fidzu : BSD

NetBSD/xen is available for some time now to work on Amazon's Xen-based Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, as previously announced in the NetBSD blog, and the NetBSD wiki has instructions on how to subscribe to Amazon, launching and rebuilding the "AMI" images.

This work is continued by Jean-Yves Migeon, who is working on build scripts for Amazon EC2, so the "AMI" images can be provided easily, with the eventual goal to include them into the NetBSD build process by Jeff Rizzo, so EC2 images can be automatically generated easily, e.g. by NetBSD's build cluster.

05 Feb 2012 6:17pm GMT

Google announced at Fosdem that there will be Google Sommer of Code 2012, the 8th time in a row. Ot can be expected that NetBSD will strive to participate again this year, and as such, now is a good time to

• make up your mind if you want to participate, either as student or mentor
• hash out details of project proposals and possible implementation details, and also see how much time you can devote as possible mentor. Also, think about choosing criteria for students and how to communicate with them on a daily basis and also in cases where problems arise (reallife on either side, student going AWOL, ...)
• go over the list of project proposals, esp. the ones with the right dimension for GSoC, and suggest changes and additions of new projects
• make yourself familiar with NetBSD from a user/admin viewpoint and esp. from a developer point if you intend to apply as student.

  A (slightly dated?) tour through the NetBSD source tree is available for userland, libraries, and the kernel. Also of interest: a guide on NetBSD internals.

• review our guidelines for applying for a project if you're an interested student. We get many really bad, dull and uninformed project proposals each year, and we wish more students would be as serious as YOU probably are (as you're already here :-).

Let's look forward to NetBSD and the Goole Summer of Code 2012, and the exciting new projects to come!

04 Feb 2012 11:40pm GMT

Matthias 'tron' Scheler announced per mail and on the NetBSD blog ``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 NetBSD-current ready for the creation of the NetBSD 6.0 release branch.

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 Wiki Page under <https://wiki.netbsd.org/hackathon/> please.

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!

Join us on the IRC channel #netbsd-code on freenode (irc.freenode.net). Just join, have a look around and ask your questions or what work needs to be done.

We are looking forward to seeing you!''

Indeed! :-)

03 Feb 2012 9:27pm GMT

This comes two days late... but anyway, I felt like posting it now instead of waiting until next Sunday/Monday.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The activity past week focused mostly on implementing support for the &lt;tt&gt;require.memory&lt;/tt&gt; test-case metadata property recently introduced into ATF. This was non-trivial due to the need to write some tricky Autoconf code to make this "slightly portable".&amp;nbsp;Seriously: It's scary to see how hard it is to perform, in a portable manner, an operation as simple as "query the amount of physical memory"... but oh well, such are the native Unix APIs...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I later spent the weekend on Lutok, preparing and publishing the project's first release and writing my first RPM library spec for it. This was a prerequisite for the upcoming 0.3 release of Kyua and thus deserved special attention!&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-3471721892781390132?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

01 Feb 2012 9:48pm GMT

Quoting from the website:

``EuroBSDcon2012
18 - 21 October 2012, Warsaw, Poland

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for people working on and with BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDcon 2012 is the 11th EuroBSDcon and will take place in Poland, 18-21 October 2012 in Warsaw. EuroBSDcon is a great and unique time to learn more about the powerful BSD systems we use everyday and to connect with other developers around the world. ''

01 Feb 2012 9:12pm GMT

spz@ announces: ``{mail, www, anoncvs, blog, wiki, releng}.NetBSD.org are changing IPv4 address from something in 204.152.190 to something in 149.20.53. Do not be alarmed. :)

There may be some glitches due to IP addresses hiding in unexpected corners; we apologize in advance for any issues caused by the renumbering.

The old addresses are going to be available at least another week.''

Background of this change that the ISP of most of the NetBSD services requires renumbering. Of course this only affects IPv4, not IPv6 :-)

31 Jan 2012 10:14pm GMT

Darren Reed is the author if IPfilter and also a NetBSD developer. IPfilter is one of the packet filters available in NetBSD, and the latest version (5.1.1) was imported into NetBSD-current by darren. Citing from his mail to tech-net, there are a few interesting changes and new features:

``To start with, the man pages for ipf(5) and ipnat(5) have been rewritten from scratch to make them easier to understand and thus easier to use the various features in IPFilter. In addition there is now an ipmon(5) that supports delivery of log messages to different destinations - including generating SNMP traps messages.

