hubertf's NetBSD blog

hubertf's NetBSD Blog
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[20091210]	Catching up on source changes I've dug through my source-changes archive once more, and there are entries from February(?!?) to mid-October 2009 in there that I think may be of interest to casual followers of NetBSD. Before I go into the details, let me add a hint on the "source-changes-full" mailing list, which is like source-changes, but the mails there also contain diffs of the changes (as long as they are below 1MB in size). The -full list is not archived on mail-index.netbsd.org, and I must have missed the announcement. It's definitely useful! So, what interesting changes have there been to NetBSD-current recently? Here we go: New / updated drivers: sdtemp(4) reads the on-DIMM temperature sensors following the JEDEC Standard No. 21-C Section 4-7. gpio(4) got support for Intel ICH southbridges as found on Intel SS4220-E (ICH7) and Acorp 6A815EPD (ICH2) motherboards lom(4) supports the LOMlite "Lights Out Management" boards found on Sun hardware like the LOMlite found on the Sun Netra t1 and the LOMlite2 found on Sun Netra T1/X1 and Sun Fire V100/V120. An initial version of a SD/MMC driver for the Winbond W83L518D (and probably W83L519D) Integrated Media Reader with PNP bus attachment glue was added. acpiwmi(4) was added to added, to further support ACPI development. See the specs for more details. piixide(4) now supports Intel 3400 SATA New kernel interfaces and library functions include: getdate(3) and getdate_err(3) were added according to POSIX.1 and the Open Group RAIDframe was sped up massively when checking parity after a system crash with the help of a parity map. This work was done during this year's Google Summer-of-Code. A "netbsd.inet.icmp.bmcastecho" sysctl was added to disable replies to the broadcast address. Floating point functions f{min,max,dim}{,l,f}(3) were added udl(4) adds support for DisplayLink DL-1x0/1x5 based USB LCDs and USB-VGA adaptors Random other additions and changes include: hdaudioctl(8) can be used to manipulate hdaudio(4) devices The NetBSD/playstation2 port was removed due to a lack of developer support. It's still available in CVS. The NetBSD/i386 bootloader now knows a "dev" command to list available boot devices and their size. Newly imported and updated 3rd party software includes: pfsync from OpenBSD 4.2, adopted in this year's Google Summer of Code. PF from OpenBSD 4.2 was imported. Multicast DNS ("Bonjour") support was added, based on Apple's mDNSResponder. Enable with "dns: mdns" in /etc/nsswitch.conf. GNU binutils were updated to version 2.19 Many of the bazillion of X.org components were updated - ways too many to note in detail. BIND was updated to 9.7.0b1 Flex 2.5.35 was imported A new m4(1) was imported [Tags: bonjour, google-soc, gpio, hdaudio, lom, mdns, pfsync, posix, raidframe, sdtemp, source-changes] [Slashdot It!]
[20091209]	Logical Volume Management (LVM) Adam Hamsik has been working on Logical Volume Management (LVM) support in NetBSD during the Google Summer of Code and beyond. The code is a from-scratch implementation of the same interfaces found in the Linux kernel, and as a result, the same userland tools can be used. The code is now enabled in NetBSD by default, i.e. it will be part of NetBSD 6.0 (quite some time down the road, but time to test and shake out the bugs is now). Besides the code, there's also documentation available in the NetBSD Guide. Happy Volume Managing! [Tags: lvm] [Slashdot It!]
[20091109]	TeX Live 2009 - including NetBSD binaries Today, TeX Live 2009 was released. After teTeX is no longer maintained, TeX Live is the Unix (and other) TeX distribution. And with the binary release come binaries for NetBSD: ``Executables for the cygwin and i386-netbsd platforms are now included, while the other BSD distributions have been dropped; we were advised that OpenBSD and FreeBSD users get TEX through their package systems, plus there were difficulties in making binaries that have a chance of working on more than one version. ''. The NetBSD binaries were provided by Jukka Salmi. Mmm, community involvement. Thanks Jukka! [Tags: TeXlive] [Slashdot It!]
