• Hosting BSD
• BSD as A Desktop
• BSD as Servers
• Infinity. Freedom. FREEBSD
• BSD Security
• Guide to FreeBSD
• PC-BSD Uncovered
• Explore NetBSD

• NetBSD's "let's move kernel parts to the userland" RUMP project is still under heavy development, and in order to make testing of compatibility after kernel changes easier, a new command "rumptest" was added to build.sh: ``Basically you say:

  	    ./build.sh ${yourargs} tools ; ./build.sh ${yourargs} rumptest
  	

  Where yourargs are what have you, e.g. '-U -u -o -O /objs'.

  The latter builds only the rump kernel libs and uses some ld+awk magic to figure out if things go right or not. This is to avoid having to install headers and build libs (which is too slow since a full build is too slow). The magic is not a substitute for a full build, but it is n+1 times faster and works probably 99.9% of the time.

  The scheme uses a number of predefined component sets (e.g. tmpfs+vfs+rumpkern) to test linkage. They are currently listed in build.sh. This area probably needs some work in the future. It would be nice to autogenerate the combinations somehow.

  If things go well, you get something like this:

          ===> Rump build&link tests successful
          ===> build.sh ended:   Wed Nov 18 20:10:59 EET 2009 

  '' See Antti's Antti's mail to tech-kern: on how to tell if things didn't go so well, and what to do in that case.

• According to Wikipedia, ``Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessors, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors.''

  Supporting NUMA in a contemporary (i.e.: Intel centric) SMP-enabled operating system requires following a bunch of standards, two of which are parsing of two tables, the System Resource Affinity Table (SRAT) and the System Locality Information Table (SLIT). Both tables are accessible via the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), and according to the German-language Wikipedia, the SRAT is used to assign local memory to local threads to boost their performance, and the SLIT defines the "distance" of the nodes among themselves, which is used to determine the "nearest" memory if local memory is not enough.

  Now, Christop Egger has posted patches to add an ACPI SLIT parser and an ACPI SRAT parser. See the two postings for dmesg pr0n from his tests on an 8-node system.

• Staying with ACPI and Christoph Egger, he found that even though the ACPI spec defines an ACPI device for fans, BIOS vendors and OEMs do their own thing. To accommodate things like the fan sensor found in the ACPI Thermal Zone in his HP Pavillion DV9700 laptop he has proposed a driver to extend the acpitz(4) driver with fan information. That way, envstat(8) can be used to display the ran's RPMs:

  [acpitz0]
    Processor Thermal Zone:     56.000   95.000                       degC
                       fan:       2840                                 RPM 

• Staying with driver games, iMil writes me that there's documentation on getting DRI, AIGLX, Composite and Compiz going with NetBSD 5.0 available in the O(ther)NetBSD Wiki now.

  The documentation covers how to enable the Direct Rendering Manager (DRI), setting up and configuring Modular X.org, assuring that everything's in place, and how to get Compitz going. Mmm, wobbly windows at last! :-)

• While we're talking funky desktop stuff: Marc Balmer has submitted a patch to get touchpanel support for ums(4). ums(4) is for USB mice, and in contrast to mice, touch panels need to deal with absolute numbers, not relative numbers.

• Back to the guts of the kernel, another patch suggested by Christop Egger was for adding x2apic. What is x2apic? X2APIC is ``an Intel-only feature but can also be found in virtual environments with support for CPU apic id's > 0xff.

  I.e. Xen 4.0 (not yet released) supports 128 CPUs in HVM guests with the CPUs enumerated with even apic id's. That means you need x2apic for the 128th CPU :) ''

• While speaking of Xen: Xen 4.0 is coming soon, and there's a call to help testing it on NetBSD!

  Install Mercurial, check out latest Xen sources, apply a bunch of patches, build and install. Examples of commands are given, in addition to changes required for /boot.cfg etc.

  Report your findings to port-xen!

• Last one for today: Michal Gladecki, Editor-in-Chief of BSD Magazine writes: ``We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter at www.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox. Also, you can now download any of the previous issues from our website. The first online issue -- 2/2010 -- is coming out in February. Please spread the word about BSD Magazine. '' Click!

