Christos us currently a mamber of the boards of directors of the NetBSD Foundation, as well as the foundation's secretary and treasurer. Besides the administrative tasks he has a long history of technical involvement in the project, like the Core group that he is also a member of. Liste to the interview to learn more!

[Tags: bsdtalk, christos]

• BSD-related radio-show "bsdtalk" has published an interview with NetBSD's Andrew Doran in its March 2009 issue. Besides covering Andrews work, the upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release is also discussed. Available as mp3 and ogg.

• Cross-compiling pkgsrc packages is a long-standing dream, and it's yet waiting for someone to do it. For the time being, Jared McNeill has come up with an HowTo on how to build 32bit packages on amd64 (and probably other 64bit systems).

• Jared McNeill's been hacking on more stuff recently, and one thing includes changes to the framebuffer console support on x86 (i.e. both i386 and amd64). In short, the recent changes are just a stop on the way to move the splashscreen code and esp. image data from the kernel to userland. I.e. that you can put something like

   menu=Boot NetBSD:vesa 1280x800;splash /logo.bmp;boot netbsd 

  into your /boot.conf in the future. But we'll see a separate announcement when that part is done. Let's stay tuned! :)

• Martti Kumparinen has tackled generating a UFS file system on a "large" (~5.5TB) disk. As the process is not straight forward, he has posted a howto that may help in the future. Any takers for adding comments and integrating this into The NetBSD Guide? :)

• Manpages are a major component of every Unix system. If you have ever tried to write such a manpage, you 'll have learned that they are in a funny text-based format similar to LaTeX and HTML, with its own processor - *roff. There are several *roff implementations, and the one used in NetBSD currently is the GNU implementation. To provide an alternative here is good for both removing GPL'd code from the NetBSD codebase, and also because groff is written in C++, which is slow to compile, and - well - requires a C++ compiler.

  A change for that situation may arise eventually, as Kristaps Dzonsons has been working on a groff replacement to format Unix manpages recently. See his posting and his homepage for further information.

• I've talked about Xen support for PCI passthrough recently, and Manuel Bouyer has finished his work to get full support for passing in access to specific PCI devices from the Xen Dom0 to DomUs. See his posting to port-xen for more details!

• Staying at Xen for a moment, David Brownlee has written instructions on Installing Windows XP in Xen under NetBSD. Just in case anyone needs to run a legacy system... :)

• The NetBSD operating system supports many different hardware and CPU platforms. For a specific platform, binaries are compiled with a specific compiler, and there is a set of binaries for each platform. This results in a rather big number of different sets of binaries - currently about 50. A different approach with historic precedence is to have one binary work on may hardware platforms, so-called "fat" binaries.

  Gregory McGarry has posted suggestions on how to modify NetBSD's toolchain to produce fat binaries. An interesting concept which would solve a number of problems (think: support, updates, pkgsrc!)

• Qt is a user-interface library found in widespread use in the Unix/Linux world. It's not exactly small, and its prerequirement of the X Window System doesn't it make a #1 choice for embedded systems at the first look. A Qt variant - Qt/Embedded - can be ran without X, though, and which thus avoids all the configuration and hardware support trouble of X in one go.

  On NetBSD, Qt/Embedded could talk to the wscons driver directly, and Valeriy 'uwe' Ushakov has posted about his work on patches to adopt Qt/Embedded to wscons. Who's first to post some screenshots?

The interview is available as mp3 and ogg formats.

Remember to visit the pkgsrcCon website, and if you want to attend it or even give a talk, register soon to help in planing!

[Tags: bsdtalk, pkgsrc]

• There was some progress on puffs, the userland filesystem stemming from last year's Google SoC, some time ago. More example userland filesystems are now available with sysctlfs and ssshfs, see src/share/examples/puffs.

  Rumours say that ssshfs works pretty well, which is a final reason to ditch the (abandoned first cut of the) netbsd-4 branch and make a -current kernel to play with this. BTW, for those wondering what ssshfs is, see ssshfs.c:

   * simple sshfs
   * (silly sshfs?  stupid sshfs?  snappy sshfs?  sucky sshfs?  seven sshfs???)
   * (sante sshfs?  severed (dreams) sshfs?  saucy sshfs?  sauerkraut sshfs?) 

• People complained that there's no ready-made VMware image with NetBSD available, and this has changed now. The #NetBSD blog points at a NAMP (NetBSD + Apache + MySQL + PostgreSQL + PHP) image that has quite a lot of software installed in 187MB size. See the arudius homepage for more information on NAMP.

• Elad, chief security hacker of NetBSD's infrastructure has proposed to add PaX Segvguard as yet another building stone in NetBSD's security architecture:

       PaX Segvguard monitors the number of segfaults in a program
       per-user, in an attempt to detect on-going exploitation attempts
       and possibly prevent them.  One common attack PaX Segvguard can
       help mitigate is when an attacker tries to brute-force a function
       return address, when wanting to perform a return-to-lib attack.  

  See Elad's proposal for more details! Note that a start of the implementation is already in NetBSD-current, but that this is still work-in-progress.

• BSDtalk did an interview with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam (jlam@), it's available in mp3 and ogg.

• Last, if you don't know what to wish for Xmas, there's something for the average BSD geek: a daemon-themed bag (which is probably not really authorized by the Daemon owner, but well).