[20091107]	NetBSD vs. Microkernels - From Kernel to Userspace and Abroad A few weeks ago I made a comment about NetBSD not being a "microkernel" despite it's move to kernel modules. Antti Kantee wrote back to me (Hi Antti!) reminding me of his work on RUMP, PUFFS and the like, which I think does definitely deserve mentioning in that context: With RUMP, PUFFS and the like, Antti is set on a mission to define interfaces between kernel components, and move those kernel components from inside the kernel to the userland. As a result, the (once) kernel-code is now running as "simple" userland processes that have all the benefits like memory protection and not taking down the whole system in case of an error. Examples that Antti has been bashing on started with moving file systems to the userland, which resulted in PUFFS and ReFUSE, an implementation of the Linux inferface of File systems in USErland (FUSE). Not stopping at file systems (which are traditionally used for accessing data on storage media, like e.g. for ntfs-3g), Antti went further and moved into getting network services like SSHFS going - in userland, based on FUSE. Not stopping there, more recent works include: USB device driver support, to run NetBSD's USB stack in userland - and with it a bunch of USB device drivers as well, e.g. storage (umass) and wireless adapters. Running NFS in userspace, and with it the underlying TCP/IP stack? Well, we've had nfsd(8) for quite some time, but this time it's the same code running in userland as in kernel. The thread also answers questions on why we want to virtualize nfsd+networking with a process and why do we want to do that by reusing kernel code. Remember when NetBSD got (re)FUSE? All of a sudden we got a bazillion of filesystems back then. So why not turn this development around, and make RUMP available as an interface for all sort of drivers to other operating systems. That way, they can get our file systems, usb stack and drivers, etc., and run them in userspace as well. Developing a driver on one operating system, and using it on many - a wet dream would come true! Sounds impossible? Ye fear not, it's been done! Arnaud 'stacktic' Ysmal already has ported RUMP to FreeBSD and Linux, the work is available via pkgsrc/misc/rump, and there is also Arnaud's page on Rump on non-NetBSD Operating Systems for more information. Whew... lots of research and development going on in this area, and - getting back to the initial topic - we may well see an operating system in the future that moves from the monolithic to a microkernel approach, and it may or may not be called NetBSD. Fact is, that a lot of research is going on in that area, on NetBSD, here and now. Hats off, Antti! [Tags: fuse, microkernel, nfs, ntfs-3f, puffs, refuse, rump, sshfs, tcp/ip, ukfs, usb] [Slashdot It!]
[20091107]	On the difference between "data" and "information" Thanks xkcd, from the information scientist inside me! [Tags: data, hubertf, information, xkcd] [Slashdot It!]
[20091025]	Harddisk image cloning for Unix - g4u 2.4 released g4u ("ghosting for unix") version 2.4 has been released. g4u is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common set up on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported. Three years of time have passed since the last full release of g4u. Here's a list of what's new / changes in g4u 2.4: Major new supported device types include bluetooth keyboards and SD/MMC cards - feedback highly appreciated! Lots of new drivers. Too many to list, please see the g4u section of my blog at http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html?-tags=g4u for details. Based on the NetBSD development version from Sep 2009 Source builds native and without root privileges on NetBSD 5.0 and crossbuilds also without root privileges from Mac OS X (tested) and probably others (untested; expected: Solaris, Linux). The g4u 2.4 release is available on the g4u homeage at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ [Tags: g4u] [Slashdot It!]