Unrelated, I've been playing with git a bit over the past few days, and wile I have a number of questions building up (which will be subject to tech-repository or so), what I can say today is that the speed of "git pull" with NetBSD's git repository and my 1MBit DSL line reminds me a lot of the times when I used SUP with my 56k modem - it took forever, too. :-(

[Tags: acpi, acpitz, aiglx, Articles, bsdmac, compiz, dmesg, dri, numa, rump, slit, touchpanel, ums, x2apic, xen]

The article introduces real-time scheduling and the scheduling classes found in NetBSD 5.0, and gives an estimate on the response timeframe that can be expected for real-time applications. Setting scheduling policy and priority from a userland application is shown next, and programming examples for thread affinity, dynamic CPU sets and processor sets are shown. Besires C APIs, there are also a number or new commands in NetBSD 5.0 that can be used to control things from the command line, e.g. to define scheduling behaviour and manipulate processor sets. My favourite gem is the CPU used in the cpuctl(8) example, which is identified as "AMD Engineering Sample". :-)

[Tags: Articles, dmesg, posix, pthread, smp]

Karoina Lesinska was kind enough to provide me with detailed information, and here's what I can report about the contents of the mag and the included DVD:

• There's a 3/4 page announcement of NetBSD 5.0, or what it will contain once released. Includes the long list of news & goods already announced elsewhere.

• NetBSD install, by Patrick Pippen. He talks about how to go through the NetBSD installer (sysinst), including language and keyboard selection, selecting and partitioning the harddisk to install to, installing bootblocks, selecting the installation media, installing the base system, selection of the system password encryption algorithm, and setting the root password and shell.

  Beyond that, the article also gives help on getting started after the installation. Format of the text is interesting, with parts of the pkgsrc setup description being included as comments in the typescript, but the contents' still there.

• BSD live, by Jan Stedehouder, compares BSD-based Live CDs. Includes NetBSD-based ones like NewBIE and NetBSD Live. No Jibbed, thought. :( The article gives an overview of the contents of each Live CD, and includes lots of screenshots for an early impression of the look & feel.

• Play Music on Your Slug with NetBSD, by Donald T. Hayford. A previous issue of the BSD Mag described how to install NetBSD on the Linksys NSLU2 (AKA slug), and this article explains how to set the system up so it can act as a web-based mp3 player that you can hook up to the stereo.

• Interview about NetBSD WAPBL, with Simon Burge, Antti Kantee and Greg Oster. Federico Biancuzzi asks the NetBSD developers who worked to get journaling into NetBSD about what it is, how it is integrated in the current file system implementation, what features there are, benchmark results, ideas for future improvements, how to set it up, space requirements, interaction with backups. Furthermore, the development and testing process with its interaction with the RUMP subsystem is discussed, and finally under what license the implementation is available.

• Besides those articles that focus on NetBSD and/or pkgsrc, they are also mentioned in further articles, including "Multi-User Conferencing" by Eric Schnoebelen and Michele Cranmer, "Installing Prelude IDS" by Henrik Lund Kramshoj, and "If it moves! crypt it" by Marko Milenovic.

• Last, the included DVD is bootable on i386 to install NetBSD from CD. It also contains the 2008Q2 snapshot of pkgsrc, precompiled binary packages for 4.0/i386 and bootable ISO images for amd64, i386, and the i386pkg CD from the NetBSD 4.0 release.

  Last, there's a snapshot of NetBSD-current as of Sep 7 2008, with bootable ISOs for installing on i386 and amd64, plus sources.

  There's a full page in the mag describing the contents of the DVD in detail, and where to get more information if needed, so noone's left out in the rain.

The NetBSD configuration article talks about basic setup for networking, ssh, the Message-Of-The-Day, NetBSD's central rc.conf config file, syslog, crontabs, time synchronization, basic system security and package management. Following that, he talks about updating the system from binary snapshots, and outlines further tweaks like softdep, silencing IDE drives, using CDroms and wscons, changing your shell, installing a new bootloader and some others. The last part covers building NetBSD from source.

In pkgsrc configuration, Pierre-Philipp shows how to install packages from binaries and sources (the main part), and also covers pkgsrc security and bulk builds.

[Tags: Articles]

For today, there are a few German language articles in the 1/2009 issue of the german FreeX magazine:

• Not every software major release has a noteworthy list of features. This is different for the NetBSD 5 release - not only does it include a number of security-relevant changes, but there are substantial changes in the kernel. Read more in Markus Illenseer's article.

