NetBSD: Changes and News in 2008

December 2008

November 2008

October 2008

September 2008

August 2008

July 2008

June 2008

May 2008

April 2008

March 2008

February 2008

January 2008

December 2008

01 Dec 2008 - New Developer in November 2008

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Tuomo Mäkinen (login: tjam), who will be working on port-atari.

November 2008

01 Nov 2008 - New Developers in October 2008

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Hasso Tepper (login: hasso) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Darran Hunt (login: darran) will be working on cryptography in NetBSD, OpenSSL, network and device drivers.
  • Jean-Yves Migeon (login: jym) will be working on port-xen.
  • Jeremy Morse (login: jmorse) will be working on video and usb.

October 2008

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-015 ICMPv6 Packet Too Big messages

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-014 Cross-site request forgery in ftpd(8)

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-013 IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

27 Oct 2008 - Updated Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning

One updated security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

14 Oct 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q3 released

The new pkgsrc-2008Q3 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

14 Oct 2008 - NetBSD 4.0.1 released

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 4.0.1 release is now available. NetBSD 4.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 4.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 4.0.1 Release Announcement for more information.

13 Oct 2008 - NetBSD developers speak at NYCBSDCon

Three NetBSD Foundation members presented at the New York City BSD Conference. Anders Magnusson discussed the design and implementation of the modern Portable C Compiler. Julio Merino introduced the Automated Testing Framework and some testing goals for NetBSD. And Jeremy C. Reed introduced DNSSEC including some examples using ISC BIND. (The pcc(1), atf(7), and named(8) projects are all included with NetBSD.) Several other NetBSD developers and end-users also attended the conference. And previous to the event, a NetBSD summit was held.

03 Oct 2008 - NetBSD developer's summit and hackathon

Leading up to this year's NYCBSDCon, a number of NetBSD developers will be gathering for an informal ``NetBSD developer's summit'' on Friday, October 10th, 2008. The event was hosted at Pilosoft and took place in their offices at 55 Broad St, New York, NY 10004.

Coinciding with the developer's summit and the conference was the 12th NetBSD Hackathon, taking place at the summit, at the conference and of course on IRC as usual.

01 Oct 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Arnaud Ysmal (login: stacktic) will be working on rump, ukfs and fs_utils.
  • Jonathan A. Kollasch (login: jakllsch) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, drivers and miscellaneous tasks.
  • Eric Schnoebelen (login: schnoebe) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, release engineering and userland.

September 2008

19 Sep 2008 - Video4Linux2 compatible interface and USB video capture support

Patrick Mahoney, a computer science student and author of the Frameworks stop-motion frame capture program, recently coded device-independent video driver support and a USB video device driver for NetBSD as part of the 2008 Google Summer of Code.

NetBSD developer, Jared D. McNeill, imported Mahoney's video(4), video(9), and uvideo(4) drivers. And McNeill also coded and imported the pseye(4) driver for the Sony PLAYSTATION(R) Eye USB webcam.

These provide a Video4Linux2 compatible capture interface. The video layer implements some of the Video4Linux2 API including read() and provides some ioctl's to set controls in a device-independent way similar the audio(9) interface. The uvideo driver is specifically for USB Video Class devices and not just any random webcam. (Link to USB Video Class specification.)

McNeill said many Video4Linux2 applications work, such as mplayer, vlc, ffmpeg, cheese (clone of apple's Photo Booth), ucview (simple capture application on the EeePC), gstreamer (media framework used by GNOME applications), and ekiga (SIP/IAX/NetMeeting compatible video conferencing tool). (McNeill also imported the pkgsrc/net/ekiga-devel package.)

15 Sep 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-012 Denial of service issues in racoon(8)

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

04 Sep 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-011 ICMPv6 MLD query

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

August 2008

31 Aug 2008 - Updated Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning

One updated security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

26 Aug 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-010 Malicious PPPoE discovery packet can overrun a kernel buffer

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

01 Aug 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Adam Hoka (login: ahoka), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and i18n.
  • Timo Teräs (login: tteras), who will be working on ipsec-tools.
  • Paul Goyette (login: pgoyette), who will be working on sdtemp, spdmem and sysmon_envsys.

July 2008

31 Jul 2008 - Metadata journaling support added to FFS

Simon Burge has just added metadata journaling to the FFS (fast file system) code to NetBSD-current.

The journaling code, known as WAPBL - Write Ahead Physical Block Logging - was originally written by Darrin B. Jewell for Wasabi Systems, Inc., and was contributed by Wasabi to the NetBSD community earlier this year. Wasabi has been shipping WAPBL-enabled products since 2003.

Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran spent quite some time on integrating this code into NetBSD-current and enhancing it to allow automatic creation of the journal log area inside existing filesystems to ease conversion.