There are a few new actions that can be used with ipnat.conf. The one that will be of most interest to people is "rewrite" which supports translation of both the source and destination address with a single rule. Use of an rdr/map combination is no longer required. There are also some others that are more experimental. One of those is a "divert" action that takes a packet and puts an IP + UDP header on the front, allowing "raw packets" to be delivered to any socket. Similarly, replies from that socket have the relevant header data removed.

There are a few extras for ipf.conf, most notably it now allows for defining limits on how many different hosts/networks can have a state entry in the state table for each rule. IPFilter 5.1.1 also supports specifying a filter rule group for the filtering of ICMP packets that match an entry in the state table. Additionally, there is a new rule - "decapsulate". This has been designed to allow filtering on "inner headers" of packets that have been encapsulated in clear text. It will, for example, allow filtering on IPv4 headers inside of IPv6 packets (or vice versa.)

It is no longer required to have a separate ipf6.conf file. Both IPv4 and IPv6 packets can be used in the same file. For those that have separate files today, they should not interfere with each other unless you have "block in all" for IPv4 and "pass in all" for IPv6 or similar. In that case, the "block in all" will affect IPv6 traffic. This is a reflection of the internal design where there is now only a single list of filter rules, not one for each protocol. Check the man page for ipf.conf for more details.''

30 Jan 2012 10:51pm GMT

spz@ gave a presentation with a status report of NetBSD during last EuroBSDCon. Slides in HTML format are available now - enjoy!

30 Jan 2012 8:57pm GMT

A few months ago, I &lt;a href="http://blog.julipedia.org/2011/09/introducing-lutok-lightweight-c-api-for.html"&gt;introduced the Lutok project&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;nbsp;a simple C++ API for Lua. To recap: the major goal of this API, which does not mimic the Lua C API bit by bit, is to enforce correct coding practices on the client side. This is done by (ab)using the RAII programming pattern to automatically free resources when not needed and to ensure that the Lua stack is correctly managed. The library also adheres to common C++ programming idioms and exposes exceptions for error management and uses the pimpl idiom to completely hide the Lua C API from clients of Lutok (unless you use the &lt;tt&gt;c_gate&lt;/tt&gt; backdoor!).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Today, I am pleased to announce that the first formal release of Lutok, obviously named 0.1, is available for download! You can obtain this release by visiting the &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/lutok/downloads/detail?name=lutok-0.1.tar.gz"&gt;lutok-0.1.tar.gz download page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Also, in preparation for this release, I have spent the weekend writing &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/lutok/wiki/Examples"&gt;some little example programs&lt;/a&gt; to demonstrate the usage of Lutok, and also some&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/lutok/wiki/Installation"&gt;installation instructions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hope you find this release useful and please do send me any comments you may have!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Hint: Yes, releasing Lutok 0.1 was a prerequisite for Kyua 0.3. So stay tuned ;-)&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-283894938669140420?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

29 Jan 2012 9:48pm GMT

A few days ago, Brian Hoard made an interesting finding about performance of g4u, a NetBSD/i386-based disk cloning system. Citing from Brians mail:

``First, my problem was I had just replaced my motherboard on my custom build PC. Once I got Windows 7 64-bit loaded and everything working, I sat up to clone my system drive. The drive is a 500GB Seagate Barracude, SATA 2 drive. Cloning locally to an identical drive.

When booting into g4u, my transfer speeds were extremely slow. Normally, my 500 Gb clones take only about 90 minutes. But this was still working after over 6 hours. The g4u transfer speed was reporting only 1.5 Mb/sec.

I shut things down, and went into my system BIOS. I noticed that the SATA mode was set to "IDE Mode" for my drives. I changed this to "AHCI Mode" and continued to boot into g4u. This worked to fix the transfer speeds, and my clone finished normally. Getting 83 Mb/sec.

Once the drive was finished, I attempted to boot into Windows, but it would not boot. I had to change my BIOS back to "IDE Mode", then Windows behaved normally.

Upon researching this, I am now learning that you should enable AHCI Mode BEFORE installing Windows for it to work. Apparently, if Windows is not installed while using AHCI Mode, it disables the drivers for AHCI on the system drive. So if you later enable AHCI in your BIOS as I did, Windows will not have the driver loaded. I saw there is a fix on the Microsoft web site, but I haven't attempted to try it yet.