[20091024]	Fun around daylight saving time (DST) and Unix timezone handling in general It's that time of the year again when I and my friends never know when daylight saving time is switched from summer- to winter time. Do you know? And if you've heared in the news today... do you know when the next change is? There's an easy way to find out, using the zdump(8) utility that comes with about every Unix machine (at least with NetBSD and Mac OS X - is there anything else relevant? :), and the timezone information stored in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. To find out when DST is switched on/off, run the following command: % zdump -v /etc/localtime ... /etc/localtime Sun Mar 29 00:59:59 2009 UTC = Sun Mar 29 01:59:59 2009 CET isdst=0 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 29 01:00:00 2009 UTC = Sun Mar 29 03:00:00 2009 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 25 00:59:59 2009 UTC = Sun Oct 25 02:59:59 2009 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 25 01:00:00 2009 UTC = Sun Oct 25 02:00:00 2009 CET isdst=0 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 28 00:59:59 2010 UTC = Sun Mar 28 01:59:59 2010 CET isdst=0 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 28 01:00:00 2010 UTC = Sun Mar 28 03:00:00 2010 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 31 00:59:59 2010 UTC = Sun Oct 31 02:59:59 2010 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 31 01:00:00 2010 UTC = Sun Oct 31 02:00:00 2010 CET isdst=0 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 27 00:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 27 01:59:59 2011 CET isdst=0 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 27 01:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 27 03:00:00 2011 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 30 00:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Oct 30 02:59:59 2011 CEST isdst=1 /etc/localtime Sun Oct 30 01:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Oct 30 02:00:00 2011 CET isdst=0 ... The data is given relative to Universal Time Coordinated, which you can determine on a NetBSD system by running "date -u": % date Sat 24 Oct 14:30:24 CEST 2009 % date -u Sat 24 Oct 12:30:26 UTC 2009 And if you wonder what timezone you're actually in, you probably knokw that /etc/localtime is a symbolic link to a file that fits to your exact timezone, with all related information: % ls -la /etc/localtime lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 33 May 26 2007 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin If you always wanted to know what timezones there are, have a look at /usr/share/zoneinfo: % ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/ Africa Chile GB-Eire Israel NZ-CHAT UCT America Cuba GMT Jamaica Navajo US Antarctica EET GMT+0 Japan PRC UTC Arctic EST GMT-0 Kwajalein PST8PDT Universal Asia EST5EDT GMT0 Libya Pacific W-SU Atlantic Egypt Greenwich MET Poland WET Australia Eire HST MST Portugal Zulu Brazil Etc Hongkong MST7MDT ROC iso3166.tab CET Europe Iceland Mexico ROK posixrules CST6CDT Factory Indian Mideast Singapore zone.tab Canada GB Iran NZ Turkey % ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/ Amsterdam Chisinau Kiev Moscow Sarajevo Vatican Andorra Copenhagen Lisbon Nicosia Simferopol Vienna Athens Dublin Ljubljana Oslo Skopje Vilnius Belfast Gibraltar London Paris Sofia Volgograd Belgrade Guernsey Luxembourg Podgorica Stockholm Warsaw Berlin Helsinki Madrid Prague Tallinn Zagreb Bratislava Isle_of_Man Malta Riga Tirane Zaporozhye Brussels Istanbul Mariehamn Rome Tiraspol Zurich Bucharest Jersey Minsk Samara Uzhgorod Budapest Kaliningrad Monaco San_Marino Vaduz So now that we all that, here's a last cutie: suppose you want to log into a machine on the other end of the world, and still run an application that should use your local timezone, not that that the machine is in. Changing /etc/localtime is not an option, but you can do it on a per-process base by setting the "TZ" environment variable: % date Sat Oct 24 14:35:06 CEST 2009 % ssh remote.example.org date Sat Oct 24 12:35:45 UTC 2009 % ssh remote.example.org env TZ=Europe/Berlin date Sat Oct 24 14:35:58 CEST 2009 Enjoy! [Tags: date, dst, localtime, utc, zdump] [Slashdot It!]
[20091019]	A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) This one is not directly related to NetBSD right now, but it will be, eventually: It's AES, the successor of the DES encryption algorithm explained in a comic-like way. It comes as a play in four acts: First some historical predecessors and related events are introduced, followed by some general crypto basics and a general overview of how AES works. The last act gives some introduction to the math behind it - enjoy! :-) Oh, and why do I think this will be related to NetBSD? Well, there's software cryptography today, and to some extent there are drivers for accelerated crypto co-processors that are supported by NetBSD's opencrypto(9) framework. Even more, some VIA CPUs already have AES hardware on board. With Intel and AMD adding them to their marked-dominating CPUs, I envision that cryptography will happen in a lot more places when they hit the streets. And I guess we can be sure that this will impact all operating systems via standards and protocols. [Tags: aes, rijndael] [Slashdot It!]
[20091018]	When updating your kernel, remember ... ... to also install new kernel modules if you run NetBSD-current, else your system will not boot any more: How? Either unpack modules.tgz set so you get modules matching your kernel in /stand, or run "make install USETOOLS=no DESTDIR=/" in src/sys/modules. [Tags: modules] [Slashdot It!]