• File systems in user space promise to connect kernel and applications, and the boundaries between data, files and file systems start to vanish. NetBSD offers an implementation for file systems in user space since 2005, and in the mean time it has reched full source code compatibility to the FUSE standard. The article also contains an interview with Alistair Crooks, developer of NetBSD's user space-based iSCSI implementation. Read more in Ulrich Habel's article.

• Not a full article, but a useful entry from the "Tips & Tricks" section, there's one on quick creation of a chroot using mksandbox from NetBSD's new bulk build framework.

The developers are

• Anders Magnusson, long-term VAX hacker and recent PCC maintainer
• David Maxwell, former security officer
• Lubomir Sedlacik, who works on pkgsrc release engineering and security, and
• Jeremy C. Reed, who works on various BSD-related PR projects.

BTW, FreeX is always looking for (german language) authors, too!

[Tags: Articles, eeepc, freex]

• NetBSD achieves permanent charity status: ``The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

  Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment. ''

• Metadata journaling support added to FFS: ``In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

  Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a ?log? option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the ?softdep? option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information. ''

  Kudos for this go to Wasabi Systems, Darrin B. Jewell, Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran!

• Uli 'rhaen' Habel wrote me that he wrote a blosxom plugin for gnats: ``During my work for pkgsrc I started to write articles for my blog and I referred to several PRs from the NetBSD gnats system. However I just wanted to type the PR in the form of e.g. NetBSD PR pkg/39230 and would like to have my blog software to link to the webpage automatically''.

  Blosxom is the blogging software that Uli and I use, and you can learn more about his GNATS plugin, and download it, here. (Apparently I didn't get to install this plugin yet, that's why you don't see a link on the above quoted text :-).

• Stefan Schumacher wrote me that the german magazine Die Zeit has an article on operating systems showing screenshots of several operating systems, starting with C64 Basic V2, going over MS-DOS and Windows to more esoteric ones like Mac OS X, Solaris, and *cough* BSD. Check the screenshot of the latter one! ;)

• Another one from Uli Habel: His (NetBSD|pkgsrc) blog is now syndicated on www.onetbsd.org.

• Wilhelm Buehler hints me at EuroBSDcon 2008: ``EuroBSDCon is the european technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDCon 2008 will take place in Strasbourg, France 18-19 October 2008 at University of Strasbourg.''

• There's an article by Warren Webb titled "Free software encircles embedded design" at Electronic Design, Strategy, News (EDN). The article starts by illustriating open source software as a natural (and cheap, or course) alternative to commercial systems, describes benefits of the development model and the wealth of applications and how they can be used in an embedded environment. It continues talking about licenses, tools, and alternatives to Linux, including NetBSD.

• Those into funky gadgets may like the MoPods may be for you: ``As if a little charm pet wasn't reason enough for being, the MoPods are actually practical. When your mobile phone rings or receives a text within a metre of your MoPod then the little blighter will get in a tizz, spin round and round and a little light will flash wildly in reaction. The perfect visual warning if your phone is on silent or you are in a noisy bar.

  Whether hung on your bag, your clothes, your keys or your mobile, MoPods are a must-have, or as they say in Japan, a "hitsuyou".''

• Back to our fine operating system: Ian Hibbert, who has written NetBSD's bluetooth stack, has worked on a PAN daemon for NetBSD. This allows to perform personal area networking in various ways:

  NAP

  Network Access Point is like an ethernet bridge

  GN

  Group ad-hoc Network is a NAP with no external network

  PANU

  Personal Area Networking User in both host (like GN but a single connection) and client (the device that connects to all the others) mode.

  All this will come in an upcoming NetBSD release (well, and FreeBSD too, it seems, as they like it :-) near you pretty soon, see Iain's mail to tech-net.

From the SSD/Linux homepage: ``SSD/Linux is the Linux distribution developed by Plat'Home, for use with the MicroServer series. The distribution is optimized to fit on a small internal ROM, while offering all necessary functions for networking and peripheral devices.

The name of the distribution is derived from its place of development, Sotokanda in Tokyo, in imitation of BSD. It is published under a BSD-style open license. See the User's Guide for more information.

While the OS uses a Linux kernel, most of the userland is taken from NetBSD.''

