NetBSD: Changes and News in 2009

December 2009

August 2009

July 2009

June 2009

April 2009

March 2009

February 2009

January 2009

December 2009

28 Dec 2009 - Website translations removed

As announced by Jan Schaumann in this posting to the netbsd-docs@ mailing list, we regretfully have had to remove the existing partial translations of our website. Providing accurate and up to date documentation to all our users is very important to the NetBSD Project. Unfortunately it has become obvious that the project is lacking the manpower to create or keep translations of the website up to date.

As we believe that providing outdated documentation may actually be more harmful than only providing English content, we have decided to no longer maintain non-English documentation in our ``htdocs'' repository or on our website.

01 Dec 2009 - New Developer in November 2009

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

  • Filip Hajny (login: fhajny), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection with a focus on pkgsrc on Solaris.

August 2009

02 Aug 2009 - NetBSD 5.0.1 released

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 5.0.1 release is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.1 is the first critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade. See the NetBSD 5.0.1 Release Announcement for more information.

Please note that due to changes in pkg_install, users upgrading from previous releases are strongly encouraged to run "pkg_admin rebuild" after the upgrade is complete.

July 2009

29 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-013 BIND named dynamic update Denial of Service vulnerability

One new security advisory was published:

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

28 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-012 SHA2 implementation potential buffer overflow

One new security advisory was published:

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

28 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-011 ISC DHCP server Denial of Service vulnerability

One new security advisory was published:

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

25 Jul 2009 - GPIO Revisited

NetBSD has had support for General Purpose Input/Output devices since the 4.0 release, when the GPIO framework was imported. GPIO devices, or gpios for short, provide an easy way to interface electronic circuits which can be as simple as a LED or that provide more complex functionality like a 1-Wire or I2C bus.

Since the import of the GPIO framework into NetBSD, Marc Balmer has reworked larger parts of that subsystem to address some problems and drawbacks. They are now available in NetBSD where they will be further improved. The new GPIO framework retains backwards compatibility while adding new features: It integrates with the kauth(9) security framework, has its own config file format gpio.conf(5), and integrates with the system startup scripts in /etc/rc.d.

For more information, read Marc Balmer's posting in the NetBSD Blog as well as Marc's mail to tech-kern.

14 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-010 ISC dhclient subnet-mask flag stack overflow

One new security advisory was published:

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

07 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-008 and NetBSD-2009-009 (concerning OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories were published concerning OpenSSL:

  • NetBSD-SA2009-008 OpenSSL ASN1 parsing denial of service and CMS signature verification weakness
  • NetBSD-SA2009-009 OpenSSL DTLS Memory Exhaustion and DSA signature verification vulnerabilities

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

01 Jul 2009 - New Developer in June 2009

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

  • Marc Balmer (login: mbalmer), who will be working on  kernel.

June 2009

30 Jun 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-005 through NetBSD-2009-007

Three new security advisories were published:

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

22 Jun 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-001 through NetBSD-2009-004

Four new security advisories were published:

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

April 2009

29 Apr 2009 - NetBSD 5.0 released!

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system, is now available.

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL), the jemalloc memory allocator, X.Org instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers. For all the details, see the full release notes.

Andrew Doran has prepared a short presentation giving an overview of the new features and performance improvements that 5.0 provides. See https://www.NetBSD.org/~ad/50/ or https://www.NetBSD.org/~ad/50.pdf.

27 Apr 2009 - Announcing the NetBSD Project Blog

It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce the new NetBSD Project Blog:

http://blog.NetBSD.org

The NetBSD Project Blog allows us to let you, the community, know about new developments in NetBSD and pkgsrc. The blog supplements our existing netbsd-announce mailing list and the "Recent Changes and News" webpage. We hope it will provide you with greater insight into the future of NetBSD.

For those that tweet - so do we - http://www.twitter.com/NetBSD

20 Apr 2009 - Summer of Code projects selected

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

16 Apr 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC4 binaries available for download

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the fourth release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC4/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

01 Apr 2009 - New Developers

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

  • Sarah Cockburn (login: sarah) will be working on marketing.
  • Tim Zingelman (login: tez) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

March 2009

21 Mar 2009 - NetBSD to participate again in Google's Summer of Code

For the fifth year in a row, the NetBSD Project has been selected as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code. As in previous years, this provides a great opportunity for students to get paid to hack on NetBSD, learn about contributing to a major open source project and to become part of an exciting community.

Students interested in applying should now start to outline their project proposals and initiate contact with possible mentors and the community at large. A list of project suggestions is available here, though students may also wish to review our general projects page.

Our NetBSD Project Application/Proposal HowTo should be a good resource to help students develop their best proposal and the answers to those questions will help us to rank all applications.

01 Mar 2009 - New Developers

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

  • Marek Dopiera (login: dopiera), who will be working on GNU/Hurd xlator support in VFS/GNUMach binary support.
  • Emile Heitor (login: imil), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and Documentation.
  • Jens Rehsack (login: sno), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

February 2009

20 Feb 2009 - BSD Magazine covers NetBSD

The January issue of the BSD Magazine is out with a special focus on NetBSD. See Hubert Feyrer's blog entry for more details: hubertf's NetBSD Blog

11 Feb 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC2 binaries available for download

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the second release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC2/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

02 Feb 2009 - Preparing for Summer of Code 2009

Recently, Google announced that there will be another instance of their popular Summer of Code program in 2009. The NetBSD Project has participated in this program as a mentoring organization since its conception in 2005 (see our results from 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005), and hopes again to be fortunate enough to take part in this year's iteration.

As part of our preparation for the Summer of Code 2009, we have begun reviewing and updating our list of suggested projects and would like to invite all interested students to likewise begin their research and start discussions with the possible mentors as well as on our public mailing lists.

Stay tuned for further updates!

02 Feb 2009 - Summer of Code 2008 Summary

In previous years, the NetBSD Project released a formal summary soon after that year's Summer of Code project deadline. In 2008, we neglected to do this, but since we feel that the students and mentors deserve the full recognition for their hard work, we have finally prepared a press release summarizing last year's project.

We apologize for the delay in getting this published. On the bright side, publishing this followup several months after the formal end of the program allowed us to include the work that was done after the "pencil's down" date: since then, six of the students have become full NetBSD developers with commit privileges, and a lot of the work has been imported into our main source tree.

Please see this page for details.

January 2009

29 Jan 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC1 binaries available for download

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC1/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

01 Jan 2009 - New Developers in December 2008

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

  • Patrick Mahoney (login: pmahoney), who will be working on video support (USB video drivers and v4l2 API).
  • Martin Schütte (login: mschuett), who will be working on syslogd.
  • Roy Marples (login: roy), who will be working on dhcpcd and the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Sergey Svishchev (login: shattered), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.