They also did some performance benchmarks and WAPBL performs very close to soft-dependencies mounts, and only slightly slower than (unsafe) async mounts. In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a “log” option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the “softdep” option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information.

The WAPBL feature will be available in the upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release.

Many thanks to Wasabi Systems, Inc. for contributing this code, everyone that helped to integrate it and especially Simon Burge for his work on the in-filesystem journal.

30 Jul 2008 - NetBSD achieves permanent charity status

The NetBSD Foundation has been granted permanent 501(c)(3) charity status under United States law. The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

To achieve the permanent "public charity" status, we needed to prove that we are publicly funded by going through the financial activity of the past 5 years and filing the necessary forms. Lex Wennmacher, Martin Husemann, and Christos Zoulas spent quite a few weekends going through all the numbers and completing the forms, and we are happy to report that the IRS accepted our paperwork.

Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment.

26 Jul 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q2 released

The new pkgsrc-2008Q2 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

25 Jul 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

12 Jul 2008 - NetBSD developer's summit @ NYCBSDCon 2008

A NetBSD developer's summit is currently being planned for Friday, October 10th, 2008. The event is sponsored by and leads up to this year's NYCBSDCon and will take place at Columbia University on the island of Manhattan in New York City, NY, USA.

While the program for this full-day event is not yet finalized, it will be open to the public and may include formal presentations as well as informal discussions of both technical and administrative nature. A public hackathon is anticipated to run in parallel throughout the weekend.

The common social activities such as PGP signing and consumption of refreshing beverages or communal ingestion of nutrition are likely to follow.

If you have any suggestions, would like to offer your help, plan on attending or have any other comments, please contact .

01 Jul 2008 - ftp.NetBSD.org outage (Updated)

ftp.NetBSD.org is having trouble with its hardware RAID. We are aware that it's not available and are working on it. In the meantime, please refer to our mirrors where available.

Update: The machine's back up again, but may experience another reboot or two in the near future.

June 2008

20 Jun 2008 - New default license: 2-clause BSD license

The NetBSD Foundation's president, Alistair Crooks, announced that “Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license.”

Please see this page for details about NetBSD's copyright and licensing terms.

01 Jun 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Hans Rosenfeld (login: hans), who will be working on port-vax and kernel.

May 2008

22 May 2008 - Hackathon 11: bug fixing for NetBSD 5.0

The hackathon was held May 24th and 25th, 2008 with a focus on working on critical and high priority bugs in preparation for NetBSD 5.0.

13 May 2008 - One Updated security Advisory

One updated security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

08 May 2008 - Two new security advisories

Two new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

April 2008

21 Apr 2008 - Summer of Code projects selected

For the fourth consecutive year, the NetBSD Project is proud to participate in Google's “Summer of Code” program as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer. The 14 accepted proposals cover a wide range of topics (“something for everyone!”) and we're looking forward to an exciting summer!

The full list of all projects together with some additional details can be found in the press release.

21 Apr 2008 - Three new security advisories

Three new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

13 Apr 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q1 released

The new pkgsrc-2008Q1 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

02 Apr 2008 - Summer of Code student applications period extended

Google has extended the student applications period for this year's Summer of Code until April 7th, 2008. This means, it's not too late to submit your proposal. With the extra days, students have more time to get in touch with a mentor, to discuss their proposal on one of our mailing lists and to solicit feedback before refining and submitting it.

The NetBSD Project would also like to take this as an occasion to remind everybody that students' own proposals not explicitly listed on the projects page are equally welcome. If you have a great idea on how to make NetBSD better, just flesh out your thoughts and hand in your application.

Due to the strong competition in the Summer of Code program, you may even wish to submit a second proposal; often we receive multiple proposals for the same project and have a hard time choosing one student over the other -- a second proposal of equal quality might increase your chances to be accepted.

If you have any questions, please contact the appropriate mailing list or see if some of your possible mentors are available on #netbsd-code on IRC (freenode.net).

01 Apr 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Tonnerre Lombard (login: tonnerre), who will be working on kernel and pkgsrc.
  • Christoph Egger (login: cegger), who will be working on kernel and the xen port.

March 2008

20 Mar 2008 - NetBSD celebrates its fifteenth birthday!

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System, one of the oldest actively maintained, freely-available operating systems. The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on March 21, 1993. See this announcement for more details about NetBSD celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. Birthday celebrations will be listed at the Events Gallery.

17 Mar 2008 - NetBSD is part of Google Summer of Code 2008, again

Google is doing another round of their Summer of Code project, where the idea is to attract students to write code for Open Source projects during the summer, instead of having them flip burgers. For the fourth time, the NetBSD project has been selected as mentoring organization in the Summer of Code project!