[Tags: Articles, linux, plathome, Products]

The contents:

• Developer Roland Illig about pkglint and the pkgsrc documentation
• Developer Ulrich Habel about pkgsrc on Solaris
• Developer Thomas Klausner about pkgsrc-wip and the updating of packages
• Getting started with pkgsrc: about pkgsrc-wip and pkgsrc Hackathons
• A talk with pkgsrc user Aleksey Cheusov
• Towards an userfriendly Ports system: the MidnightBSD mports
• Simplified package management on GoboLinux
• The Zero Install system

1. Installation sets and precompiled binary packages for NetBSD/i386
2. Installation sets for amd64, macppc, sparc and sparc64
3. Installation sets for amiga, alpha, atari, mac68k, netxt68k and sun3
4. Sources

• Introduction
• Release engineering, Sendmail, and kauth
• PaX, fileassoc, and Veriexec
• Linux compat, XFree86, pkgsrc, proplib, and Xen
• Filesystems
• iSCSI and optical disc support
• Bluetooth, mobile devices, agr
• Google Summer of Code
• Hackathons and funding

Before you jump and start mailing, have a further look at Dru's blog on what is considered as a "good" article, and what topics are appreciated most.

Personally, I'd appreciate if a "BSD Magazine" would have some NetBSD content. Start writing NOW! :)

[Tags: Articles]

Besides talking bit about pkgsrc, in general, Mark did a number of interviews:

• Alistair Crooks about the history, present state and future of pkgsrc
• Hubert Feyrer: The history, failures and prospects of pkgsrc
• Jordan K. Hubbard: The invention of the FreeBSD Ports system, its drawbacks and the merits of MacPorts
• Erwin Lansing about the FreeBSD Ports
• Marc Espie: Comparison of pkgsrc and the OpenBSD Ports system
• Christoph Badura: Problems and drawbacks of the pkgsrc system
• Joerg Sonnenberger about pkgsrc on DragonFly BSD and his pkgsrc development projects
• James K. Lowden: The pkgjam project

Recommended reading!

[Tags: Articles, pkgsrc]

Ulrich Habel's article "Der Daemon und die Sonne" talks about pkgsrc on Solaris. He describes how to bootstrap the environment using a precompiled binary bootstrap that was made available as Solaris package, then continues on how to use pkg_add and other tools for using precompiled binaries that are available via www.sunpkg.de.

Dr. Heiko Herrman's article "Daemonic Tux: Linux mit pkgsrc" describes the situation where he gets to a new workplace that has Linux on the desktop, but that calls for some software maintenance. Instead of hunting down the system administrator, pkgsrc can be used to install everything pkgsrc offers into his home directory, and without root privileges. The article gives details on how to bootstrap pkgsrc by compiling, then explains how to compile packages via pkgsrc and gives some hints on pkgsrc's internals.

The articles cannot be read online, information about the magazine and how to get it can be found at www.cul.de.

[Tags: Articles, linux, pkgsrc, solaris]

The article goes on into the details of the new version of the GPL, it's revised definition of "freedom" and esp. how other projects like NetBSD view the new license, citing Martin Husemann from the NetBSD board of directors: ``We don't think that the switch of GNU programs from GPL v2 to GPLv3 will affect NetBSD or its users much, since we are not in violation of the additional provisions that GPL v3 stipulates. It is a long term goal of NetBSD to become GPL free, but the potential change in license will not affect the scheduling of that goal. Furthermore, the GPL programs in NetBSD are clearly separated from the rest of the source so one can easily distribute a GPL-free NetBSD system (with missing functionality specially in the toolchain parts).

Since pkgsrc does not redistribute third party packages, it is also not affected. For users of pkgsrc, and creators of binary pkg sets or CDs/DVDs, it has versatile provisions to express licensing restrictions implied by the created packages (like LICENSE=, ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES, NO_BIN_ON_FTP, NO_BIN_ON_CDROM)''.

The author concludes that ``The Free Software Foundation has dumped a load of restrictions on us with GPLv3 and told us that restrictions lead to freedom and that it is good for us. That's a little too Bush administration-like for me. [...] GNU, this is as far as we go. I'm breaking up with you. I think we should see other groups of userland operating system tools (or users, as the case may be). I'd prefer it if you took my number out of your cell phone and pretended we never went out.''

