/NetPGP-20090920.pdf">Slides</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~agc/netpgp_20090831.pdf">Paper</a></p>
<h3>fs-utils: File systems access tools in userland - Arnaud Ysmal</h3>
<p>This talk introduces the fs-utils set of tools, an application suite which provides mtools-like file system access without requiring mount privileges or an in-kernel driver. fs-utils reuses the kernel file system drivers through the RUMP framework and the UKFS library instead of relying on a userspace reimplementation. It supports a total of 12 file systems from NetBSD plus FUSE file systems, and offers the same usage as the well-known tools (e.g. all of the flags of ls are supported).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~stacktic/ebc09_fs-utils_slides.pdf">Slides</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~stacktic/ebc09_fs-utils_paper.pdf">Paper</a></p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_developer_summit_in_cambridgeNetBSD developer summit in Cambridge/UKMatthias Scheler2009-09-27T13:37:14+00:002009-09-27T22:59:42+00:00<p>
On Friday, the 18th of September, a group of NetBSD developers from all over the world met during a developer summit at the <a href="http://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/" title="Fitzwilliam College">Fitzwilliam College</a> in <a href="http://www.visitcambridge.org/" title="Cambridge">Cambridge/UK</a>. It provided a great opportunity for developers to meet each other in person, to share ideas and to talk about ongoing and future projects.<br />
The summit was organised by <a href="http://www.NetBSD.org/~sborrill/" title="Dr. Stephen Borrill">Stephen Borrill</a> and sponsored by <a href="http://www.precedence.co.uk/" title="Precedence Technologies">Precedence Technologies</a>, a Cambridge based company selling NetBSD based products.
</p>
<p>
Based on a <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/agc/eurobsdcon2009/netbsd-20090920.pdf" title="State of BSD - NetBSD">presentation</a> by <a href="/tnf/entry/interview_with_alistair_g_crooks" title="Alistair Crooks">Alistair Crooks</a> the roadmap for NetBSD 6.0 was discussed. Here are some of the highlights that are planned for NetBSD 6.0:
<ul>
<li>System:<ul>
<li>kernel modules</li>
<li>POSIX shared memory</li>
<li>processor & cache aware scheduler</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Networking:<ul>
<li>Mobile IPv6</li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP" title="SCTP">SCTP</a></li>
<li>netboot from HTTP</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Storage:<ul>
<li>LVM</li>
<li>ZFS</li>
<li>iSCSI initiator</li>
<li>devfs</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Virtualisation:<ul>
<li>Xen domU migration, suspend & resume</li>
<li>Xen ballon driver</li>
<li>Gaols via kauth (similar to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebsd_jail" title="FreeBSD jail">FreeBSD jails</a>)</li>
<li>iSCSI booting</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Security:<ul>
<li>RBAC kernel</li>
<li>netpgp</li>
</ul</li>
</ul>
The current plan is to branch NetBSD 6.0 in March 2010 and release it in summer 2010.
</p>
<p>
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/announcing_eurobsdcon_2009Announcing EuroBSDcon 2009Matthias Scheler2009-07-13T11:00:37+00:002009-07-13T11:00:37+00:00</p>
EuroBSDcon 2009<br />
Friday 18th - Sunday 20th September,<br />
University of Cambridge, UK
</p>
<p>
A day of tutorials followed by 2 days of conference talks covering a wide variety of BSD related topics. This is the European BSD Community's annual event to meet, share and interact across the projects and between friends.
</p>
<p>
This year's line up features...