[20091014]	Catching up: Webfwlog, git, vnd and sparse disk images, acpismbus Here are two news items from the past few days: Web-based firewall log reporting and analysis tool Webfwlog 0.94 released: ``Webfwlog is a flexible web-based firewall log analyzer and reporting tool. It supports standard system logs for linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Irix, OS X, etc. as well as Windows XP. Supported log file formats are netfilter, ipfilter, ipfw, ipchains and Windows XP. [...] With Webfwlog you can design reports to use on your logged data in whatever configuration you desire. Included are example reports as a starting point. You can sort a report with a single click, "drill-down" on the reports all the way to the packet level, and save your reports for later use. You can also create a link directly to any saved report.'' See the webfwlog homepage for more information. Git copies of cvs modules available - spz@ writes that ``htdocs, othersrc, pkgsrc, src and xsrc are now available as (bare) git repository copies at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/repositories/git. These repositories are currently updated every 30 minutes. They are not authoritative and are not meant to replace cvs, but if you want to track your development that is not yet fit for committing into cvs head or sending in as a PR, and want to use git for that, they may serve as a convenient starting point or reference.'' Support for writing file systems on sparse disk images - File system hacker Antti Kantee writes: ``Yesterday I wanted to write to a file system which was on a sparse disk image. Normally I would have just used a rump mount, but since the file system was not at offset = 0 in the file, this failed. vnd wasn't helpful either: it allowed me to mount the image and then I got weird errors when writing. I just finished adding disklabel support to the various rump_fs utilities. Due to them using the option parsing code of the real mount_fs utilities, I decided to signal the label number with a magic parameter at the end of the device (yes, this really simplifies things currently). Let's assume you're looking at wd0.img. Here's how it works: === SNIP === golem> disklabel wd0.img [...] 16 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs] a: 719712 63 4.2BSD 1024 8192 0 # (Cyl. 0- 714) b: 66657 719775 swap # (Cyl. 714- 780) c: 786369 63 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0- 780) d: 786432 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 780) golem> rump_ffs wd0.img%PART:a% /puffs rump_ffs: "wd0.img" is a non-resolved or relative path. rump_ffs: using "/usr/home/pooka/wd0.img" instead. golem> df /puffs Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail %Cap Mounted on /usr/home/pooka/wd0.img%PART:a% 338471 256211 65337 79% /puffs === SNIP === So you specify the partition number as %PART:n%, where is n is obviously the partition number. Other than that, things work as usual. No vnconfig etc. necessary. '' New ACPI driver: acpismbus(4) - call for testers - Paul Goyette writes that ``At the request of some folks off-list, I have created a driver for ACPI's SMBus Control Method Interface. Basically, this is an acpi-based wrapper to provide device-independant access to i2c/SMBus controllers. (See spec at http://smbus.org/specs/smbus_cmi10.pdf for further info.) To see if your system can use this driver, check the output of acpidump for the existence of a Device(SMB0). If you have an SMB device, I'd appreciate it if you could help test this driver!'' Continue with Paul's mail to learn on how to test the driver, and what limitations there are currently. [Tags: acpi, git, puffs, rump, smbus, webfwlog] [Slashdot It!]*
[20091007]	*man(1) can handle roff files, now** What, roff - never heared of? You should - it's the formatting language that predates HTML and TeX for some many years, and which all nix manpages are written in: % cat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 ... .Dd September 25, 2008 .Dt LS 1 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm ls .Nd list directory contents .Sh SYNOPSIS .Nm .Op Fl AaBbCcdFfghikLlmnopqRrSsTtuWwx1 .Op Ar ... There are many formatting commands, all starting with a dot as first character, and the various commands are grouped in so-called macro packages. Example files in the old-school "man" format and the newer "mandoc" format can be found in man(7) and mdoc(7) manpages on any NetBSD installation, templates can be found in /usr/share/misc/man.template and .../mdoc.template. And in /usr/share/man. :-) Now, with the new change to man(1), you can simply type "man /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1" and the formatted manpage will be shown, just like it always did for "man ls". The fine difference is that the latter command really just shows you a preformatted file (from /usr/share/man/cat1), while the former now really formats the given file on the fly, and shows you the result. Before the new change to man(1), you had to run the formatting tool with the right set of parameters for macro packages and possibly other options manually. Usually, the command is something like nroff -mandoc /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 \| more for terminal output. NetBSD's "nroff" command is really from the GNU roff utilities, and using groff(1) it is also possible to produce PostScript output for pretty-printing: groff -Tps -mandoc /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 >ls.ps lp -dPS ls.ps There are more options when running nroff(1)/groff(1), plus manpages can be stored in compressed format, see /etc/man.conf for some ideas. All this is now hidden behind an easy run of man(1). For a more in-depth introduction of the Unix documentation tools (and many more things!), I recommend reading Kernighan/Pike's Unix Programming Environment. [Tags: groff, nroff, roff] [Slashdot It!]*
[20091004]	NetBSD: runs on gasoline, heating oil and wood (Updated) Found via Kuvaton.com: (Click to enlarge) [Tags: cars] [Slashdot It!]