If someone else runs into a similar problem, hopefully this will help you.''

FWIW, g4u-2.5beta1 is based on NetBSD-current from January 2012, so checking your BIOS may help anyone seeing bad disk performance out there.
(Emphasizes in the text added by me)

29 Jan 2012 12:40pm GMT

As you are aware, there's a BSD Associate Certification available from the BSD Certification group (that I'm a member of, working as subject matter expert for NetBSD). That's good!

There's also is a PDF which lists the BSD Associate (BSDA) examn objectives on 57 pages. That's neccessary!

There is currently no training material available that covers all the examn objectives, and that allows people interested in the certification to start learning. That sucks!

Now that's where I'd like to ask the NetBSD (and actually the whole BSD community) for support: This is not a small task, but I think it would be worthwhile for the whole community to have that available, either in closed (paper/book) or in public (electronic) form.

Any takers?

Update: Jeremy Reed reminds me that he has startet a Wiki-based approach to cover all topics of the BSDA, with the eventual goal to publish the result in book form. There is a Wiki-to-PDF transformation engine already in place, and the primary focus can be put on the contents at this point. So, this is the point where YOU come in. Have a look, get involved, participate in a novel project!

28 Jan 2012 2:03pm GMT

Watching conference proceedings and publications like magazines, I feel a certain lack of NetBSD presence. Even in events that are BSD-friendly (EuroBSDcon, BSD Magazine come to mind). So here's a friendly reminder to go out on the street and preach the truth, as posted by Dan Langille on netbsd-advocacy@: You have two days left before the deadline!

Dan continues: ``BSDCan 2012 will be held 11-12 May, 2012 in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 9-10 May.

NOTE: This will be Fri/Sat with tutorials on Wed/Thu.

We are now accepting proposals for talks.

The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.

If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also encouraged to submit a proposal. Possible topics include:

• How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam.
• and/or sysadmin.
• and/or networking.

From the BSDCan website, the Archives section will allow you to review the wide variety of past BSDCan presentations as further examples.

Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.

The schedule is:

8 Jan 2012 Proposal acceptance begins
29 Jan 2012 Proposal acceptance ends
19 Feb 2012 Confirmation of accepted proposals

See also http://www.bsdcan.org/2012/papers.php

Instructions for submitting a proposal to BSDCan 2012 are available from: http://www.bsdcan.org/2012/submissions.php

Update: The deadline for submissions has been extended to Tuesday 31 January.

27 Jan 2012 3:57pm GMT

Izumi Tsutsui writes on port-cobalt: ``It seems NetBSD 5.1.1 release is pending, but binaries are there and it also contains telnetd vulnerability fix (which is rather important for restorecd), so I'd announce 5.1.1 based NetBSD/cobalt RestoreCD and brandnew RestoreUSB as Beta test for future 5.1.x release:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/cobalt/restore-cd/5.1.1/

restorecd-5.1.1-20120112.iso.gz is a gzipped RestoreCD ISO9660 image as prior releases.

restoreusb-5.1.1-20120112.img.gz is a new "RestoreUSB" image which has almost identical functions with RestoreCD but is intended to be burned into USB memory sticks for USB bootable PCs.

You can write the image using gzip(1) + dd(1) on Unix like OSes, or you can also use "Rawrite32" utility on MS Windows: http://www.NetBSD.org/~martin/rawrite32/index.html

To use the RestoreUSB for cobalt installation, write the image into >=512MB USB memory stick (or USB HDD etc.) and boot your PC from it, then all other procedures are same as RestoreCD. You no longer have to burn a coaster for every installation ;-)

See also "Restore CD Howto" for actual installation procedures: http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/cobalt/restorecd-howto.html: (though RestoreUSB is not mentioned yet) and see files in .tar.gz archive for more details. ''

Time to get out the good old Cobalt cube :)