<ul>
<li> ISC and *BSD </li>
<li> OpenBSD malloc</li>
<li> How FreeBSD finds oil</li>
<li> NetBSD's LVM</li>
<li> faster packets in OpenBSD</li>
<li> Wireless Mesh networks</li>
<li> Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Guide</li>
</ul>
... and more. The full talk list and schedule: <a href="http://2009.euroBSDcon.org">http://2009.euroBSDcon.org</a>
</p>
<p>Discounted Early Bird registration runs until 2nd September. Book your place now at <a href="http://2009.euroBSDcon.org">http://2009.euroBSDcon.org</a></p>
<p>Final programme may be subject to alteration. EuroBSDcon is a not for profit event open to everyone so please help spread the word online and offline.</p>
<p>If you're interested to read this far, you can sign up for future announcements about EuroBSDcons by sending an email to eurobsdcon-announce-subscribe@lists.ukuug.org . Your address will only be used to contact you about European BSD events.</p>
<p align="center">EuroBSDcon 2009 : September 18-20th, Cambridge, England.<br />
<a href="http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/">http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/</a></p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/usenix_2009_rump_file_systemsUSENIX 2009 - Rump File Systems: Kernel Code RebornAntti Kantee2009-06-30T04:17:45+00:002009-06-30T04:17:45+00:00<p>
At <a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/">USENIX 2009</a> I talked about rump file systems.
The <a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/kantee/kantee.pdf">paper</a>
(<a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/kantee/kantee_html/index.html">html</a>)
and <a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/slides/kantee.pdf">slides</a> are available.
Additionally, USENIX members can view a <a href="http://usenix.org/multimedia/atc09kantee">video</a>
of the presentation.
</p>
<p>
At <a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/">USENIX 2009</a> I talked about rump file systems.
The paper (<a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/kantee/kantee.pdf">pdf</a>,
<a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/kantee/kantee_html/index.html">html</a>)
and <a href="http://usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/slides/kantee.pdf">slides</a> are available.
Additionally, USENIX members can view a <a href="http://usenix.org/multimedia/atc09kantee">video</a>
of the presentation.
</p>
<h3>paper abstract</h3>
<p>
When kernel functionality is desired in userspace, the common
approach is to reimplement it for userspace interfaces. We show
that use of existing kernel file systems in userspace programs is
possible without modifying the kernel file system code base. Two
different operating modes are explored: 1) a transparent mode, in
which the file system is mounted in the typical fashion by using
the kernel code as a userspace server, and 2) a standalone mode,
in which applications can use a kernel file system as a library.
The first mode provides isolation from the trusted computing base
and a secure way for mounting untrusted file systems on a monolithic
kernel. The second mode is useful for file system utilities and
applications, such as populating an image or viewing the contents
without requiring host operating system kernel support. Additional
uses for both modes include debugging, development and testing.
</p>
<p>
The design and implementation of the Runnable Userspace Meta Program
file system (rump fs) framework for NetBSD is presented. Using
rump, ten disk-based file systems, a memory file system, a network
file system and a userspace framework file system have been tested
to be functional. File system performance for an estimated typical
workload is found to be ±5% of kernel performance. The
prototype of a similar framework for Linux was also implemented
and portability was verified: Linux file systems work on NetBSD
and NetBSD file systems work on Linux. Finally, the implementation
is shown to be maintainable by examining the 1.5 year period it
has been a part of NetBSD.
</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2009_call_for_papersEuroBSDCon 2009 - Call for PapersMatthias Scheler2009-05-06T15:41:16+00:002009-05-06T15:41:16+00:00EuroBSDCon 2009 - Call for Papers<br />
9th European BSD Conference<br />
September 18 - 20, 2009<br />
University of Cambridge, UK<br />
<a href="http://2009.eurobsdcon.org/">http://2009.eurobsdcon.org/</a><br />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
The European BSD Community is once again gathering for
EuroBSDcon. In 2009, we invite you to join us in Cambridge,
England for the latest in discussion, dissemination and
development of material from the many BSDs and their related
communities. This, the ninth European BSD conference is a
great opportunity to present new ideas to the community and
to meet some of the developers behind the different BSDs.
The two day conference program (September 19 - 20) will be
complemented by a tutorial day preceding the conference
(Sept 18).
<h2>Call for Papers</h2>
The Conference is inviting authors to submit innovative and
original papers not submitted to other European conferences on the
applications, architecture, implementation, performance and security of
BSD-derived operating systems. Investigations on economic aspects regarding the
operation of BSD systems are also welcome. Topics of interest for the EuroBSD
Conference 2009 include, but are not limited to:
<ul>
<li>application development and deployment</li>
<li>device drivers</li>
<li>security and safe coding practices</li>
<li>methods others should know about</li>
<li>system administration: techniques and tools of the trade</li>
<li>operational and economic aspects</li>
</ul>
Prospective authors of contributions to the technical program are
requested to submit an abstract via <a href="http://2009.eurobsdcon.org/">http://2009.eurobsdcon.org/</a>.