[20090927]	Looking at the new kernel modules in NetBSD-current In contrast to the current and previous NetBSD releases, NetBSD-current and the next major release (6.0) uses a new system for kernel modules. Unlike the "old" loadable kernel modules (LKMs), the new module framework supports dependencies between modules, and loading of kernel modules on demand. Today, I've found time to install NetBSD-current/i386, and configure things that I use here - /kern, /proc, and some NFS, in addition to a local disk. Now, looking at the list of loaded kernel modules reveals: % modstat NAME CLASS SOURCE REFS SIZE REQUIRES compat misc builtin 0 - - coredump misc filesys 1 3067 - exec_elf32 misc filesys 0 7225 coredump exec_script misc filesys 0 1187 - ffs vfs boot 0 166292 - kernfs vfs filesys 0 11131 - nfs vfs filesys 0 145345 - procfs vfs filesys 0 28068 - ptyfs vfs filesys 0 8975 - Interesting points here are that nfs, kernfs and procfs are just listed in /etc/fstab, and the related filesystem modules are loaded automatically, without a need to worry if they are needed or not. In fact I just assumed NFS is in the GENERIC kernel. Seems it's loaded as module! ;) Another interesting module is "coredump", which is loaded by the module to execure 32bit ELF programs, exec_elf32. This is an example of module dependencies, and again no manual intervention was needed. So what modules are there? First, let's remember that kernel modules are object code that implements facilities for the running kernel, and which interfaces closely with the running kernel. As such, they need to match the kernel version, ideally. When one of the kernel's API or ABI interfaces changes, it's best to rebuild all modules. For NetBSD, the kernel's version is bumped e.g. from 5.99.15 to 5.99.16 for such an interface change, which helps tracking those changes. Back to the question of what modules are there. Now that we know kernel modules are closely tied to the version of the kernel (which still is in the file /netbsd, btw), associated modules -- for the example of NetBSD/i386 5.99.15 -- can be found in /stand/i386/5.99.15/modules: % cd /stand/i386/5.99.15/modules % ls -F accf_dataready/ drm/ lfs/ ptyfs/ accf_httpready/ efs/ mfs/ puffs/ adosfs/ exec_aout/ miniroot/ putter/ aio/ exec_elf32/ mqueue/ radeondrm/ azalia/ exec_script/ msdos/ smbfs/ cd9660/ ext2fs/ nfs/ sysvbfs/ coda/ fdesc/ nfsserver/ tmpfs/ coda5/ ffs/ nilfs/ tprof/ compat/ filecore/ ntfs/ tprof_pmi/ compat_freebsd/ fss/ null/ udf/ compat_ibcs2/ hfs/ overlay/ umap/ compat_linux/ i915drm/ portal/ union/ compat_ossaudio/ kernfs/ ppp_bsdcomp/ vnd/ compat_svr4/ ksem/ ppp_deflate/ coredump/ layerfs/ procfs/ % *ls /.kmod* accf_dataready/accf_dataready.kmod layerfs/layerfs.kmod accf_httpready/accf_httpready.kmod lfs/lfs.kmod adosfs/adosfs.kmod mfs/mfs.kmod aio/aio.kmod miniroot/miniroot.kmod azalia/azalia.kmod mqueue/mqueue.kmod cd9660/cd9660.kmod msdos/msdos.kmod coda/coda.kmod nfs/nfs.kmod coda5/coda5.kmod nfsserver/nfsserver.kmod compat/compat.kmod nilfs/nilfs.kmod compat_freebsd/compat_freebsd.kmod ntfs/ntfs.kmod compat_ibcs2/compat_ibcs2.kmod null/null.kmod compat_linux/compat_linux.kmod overlay/overlay.kmod compat_ossaudio/compat_ossaudio.kmod portal/portal.kmod compat_svr4/compat_svr4.kmod ppp_bsdcomp/ppp_bsdcomp.kmod coredump/coredump.kmod ppp_deflate/ppp_deflate.kmod drm/drm.kmod procfs/procfs.kmod efs/efs.kmod ptyfs/ptyfs.kmod exec_aout/exec_aout.kmod puffs/puffs.kmod exec_elf32/exec_elf32.kmod putter/putter.kmod