[Tags: Articles, gpl]

Plus hey, NetBSD DOES run most of the Linux software, anyways. :)

FWIW, another article "NetBSD: An alternative to Xubuntu and Ubuntu Lite for machines with low specs" talks about the same topic, as does "Inherent bloat with desktop-specific Linux distributions".

[Tags: Articles, blogs, pinderkent]

• Linuxdays Chemnitz: I was only there for my presentation on sunday, due to not feeling too well the days before. Still, Stefan, Jörg, Charlie and many others staffed the booth just fine, and I think every single household in and around Chemnitz has a NetBSD install and/or Live CD now. :)

  Related talks to mention are Stefan Schumacher's talk on hardening systems with systrace and deleting data. My own talk was not too NetBSD specific, showing an application on how to implement dynamic DNS with some retail web/domain hoster. Slides for my talks are available as OpenOffice .ODP and as PDF. (I'll reconsider the move from TeX/prosper to OpenOffice after it was NOT as easy as I expected to find a machine running OOo for presentation purpose, after my laptop's harddisk crashed on the way to Chemnitz!)

• While at roadshows: Stefan Schumacher has made DIN A4 pkgsrc flyers in english and german language.

• NetBSD's puff-based FUSE implementation "refuse" is now in a state to also run the NTFS-g3 filesystem, which offers read/write support for NTFS. It's available from pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g.

• Google News found me an article that NetBSD stack supports Geode NAS design: ``Wasabi Systems Inc.'s BSD-based NAS (network attached storage) software stack now supports a Geode-based reference design from AMD. Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS, combined with AMD's Geode LX NAS RDK (reference design kit), provides a secure, reliable platform for the development of NAS devices, according to Wasabi. ''

  While that's all fine for Wasabi, it should be noted that whatever the company Wasabi offers is not automatically available in the freely available operating system called NetBSD. Integration efforts would have to happen first, so the headline of that article is unfortunately misleading if not to say plain wrong!

• Another article that's more to the point: Julio M. Merino Vidal has worked on getting multiboot support into NetBSD, and in his article ``Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible'' he talks more about it.

• Andrew Doran has done lots of work on NetBSD's thread and SMP implementation recently, and he has made a comparison between performance of the Scheduler-Activations-based code in NetBSD 4 and the one that will be in NetBSD 5 (AKA NetBSD-current, currently numbered as 4.99.13). See his mail to tech-kern or watch the images for 'make cleandir' on an empty source tree and the MySQL supersmack benchmark.

• Google runs another Summer of Code, and this year it's not clear upfront who will be allowed as mentoring organizations. NetBSD is ready to participate again, and there's an official announcement from NetBSD about this, including pointers to our suggested/wanted list of projects and the project application HowTo. People interested in submitting a project proposal (via google!) are encouraged to use the remaining time until the deadline to discuss their proposals on the public NetBSD tech-* lists! (Personally I'll try to stay out of GSoC this year to finish some reallife work. At least that's the plan so far ...)

• Three new security advisories were released:
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-001: Integer overflow in ktruser()
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-002: Integer overflows in Render and DBE extensions
  • NetBSD Security Advisory 2007-003: BIND multiple denial of service vulnerabilities

• Another article that doesn't mention NetBSD but g4u: ``How to Install a New Hard Drive: Tech Clinic'' by Joel Johnson. From the article: `` To make your new drive work like your old drive, you'll need a disk "cloner." There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you're comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I've had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure''.

1. "Daten sicher löschen" (deleting files safely) talks about deleting files in a secure way. The article also mentions a NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 based Live CD called "NetBSD/Schrubber", an article and slides for a presentation about the topic that Stefan will give at the Chemnitz Linuxdays 2007.

2. "Systrace" contains an (also german language) introduction on what Systrace is and how to use it, including an article and presentation slides that Stefan gave at the GUUG Spring Talks 2007 and will give at the Chemnitz Linuxdays 2007.

The german-language article introduces two ways to implement encrypted file systems under NetBSD. CGD is a NetBSD-specific solution which works on the disk-block layer, the other one is CFS, which uses the NFS server interface and works under BSD, Linux and Solaris. Thus, CFS can be used in heterogenous networks and on changable media to exchange data.

