NetBSD: Changes and News in 2011

On this page you will find a summary of significant changes to NetBSD. For those interested in every change to the source tree, there is no substitute for subscribing to the source-changes mailing list. Significant news related to the NetBSD Project is also included here. Changes to pkgsrc are also listed here. All of this information is also available in rss/xml format.

Changes to specific areas

See also

NetBSD BlogThe NetBSD Project's Blog

December 2011

November 2011

October 2011

September 2011

July 2011

June 2011

May 2011

April 2011

March 2011

February 2011

January 2011

December 2011

15 Dec 2011 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2011-008 OpenPAM privilege escalation and NetBSD-SA2011-009 BIND resolver DoS

Two new security advisories were published:

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

01 Dec 2011 - New Developer in December 2011

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

  • Charles Zhang (login: charles), who will be working on port-xen and kernel bug fixes.

November 2011

01 Nov 2011 - New Developer in October 2011

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

  • Thomas Cort (login: tcort), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

October 2011

01 Oct 2011 - New Developer in September 2011

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

  • John Marino (login: marino), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

September 2011

20 Sep 2011 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2011-007 LZW decoding loop on manipulated compressed files

One new security advisory was published:

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

18 Sep 2011 - Freeze of pkgsrc tree for pkgsrc-2011Q3

In a message to the tech-pkg mailing list Thomas Klausner announced that the NetBSD Packages Team will stop the development non-essential changes for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2011Q3. The freeze period began September 18 2011 and is expected to last until September 25 2011. During this period, the developers will bring down the number of open problem reports and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

July 2011

26 Jul 2011 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2011-006 BIND DoS via packet with rrtype zero

One new security advisory was published:

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

01 Jul 2011 - New Developer in June 2011

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

  • Radoslaw Kujawa (login: rkujawa), who will be working on the amiga port and the amigappc port.

June 2011

01 Jun 2011 - New Developer in May 2011

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

  • Aleksey Cheusov (login: cheusov), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

May 2011

23 May 2011 - libcxxrt C++ runtime now available under BSD license

The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C, and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64, and MIPS. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license.

Read the press release for details.

21 May 2011 - Annual Group Meeting

The NetBSD Foundation held its Annual Group Meeting on Saturday, May 21, 2011. This online meeting was attended by over 80 developers. It provided an overview of significant work over the past year, status updates, and plans for the upcoming year from the Board of Directors, and several groups within NetBSD, including the Membership Executive Committee, the Finance Executive Committee, Core, Release Engineering, Security, pkgsrc, Admins (server administration), WWW, and Marketing.

01 May 2011 - New Developers

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

  • Alexander Nasonov (login: alnsn), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Matthew Sporleder (login: mspo), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, documentation and website documentation.
  • Taylor R. Campbell (login: riastradh), who will be working on bug fixing.

April 2011

26 Apr 2011 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2011-005 ISC dhclient does not strip shell meta-characters in

One new security advisory was published:

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

07 Apr 2011 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2011-004 Kernel stack overflow via nested IPCOMP packet

One new security advisory was published:

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

06 Apr 2011 - pkgsrc-2011Q1 released

The new quarterly branch for pkgsrc was released. The number of packages has grown to 10973. It now includes MirBSD support. For details, see http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/pkgsrc-users/2011/04/05/msg014147.html.

01 Apr 2011 - New Developers

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

  • Benny Siegert (login: bsiegert), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Lars Heidieker (login: para), who will be working on kernel memory allocators resource managers, smp and port-arm.

March 2011

30 Mar 2011 - Port tier system introduced

The NetBSD core team has announced a tier system for the hardware architectures supported by NetBSD. The tier system classifies ports into three tiers. Summarizing, the tiers consist of ports that NetBSD will support, ports that NetBSD does its best to support, and ports which may be desupported soon. The purpose of this classification is to clarify the development roles between old and new architectures. By making modern architectures an official development priority, the tier system ensures that NetBSD will continue to be the top choice for a fast, secure and portable free OS on the hardware of today and tomorrow.

24 Mar 2011 - Freeze of pkgsrc tree for pkgsrc-2011Q1

In a message to the tech-pkg mailing list Thomas Klausner announced that the NetBSD Packages Team will stop the development of non-essential changes for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2011Q1. The freeze period will begin Mar 23 2011 and is expected to last about ten days, until April 3 2011. During this period, the developers will bring down the number of open problem reports and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

19 Mar 2011 - NetBSD to participate again in Google's Summer of Code

For the seventh 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. Students may choose one of the GSoC 2011 proposed projects, although they are also encouraged to come up with their own project proposals.

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.

Do not let this opportunity slip!

10 Mar 2011 - tmux imported into the base system

Julio Merino has imported tmux into the base system. As a result, NetBSD 6.0 will ship with tmux built in.

In short, tmux is a "terminal multiplexer": it enables a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux can be seen as a BSD-licensed replacement for the popular GNU screen utility.

For more details please see the original announcement sent to the tech-userlevel@ mailing list.

08 Mar 2011 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2011-002 OpenSSL TLS race condition and NetBSD-SA2011-003 kernel memory exhaustion.

Two new security advisories were published:

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

February 2011

01 Feb 2011 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2011-001 BIND DoS due to improper handling of RRSIG records

One new security advisory was published:

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

January 2011

01 Feb 2011 - New Developer in January 2011

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

  • Brian Buhrow (login: buhrow), who will be working on device drivers, port-i386 and closing PRs.

01 Jan 2011 - New Developers in December 2011

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

  • Lourival Pereira Vieira Neto (login: lneto), who will be working on Lua in kernel.
  • Ryo Shimizu (login: ryo), who will be working on arm, networking and device drivers.
  • Ryo ONODERA (login: ryoon), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.