exec_script/exec_script.kmod radeondrm/radeondrm.kmod ext2fs/ext2fs.kmod smbfs/smbfs.kmod fdesc/fdesc.kmod sysvbfs/sysvbfs.kmod ffs/ffs.kmod tmpfs/tmpfs.kmod filecore/filecore.kmod tprof/tprof.kmod fss/fss.kmod tprof_pmi/tprof_pmi.kmod hfs/hfs.kmod udf/udf.kmod i915drm/i915drm.kmod umap/umap.kmod kernfs/kernfs.kmod union/union.kmod ksem/ksem.kmod vnd/vnd.kmod % find . -type f -print \| wc -l 58 There are directories with major kernel subsystems in the named directory, each one containing various files with the ".kmod" extension, for kernel modules. Subsystems include kernel accept filters, various file systems, compatibility modules, execution modules for various binary formats, and many others. Currently there are 58 kernel modules, and I guess we can expect more in the future. P.S.: I've seen one confusion WRT systems that use kernel modules to whatever extent, as they shrink the size of the actual kernel binary: Even with kernel modules, an operating system is still a monolithic kernel: The modules are tied in closely into the system once loaded, ending in a monolithic system. In contrast, a "microkernel" is something very different, and it doesn't have anything to do with kernel modules. :-) [Tags: kernel, lkm, modules] [Slashdot It!]
[20090919]	pkgsrc via git Did you always feel like ~~exposing your soul to the dark side~~ trying out git, but couldn't find a good reason for? Maybe here's one for you, found via The DragonFly BSD Digest: Matthew Dillon hass etup a GIT pkgsrc repository to give DragonFly users and developers a more reliable(?) way to track the pkgsrc tree. Right now this is just a copy from cvs every 15 minutes, so it won't allow changes back to pkgsrc, but apparently it's much faster to download via git than it is via cvs. For a quick start, run "`git clone git://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/pkgsrc.git`". See Matt Dillon's mail for a bit more information. [Tags: git, pkgsrc] [Slashdot It!]
[20090916]	Article: Arkeia Network Backup Version 8.1 General Availability From the article: ``Arkeia Software, a worldwide provider of backup and disaster recovery software, today announced general availability of Arkeia Network Backup Version 8.1. The release offers features to simplify backup management of hosted platforms, including multi-tenant servers. The release is designed for hosting providers that seek to generate revenue by offering backup services to their customers. For more information visit: http://www.arkeia.com/r/version8.1. [...] New with Version 8.1 is support for AIX 6, Fedora 11, NetBSD 5.0, OpenBSD 4.5, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and Microsoft Windows 7. Arkeia Network Backup protects data on more than 150 platforms, including virtually all Linux and Windows platforms, as well as AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Irix, Macintosh, Netware, Solaris, and VMware. '' See the article and the Arkeia homepage for a lot more information! [Tags: arkeia, backup, products] [Slashdot It!]
[20090912]	Yet another BSD website aggregation site: irbsd.com, BSD News Network Found via BSDnews (which I still find amazingly content-free when it comes to NetBSD): There's are two new BSD-related news aggregation site. The first one is irBSD.com, which carries news on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, and NetBSD (of course :). The other one is the BSD News Network which also carries news from various BSDs. Pick your choice! [Tags: irbsd] [Slashdot It!]