Prospective students that are interested in pursuing projects for NetBSD are welcome to start thinking about what projects they'd like to do, and discuss things on our public mailing lists. We have lists of suggested GSoC projects and (harder!) general projects which can serve as inspiration. Also, please see our NetBSD Project Application/Proposal HowTo for information that we'd like to see answered in the eventual project proposals sent to Google -- this information helps us to rank the project proposals we'll get, and to put your project on the best spot!

14 Mar 2008 - More interviews about packaging systems

The second and finishing article with interviews about pkgsrc and alternative packaging systems is available. This issue also provides talks about MidnightBSD mports, GoboLinux and Zero Install.

01 Mar 2008 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Yojiro UO (login: yuo) will be working on wireless support, embedded platforms and device drivers.

February 2008

28 Feb 2008 - Three new security advisories

Three new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

28 Feb 2008 - Results of NetBSD's 2007 Fundraising Campaign

NetBSD is an open source operating system project that depends on funding for its operation. A generous donation by Google has enabled us to fund development in the area of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and a fundraising drive was started to extend this activity. The goal of $50,000US of the 2007 fundraising campaign was met thanks to a lot of support from companies, users, and our community as a whole. Read more about what supporting companies have to say about NetBSD, what has been achieved recently, and what changes to expect thanks to the donations in the press release about the Results of NetBSD's 2007 Fundraising Campaign.

18 Feb 2008 - Web-mail-archive revamped

As announced by S.P. Zeidler a few days ago, the NetBSD Web-mail archive was updated with improved functionality (email address obfuscation and threaded display of messages) and a new look&feel. (Announcement)

13 Feb 2008 - Changes and updates from the Ports

NetBSD/ofppc

  • Tim Rightnour has announced the rebirth of the ofppc port: "The port has been completely rewritten from the ground up, and is essentially a brand new port of NetBSD." (Announcement)

  • Tim is now the new portmaster for NetBSD/ofppc: "I would like to thank the previous portmaster, Wolfgang Solfrank for his excellent work in what was the original port of NetBSD to the PowerPC." (Announcement)

  • Support for IBM 7044-270 (POWER3-II cpu) machines was added. (Announcement)

NetBSD/prep

Tim Rightnour has reworked NetBSD's powerpc-ports recently. With support from Kevin Bowling he has ported NetBSD to the IBM MCA RS/6000 model 7006. This makes NetBSD the first free operating system to run on this class of machines. (Announcement)

NetBSD/xen

Manuel Bouyer has implemented support for Xen/i386 DomUs with PAE extensions and and full support for Xen/amd64 (Dom0 and DomU) to NetBSD-current. NetBSD/i386 has still no general PAE support yet, but the NetBSD i386-PAE DomUs can now be used on top of recent Linux x86_32 and x86_64 Xen Hypervisors out of the box. (Announcements: 1, 2)

NetBSD/i386

Hubert Feyrer has announced an install CD for NetBSD/i386 that already contains a collection of essential precompiled binary packages. (More details)

NetBSD/pc532 ceased

The NetBSD support for the PC532 platform is history: Simon Burge has announced the termination of the port. (Announcement)

NetBSD/arm

Donald T. Hayford has posted instructions for building and installing NetBSD on the NSLU2. (Instructions: 1, 2)

NetBSD/hp700

Nick Hudson has posted a status update about the progress of NetBSD's port to the HPPA architecture, NetBSD/hp700. (Status report)

01 Feb 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Stefan Schumacher (login: stefan), who will be working on Documentation, advocacy and website documentation.

January 2008

31 Jan 2008 - Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about NetBSD 4.0

Federico Biancuzzi has done an comprehensive interview with more than twenty NetBSD developers speaking with them about what is new in NetBSD 4.0. The full article is available at ars technica, together with a page for comments and discussions.

24 Jan 2008 - Joachim Schueth: beating the Colossus code breaking machine

Joachim Schueth has beaten a reconstruction of the famous Colossus Mark II code breaking machine in November 2007. The Colossus computers were used in World War II to break the German encrypted messages. Equipped with a NetBSD-powered laptop and profound knowledge of cryptography and the Ada programming language, Schueth has won the code breaking challenge. We talked with him about the historical and technical backgrounds of the Cipher Event and the tools he has used - Read the interview.

05 Jan 2008 - pkgsrc-2007Q4 released

The new pkgsrc-2007Q4 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

04 Jan 2008 - Hackathon 9 focussed on closing PRs

The hackathon was held January 19th and 20th, 2008. The focus was on closing PR's that are not relevant anymore after the release of 4.0. I.e. 2.0 becomes unsupported.

01 Jan 2008 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Frank Wille (login: phx), who will be working on the ofppc port and the amigappc port.