[Tags: Articles, cfs, cgd, Security]

Too much focus on Linux and too little focus on NetBSD, but it may still serve as useful material when trying to tell your boss/buddy/whatever what Xen is and why it is yet another reason for going NetBSD.

(While there: anyone up for providing patches to bring the NetBSD/Xen HowTo up to speed for Xen3 from the start? Send your patches to www [at] NetBSD.org!)

[Tags: Articles, xen]

As well as John-Mark's RISC OS 6-related work, a number of other enhancements have been committed into the emulator's source code vault by Tom: these include [...] improved support for running ARM Linux and ARM NetBSD, a rewritten timing system, and more. ''

Anyone got a package for this, plus instructions on how to run NetBSD/acorn32?

Update: I've fixed the link...

[Tags: arm, Articles]

I haven't tried it, and I'll most likely not have time for it soonish (and I'll hopefully not need it ever :-), so no first-hands experiences from me. But if anyone can make a statement about this tool on NetBSD, I'd love to hear about it (and I'll promise posting an update here :). Anyone?

[Tags: Articles]

Print it, and put it on your boss' desk!

[Tags: Articles]

Citing from the article, ``The authors show how to use image backups to return a system to a known state with a few commands. [...] g4u [...] is a simple, elegant and well-documented tool that boots a NetBSD kernel''

For those that forgot, g4u ("ghost 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.

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

Also from the "cool, they use my source code"-department: Looking for NetBSD in the latter one revealed quite a number of projects that use sources that mention NetBSD, either in copyright messages, single functions they've copied or RCS IDs that show how the code went from one project to another.

Here's a list of projects that I've found use NetBSD sources in one way or other:

• MinGW - Minimalistic GNU for Windows:
  .../src/newlib/libc/posix/popen.c

• BSD Utils for Linux/UN*X:
  .../bsd-utils-aconf/bsd-utils-aconf/bin/cat/cat.c

• uC/IP - TCP/IP for microcontrollers:
  .../ucip/ucip/ucip1/src/InetAddr.c

• POSIX/2 environment for OS/2:
  .../posix2/posix2/tools/tail/extern.h

• Etherboot:
  .../etherboot-5.0/contrib/tftp-hpa-0.17/tftp/tftp.c (via OpenBSD)

• OpenSSH for NetWare:
  .../openssh/openssh/openssh/openbsd-compat/sys-queue.h (via OpenBSD)

• Darwin-Ports Base:
  .../dports_base/src/programs/mtree/mtree.c

• GNU Shishi - A Kerberos 5 implementation:
  .../shishi/shishi/inetutils/libls/ls.c (via OpenBSD)

• net-snmp:
  .../net-snmp/net-snmp/apps/snmpnetstat/route.c (via OpenBSD)

• Snort:
  .../snort/src/win32/WIN32-Includes/syslog.h (via OpenBSD)

• MRT:
  .../mrt/src/programs/datadist/mytime.h

• GNU Internet Utilities:
  .../inetutils/inetutils/inetutils/libls/print.c , .../inetutils/inetutils/inetutils/libls/ls.h (via OpenBSD)

• Amanda Tape Backup:
  .../amanda/amanda/amanda/common-src/queue.h

• Hurd on Mach on PowerPC:
  .../hurdppc/gnu-osfmach/ppc/POWERMAC/scsi_53C94_hdw.c

• PostgreSQL:
  .../pgsql/pgsql/src/port/memcmp.c

• Watt-32 tcp/ip stack:
  .../watt-32/watt-32/INC/NET/IF_ARC.H

• Cisco Enterprise Print System:
  .../ceps/ceps/isc-dhcp/common/inet_addr.c (via ISC DHCP)

• Samba4:
  .../source/heimdal/lib/roken/vis.c

• BSD indent:
  .../indent/indent/indent/src/indent_codes.h

• VERMONT - VERsatile MONitoring Toolkit:
  .../v/vermont/trunk/libpcap-mmap/arcnet.h (via libpcap)

• BZFlag - Multiplayer 3D Tank Game:
  .../bzflag/bzflag/src/regex/regfree.c

• WinBinder - Native Windows binding for PHP:
  .../WinbinderComp/csource/php-6.0.0/win32/glob.h (via OpenBSD & PHP6)