[20090912]	Catching up on source-changes, Apr to Sep 2009 (Updated) I've been slacking with catching up on source-changes again, and today I've found to get at it. Here's a bunch of noteworthy changes that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhereso far: hppa: work for PA2.0 CPUs is under way on the nick-hppapmap branch Work for SMP-enabled NFS is in progress on the yamt-nfs-mp branch A read-only implementation of NiLFS, the New implementation of Logging File System was imported. See http://www.nilfs.org/ for more information, note that this is a new implementation, not a port of the Linux code. boothowto(9) now documents boot flags that are passed in from the bootloader on various platforms. See also the kern.boothowto sysctl. The /etc/rc framework was changed to be silent when requested via the bootloader. Uses the kern.boothowto sysctl to determine what's needed. Can also be set as "rc_silent=yes" in /etc/rc.conf, the boot output can be found in /var/run/rc.log then. Sun's ZFS was imported and adjusted for NetBSD. Is there any documentation for this??? Much 3rd party code code from src/dist, src/crypto/dist, src/gnu/dist was moved to src/external. new POSIX functions stpcpy(3), stpncpy(3) and strnlen(3) Kernel: during shutdown, devices are noew detadched in an orderly fashion, including stacks of file systems and storage drivers like cgd(4), vnd(4) The GPIO framework was greatly revamped, with many new drivers added. unzip(1) was added, which works with libarchive Xen: Add support for ACPI suspend, Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! Xen2 support was removed Drivers added and improved: Support for siisata(4) @ cardbus was added mvsata(4): new Marvell Hercules-I/II SATA driver smsh(4): new SMSC LAN9118 family ethernet driver hdaudio(4): new driver for Intel High Definition Audion, to replace azalia(4) sdmmc(4) adds SD/MMC support Imported software: NTP 4.2.4p7 libevent 1.4.11 IPfilter 4.1.33 binutils 2.19 BIND 9.6.1p1 pcc 0.9.9 Postfix ~~2.6.2~~ 2.6.5 (Thanks, Matthias!) xorg-server 1.6 and many other X parts (too many to list...) [Tags: source-changes] [Slashdot It!]
[20090906]	NetBSD (and others) and the Ruby Benchmark Jamie 'ober' Fournier has wondered what the performance of the Ruby language on NetBSD is, in comparison to other operating system platforms. To answer the question, he ran the Ruby benchmark on a number of operating systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris ... and NetBSD, of course. His page describes the list of operating systems (and versions!) tested, a bit of configuration for each operating system, and the hardware and software versions used. There are two charts available, the first one showing results for Ruby version 1.8.7, the second one with results for Ruby version 1.9. Please note that you can click on the graphs to get the corresponding ruby code - which is not commented too good, and thus leaves it to own interpretation on what exactly the test actually benchmarks. Here's an example graph: From a first look, NetBSD seems to be good for CPU-intensive applications (i.e. it has less overhead), but performance with virtual memory, regular expressions and threading can still be improved. From looking at all the tests, it can be said that NetBSD makes a pretty good platform for Ruby deployment. For more, follow the discussion on the tech-perform list. [Tags: benchmark, ruby] [Slashdot It!]
[20090831]	g4u 2.4alpha4 is available for testing Again much more time has passed than I expected, but over the past few days I've made sure that g4u compiles against the latest NetBSD-current sources, and so I'm making g4u 2.4alpha4 available for resting. What is g4u? ``g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.'' Get it now: ISO compressed ISO First floppy 2nd floppy 3rd floppy all 3 floppies sources What's new in g4u 2.4alpha4: Make this build with NetBSD-current as of 2009-08-30 Trim kernel some more (NFS server, quotas) Put only on the CD what's really needed (31MB->5MB) Drivers for: Marvell Hercules-I/II SATA controller SiI SteelVine SATA controllers Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet cards Attansic/Atheros L1E Ethernet cards & PHY SD/MMC cards as media - feedback highly appreciated! Again, I'd like to hear any reports if this version works better or worse than any previous alpha version or release, esp. under the light that this version is (another...) attempt to switch to ACPI, which is on by default in NetBSD now. Also, I'd appreciate any reports if using SD/MMC cards on internal card readers work as media - I do not have any hardware to test this. Let me hear if it works for you! If things go well, I want to put this out as 2.5 before it gets old again. ;-) [Tags: g4u] [Slashdot It!]
[20090830]	netboot.me - Netbooting over the internet From the netboot.me homepage: ``netboot.me is a service that allows you to boot nearly any operating system or utility on any computer with a wired internet connection - without having to know ahead of time what you'll want to boot. Once you can netboot.me, you never need to update your boot disk again! netboot.me works through the magic of netbooting. There are a number of ways to boot a computer with netboot.me. The simplest is to download a bootable image and burn it to a CD, USB memory stick, or floppy disk. Boot off it on any networked computer, and it will automatically fetch the latest boot options from netboot.me and let you choose from dozens of installation, recovery, testing, portable desktop and other tools. You can also start netboot.me from any computer running gPXE, or from any netbootable computer with some simple tweaks to your DHCP server.'' A nice idea, BUT... there's not NetBSD. Yet. Anyone feel like adding it? Drop me a line when it's there! :-) (And maybe make sure it doesn't immediately panic with "ACPI autoload failed - no such file or directory" like that other BSD version there does for me ;) [Tags: netboot] [Slashdot It!]