All submissions will be acknowledged. Presentations may last from
15 to 45 minutes - please indicate how long you would like.
This is the initial call for papers; a more focussed call based on
initial accepted submissions will follow in March 2009. We will
begin accepting talks early in 2009.
Authors of accepted submissions should provide a full paper for
publication in the conference proceedings and give permission to the
organizers to publish the results in the printed proceedings and on
the conference web site at www.eurobsdcon.org
<h2>Call for Tutorial Proposals</h2>
Selected tutorials on practical and problem-solving aspects of
BSD-derived operating systems will be offered on the day before the
Conference. The tutorials will be presented by speakers who
have wide experience in developing and administering the different
BSDs. Potential tutorial themes could include, but are not limited to:
<ul>
<li>Safe coding practices to provide secure solutions</li>
<li>System load testing and tuning</li>
<li>BSD in a large network</li>
<li>Solving sets of problems</li>
</ul>
If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please contact the
organisers on <a href="mailto:eurobsdcon@ukuug.org">eurobsdcon@ukuug.org</a> with what you're thinking. Initial
exploratory conversations are as welcome as full proposals.
<h2>Sponsorship Opportunities</h2>
We are seeking companies or institutions to sponsor various
elements of the conference in order to keep delegate fees as
low as possible. Sponsorship opportunities include: paying
for a speaker's travel or accommodation; providing bursaries
for delegates who cannot pay the conference fee themselves;
sponsoring catering, lunches, or the conference dinner.
All sponsors will be listed in the conference proceedings
and included on our website with a link back to your
site. You will also have the opportunity to provide
literature for distribution in delegate packs. Please
contact the UKUUG Secretariat (<a href="mailto:office@ukuug.org">office@ukuug.org</a>) to discuss
the possibilities or see <a href="http://www.eurobsdcon.org/">http://www.eurobsdcon.org/</a>.
<h2>Important Dates</h2>
<table border="0">
<tr>
<td>Final abstract deadline:</td>
<td>May 31st 2009</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Final tutorial deadline:</td>
<td>May 31st</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Final papers due:</td>
<td>August 1st</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tutorial day:</td>
<td>September 18</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Conference:</td>
<td>September 19 - 20</td>
</tr>
</table>
For more, see <a href="http://www.eurobsdcon.org/">http://www.eurobsdcon.org/</a>.
<p />
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/asiabsdcon_2009_endedAsiaBSDCon 2009 endedMasao Uebayashi2009-03-19T13:03:20+00:002009-03-19T14:57:36+00:00<p>AsiaBSDCon 2009 was held during March 12-15 at Tokyo University of Science and successfully ended on March 15. Even though economy is quickly going down, we had more participants than we expected. We look forward to seeing you again next year.</p>
Masao Uebayashi<BR>
<p>On behalf of AsiaBSDCon 2009 staff</p>https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2009EuroBSDCon 2009Matthias Scheler2009-02-24T08:11:42+00:002009-02-24T08:11:42+00:00<p>
Since 2001 the yearly European BSD Conference provides a great opportunity to present new ideas and meet developers of all BSD projects. <a title="EuroBSDCon 2009" href="http://2009.eurobsdcon.org/">This year's European BSD conference</a> takes place in <a title="Visit Cambridge" href="http://www.visitcambridge.org/">Cambridge</a>, UK.
</p>
<p>
If you have a paper that you would like to present at the conference or an idea for a tutorial please let the <a title="Offer a talk at EuroBSDCon 2009" href="http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/offer/">program committee</a> know as the conference cannot succeed without your contributions.
</p>
<p>
In addition <a title="Stephen Borill" href="http://www.NetBSD.org/~sborrill/">Stephen Borrill</a> is organising a NetBSD developer summit in Cambridge before the EuroBSDCon.
</p>