• win32-xfree:
  .../programs/Xserver/hw/sunLynx/btvar.h (via XFree86 and X.org)

• Firebird:
  .../firebird/firebird2/extern/editline/prompt.c

• Mono Debugger:
  .../debugger/debugger/frontend/libedit/prompt.h

• SuSE/Novell's YaST(! :-):
  .../yast/yast/bootloader/mbr/asm.h

• Linux Test Project:
  .../syscalls/libevent/compat/sys/_time.h (via OpenBSD)

• xMach:
  .../xmach/xmach/lites/emulator/e_linux_getcwd.c

• giFT-Ares - plugin for giFT that connects to the Ares peer-to-peer filesharing:
  network .../lib/libevent/compat/sys/_time.h (via OpenBSD)

• PW32 the Posix-over-Win32:
  .../pw32/pw32/include/windows/profile.h

• SorceryNet IRC Services:
  .../s/snservices/snservices/services/queue.h

• NFS-Utils:
  .../nfs/nfs-utils/utils/idmapd/queue.h (via OpenBSD)

• Scsh - a Scheme shell:
  .../scsh/scsh/scsh/sunos/libansi.c

• Putty, branch-0.56:
  .../p/putty-branch-0.56/putty-branch-0.56/mac/stricmp.c

• MySQL:
  .../mysql/mysql/mit-pthreads/include/string.h

• Tk:
  .../Tk/pTk/mTk/tclUnix/tclUnixFCmd.c

• Real-time microkernel:
  .../rtmk/src/include/sys/mount.h

• IRC 2010:
  .../irc2010/irc2010/ncserv/include/queue.h

• Solid PBX:
  .../s/solid-pbx/trunk/editline/tty.h

• NeoWebScript:
  .../nws/neotcl8.3.0-lite/tcl8.3.0/unix/tclUnixFCmd.c (via tcl/tk)

• Amanith :
  .../3rdpart/freetype2/src/lzw/zopen.h (via freetype)

• libtiff:
  .../l/libtiff/libtiff/port/strcasecmp.c

• Darkfire Security Project:
  .../d/darkfire/darkfire/libdkf/libdkf.h

• The CvsGui project:
  .../cvsgui/cvsgui/cvs-1.10/macintosh/rcmd.c

• PHP:
  .../php-src/php-src/win32/glob.h (via OpenBSD)

• YAM - Yet Another Mailer:
  .../yamos/yamos/yamos/includes/netdb.h

• The Tiny COBOL compiler project:
  .../tiny-cobol/tiny-cobol/development/lockserver/syslog.h (via OpenBSD)

• z88 Development Kit:
  .../z88dk/z88dk/include/net/telnet.h

• irC6:
  .../irC6/src/missing/sys/queue.h (via OpenBSD)

• MiniMIME:
  .../minimime/minimime/src/sys/mm_queue.h (via OpenBSD)

• Quizzer__AutoSelect:
  .../Quizzer/exercises/compile-tcsh/tcsh-6.10.00/ed.chared.c (via tcsh)

• tcl:
  .../tcl/tcl/tcl/unix/tclUnixFCmd.c

P.S.: Here's a similar list using Google's Code Search.

[Tags: Articles, Products]

Read the article for all the details!

[Tags: Articles]

The article covers overall security considerations like code auditing, exploit mitigation and layered security, then gives mode details about NetBSD's perception of security. It continues with an overview of recent NetBSD security enhancements, including details on kernel authorization, verified exec (veriexec) and measures for exploit mitigation like PaX MPROTECT and the SSP (Stack Smashing Protection) compiler extensions. Further features discussed include information filtering, strong digital checksum support and the fileassoc framework. After hilighting those features that are already present in NetBSD today, the article outlines current and future security research and development. Items of interest there are deprecation of using the kernel virtual memory interface, digitally signed files, access control lists (ACLs) and capabilities. An analysis of the component's interaction in light of layered security follows, discussion measures that can be taken on five different levels.

To cite from the conclusion of the article: `` While it is true that a lot of work is still ahead of us, this paper exposed the lot of work that is behind us. Over the past year NetBSD improved a lot on the security front, and it is expected that these efforts will pay off - if not already - within the next major release.''