25 Jan 2012 11:10pm GMT

&lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~jmmv/atf/news.html#20120116-atf-0-15-released"&gt;Released ATF 0.15&lt;/a&gt; and imported it into NetBSD.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Added support for integer/float printf-like modifiers to the &lt;tt&gt;utils::format&lt;/tt&gt; module. These will be required to beautify size and time quantities in the reports and error messages.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;I spent way more time than I wanted on this. At first, I attempted to use &lt;tt&gt;std::snprintf&lt;/tt&gt; to parse and process the format modifiers for integers and floats so that I could avoid implementing a custom parser for them. While this sounds like a cool idea (yay, code reuse!), it resulted in a ugly, nasty and horrible mess. In the end, I just ended up implementing custom parsing of the formatters, which was way easier and "good enough" for Kyua's needs.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Started work on backporting ATF's new &lt;tt&gt;require.memory&lt;/tt&gt; property into Kyua. This needs having a way to parse and format byte quantities in user-friendly forms (e.g. 1k, 2m, etc.)... hence the previous work on &lt;tt&gt;utils::format&lt;/tt&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Set up a &lt;a href="https://plus.google.com/b/109170076014992185386/"&gt;Google+ Page for Kyua&lt;/a&gt;. I have no idea what to use it for yet. Maybe the status reports should go in there. Ideas?&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-2326868603928918712?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

23 Jan 2012 3:48pm GMT

Finally some progress!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Backported the &lt;tt&gt;require.memory&lt;/tt&gt; changes in NetBSD to the ATF upstream code, and extended them to support OS X as well.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Backported local pkgsrc patches to ATF into the upstream code.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Started to prepare ATF 0.15 by doing test runs of NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64 and by building the code in various Linux distributions. Several build bugs fixed along the way.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Spent a long while trying to figure out how the Fedora package maintainer procedure has changed since 3 years ago to create packages for ATF, Lutok and Kyua. Not very successful yet unfortunately.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;div&gt;Nothing on the Kyua front, but getting a new release of ATF out of the door has higher priority now!&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-4383268139030266213?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

16 Jan 2012 3:48am GMT

After some absence (job-related) and technical problems (building of NetBSD failing for me from Mac OS X), I'm very happy to release a beta version of g4u with some long-overdue changes. Those include being able to backup/restore the MBR, which includes the partition table - needed when recovering single partitions to a new disk. Also, the various commands reading disks are now adjusted to not abort when a disk sector cannot be used. Instead, the bad bytes are skipped and the rest of the disk is recovered. Please give me feedback on this feature as I didn't have a bad disk to test this! Other news include a command to wipe a disk by completely overwriting it with 0-bytes (once). Last, command line editing was enabled - finally!

Remember that this is a test release, so your feedback is wanted - either to me in person, or to the g4u-help mailing list. Thanks!

Here's a full list of changes:

• New commands "uploadmbr" and "slurpmbr" to backup and restore the master boot record, which includes the partition table. Required to restore a partition to an empty disk.
• New command "copymbr" to copy the MBR from one disk to another, similar to "copydisk"
• New command "wipedisk" to write the disk full with 0-bytes once from start (sector 0) to end (last sector)
• Enable command line history/editing by forcing /bin/sh to be built without -DSMALL (ugly hack... there be lots of dragons!)
• When setting up a fresh compile tree, g4u patches are now applied automagically without aborting the build
• Error detection was now enabled in the dd(1) command, which is the core of g4u (surprise!). With that, disks with broken/unreadable sectors should now be copied, skipping the unreadable sectors and copying the rest. This affects a number of programs: copydisk, copypart, uploaddisk, uploadpart. BEWARE: I wasn't able to actually test this as I do not have a disk with bad sectors here. Please report back your experiences!!!
• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2012-01-12
• New drivers added to the kernel:
  • RDC PMX-1000 IDE controllers
  • Intel SCH IDE controllers
  • TOSHIBA PICCOLO controllers
  • Attansic/Atheros L1C/L2C Ethernet
  • Broadcom BCM43xx wireless
  • Agere/LSI ET1310/ET1301 Gigabit Ethernet
  • RDC R6040 10/100 Ethernet
  • USB LCDs and USB-VGA adaptors, e.g.:
  • DisplayLink DL-1x0/1x5
  • Option N.V. Wireless USB WAN modems
  • Microsoft RNDIS specifications USB ethernet
  • Atheros AR9001U USB Wifi
  • Intersil PrismGT USB Wifi
  • Virtio PCI, memory balloon, disk & network devices
  • ... and many more that slipped past QA
• ... and any driver updates, optimizations and bug fixes and other enhancements from NetBSD-current

Get g4u 2.5beta1:

• ISO
• compressed ISO
• First floppy
• 2nd floppy
• 3rd floppy
• all 3 floppies
• sources

14 Jan 2012 1:48pm GMT