[Tags: Articles, Security]

• Part 1: Embedded Linux cross-development
• Part 2: An introduction to eCos
• Part 3: Porting a screen-management utility to eCos
• Part 4: Interfacing with flash and avoiding file systems
• Part 5: Porting NetBSD to the TAMS 3011
• Part 6: Booting NetBSD on new hardware, the saga begins

Both g4u and Live View are free of charge.''

[Tags: Articles, g4u]

• The Newsforge article "Which distro should I choose?" refers us to a Comparison between NetBSD and OpenBSD, the website apparently allows other comparisons.

• Parallels is a ``powerful, easy to use, cost effective desktop virtualization solution that empowers PC users with the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine.'' In other words "something like VMware". In contrast to the leading(?) product in that area, Parallels supports NetBSD as guest OS officially.

• PC-98 is a PC-like computer from NEC that has a Intel CPU and that was only sold in Japan. Due to some subtle differences from the "original" (IBMesque) PC architecture, it can't run NetBSD/i386 and was so far supported e.g. by FreeBSD/PC98. Now, Kiyohara Takashi has made patches and a floppy image available for a NetBSD/pc98 port - see Kiyohara's mail to tech-kern for more details, and also some discussion about further abstraction of the current x86 architecture to support machines with Intel CPUs that can't run NetBSD/i386.

• Staying on the technical side, David Young has a need to tunnel packets through consumer-grade (and consumer-intelligence) devices, which are unlikely to cope with anything outside of the IP protocol. As such, he has posted patches to tunnel gre(4) over UDP.

  Now let's hope this works as a foundation for Teredo (tunneling IPv6 over UDP)... :-)

• Verified Exec is a security subsystem inside NetBSD that verified fingerprints of binaries before loading them. This prevents binaries from being changed unnoticed, e.g. by trojan horses. Now when NetBSD runs such a system and memory becomes tight, only the process' data is paged to disk, the executables text is simply discarded with the assumption that it can be paged in from the disk again when needed. Of course this assumes that the binary won't change, which may not be true in a networked scenario with NFS or a disk on a fiber channel SAN that may be beyond control of the local system administrator. To prevent attacks of this kind, Brett Lymn has worked to generate per-page fingerprints that are kept in memory even when the executable pages are freed, for later verification when they are paged in from storage again.

  The code is currently under review and available as a patch set - see Brett's mail to tech-kern for all the details!

• While talking about security subsystems, Elad Efrat, who also worked on veriexec previously continued his work to factor out authentication inside the kernel: After introducing the kauth(9) framework and replacing all manual checks for "am I running as root" or "does the current secure level allow this operating" with calls to it, the next step is to seperate the the place where those calls are made from a back-end implementation that will determine what is allowed and what is not, who is privileged and what is not, etc. While these questions are traditionally answered via special user ids (0, root), group membership or secure levels, other methods like capability databases could be imagined.

  Elad has been working along these lines, and he has posted the next step in his work, outlining the upcoming security model abstraction - see Elad's mail to tech-security for details & code references.

• NetBSD 3.1 is around the corner, which will be an update to NetBSD 3.0 with lots of bugfixes and some minor feature enhancements like new drivers and also support for Xen 3 DomainU. There's a NetBSD 3.1 Release Candidate 1 available - be sure to have a look!

• FWIW, I've also updated the overview of NetBSD release branches a few days ago, as I still see a lot of people that are confused over NetBSD's three lines of release branches (well, counting the development branch NetBSD-current as release branch :), and the differences between what a branch and what a release is. With NetBSD 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1 this sure makes my little head spin...

• But there's more than NetBSD 3.x! If you've watched the above link, you will understand that the next release after the NetBSD 3.x set of releases is NetBSD 4.x. The release cycle for NetBSD 4.0 has started a few days ago, and there's also an announcement about the start of the NetBSD 4.0 release process by the NetBSD 4.0 release engineer Jef Rizzo which has information on schedule, how YOU can help and getting beta binaries and sources.

• The working period of the Google Summer of Code is over, and while mentors are still evaluating the code submitted by students, there are some public status reports: Alwe MainD'argent about the status of the 'ipsec6' project and Sumantra Kundu about the 'congest' project

• Sysjail 1.0 has been released! Includes some interesting overhead benchmarks.

• As reported in the #NetBSD Community Blog, an alpha version of sBSD was released: It's a NetBSD-based system for easy installation on USB sticks and CF cards.