A bit dated, but hey! More information about the "extensible MIPS" project is also available on Microsoft's website.

Maybe it's time to update my 2005 research WRT NetBSD at Microsoft? (Thanks for the initial hint, Volkmar!)

[Tags: emips, iso, microsoft, mips]

See also this blog posting on creating disk images from NetBSD release files (not on ISO, but therefore tested on i386 and shark :-).

Now who's going to integrate building of an install/full image into our release process? And while there, also make a VMware image? :)

[Tags: cdrtools, dd, eeepc, image, iso]

• In preparation of the NetBSD 5.0 release, a lot of documentation updates were made, esp. in the release notes. Also, many manual pages were added to the system, documenting existing userland tools, library, system and internal interfaces.

• Following some re-organization of binary packages on ftp.NetBSD.org some time ago, the official URLs are now:
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/current-packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  Both should have the same results, the latter is more safe on mirrors that don't carry /pub/pkgsrc. Adjust your PKG_PATHs!

• Syntax for /etc/rc.conf's ifconfig_xxN variables and /etc/ifconfig.xxN was changed to also allow line breaks via ';'s. This allows something like ifconfig_wi0="ssid 'my network'; dhcp"

• Martin Schuette's work on syslogNG from Google Summer of Code 2008 is now available in NetBSD's syslog

• X.org integration is advancing in big steps. It's on by default on a number of platforms (including alpha, i386, macppc, shark, sparc and sparc64), and instead of using the (now obsolete) MKXORG build variable it can be build with "build.sh -x".

• Old-style LKMs are dead, welcome to the new module framework! (XXX Documentation???) In the process, more and more kernel subsystems are being changed to be loadable as a module, e.g. POSIX AIO and semaphores, File System Snapshots, emulations, exec formats, coredump, NFS client and server, http and data accept filters, ppp compressors, and others.

  Hooks into UVM have been added to unload unused kernel modules if memory is scarce.

• MAKEVERBOSE now has two new levels, 3 and 4. The complete list is now:
  • 0 Minimal output ("quiet")
  • 1 Describe what is occurring
  • 2 Describe what is occurring and echo the actual command
  • 3 Ignore the effect of the "@" prefix in make commands
  • 4 Trace shell commands using the shell's -x flag
  The default remains MAKEVERBOSE=2, you can also set this via build.sh's -N switch.

• A POSIX conformant tabs(1) utility was added

• The haad-dm branch was merged to NetBSD-current. This adds Logical Volumen Management (LVM) functionality to the base NetBSD system. It uses Linux LVM2 tools and our BSD licensed device-mapper driver.

• The wrstuden-revivesa branch was merged into NetBSD-current, bringing Scheduler Activation based threading back to NetBSD, and giving NetBSD 5.0 and up both SA and 1:1 threads.

• Support for the ARM-based Cortina Systems SL3516 eval board was added to NetBSD/evbarm

• patch(1) got a major overhaul, based on DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD. There's better detection of double applied patches, rejected diffs remain in unified diff format, and and less limitation e.g. on line length.

• pxeboot now understands boot.cfg

• Boot CD ISO creation has been greatly overhauled, accomodating changes in boot.cfg, and moving away from a ramdisk-based system to using a file system on the cd-rom, which helps reduce RAM usage. Also, the GENERIC kernel can be used there.

• makefs(8)'s ISO-9660 (cdrom) support was enhanced to write RISC OS data. This allows to make bootable CDs for acorn{26,32} directly, without copying the bootloader to a native file system.

• The christos-time_t branch has been merged into NetBSD-current. This gives 64bit time_t and dev_t types (no more year 2038-problem!!!).

  Many related places like timeval and timespec were adjusted, kernel and userland APIs were touched, and shared library major versions (including libc) were bumped for this fairly exhaustive change.

  See src/UPDATING's entry on 20090110 for the full update path!

• New/updated drivers:
  • jme(4) for JMicron Technologies JME250 Gigabit Ethernet and JME260 Fast Ethernet PCI Express controllers
  • u3g(4) provides better support for 3G datacards than ugensa
  • dbcool(4) for dbCool(tm) family of Thermal Monitor and Fan Controller
  • ataraid(4) now supports Intel MatrixRAID and JMicron RAID
  • bwi(4) for Broadcom BCM4302 wlan controllers, otherwise known as Airport Extreme
  • alipm(4) for the Acer Labs M7101 Power Manage- ment controller
  • admtemp(4) for the Analog Devices ADM1021, Analog Devices ADM1023, Analog Devices ADM1032, Genesys Logic GL523SM, Global Mixed-mode Technology G781, Maxim 1617, and Xeon embedded temperature sensors
  • ipw(4),iwi(4),wpi(4),iwn(4): We ship the firmware now, but users have to accept the Intel license manually by setting sysctls like hw.ipw.accept_eula=1. The latter is also offered by sysinst.
  • nsp(4) adds support for the NSP2000 cryptographic processor which does crypto, hashing and arbitrary precision arithmetics in hardware, and which hooks into the opencrypto(9) interface.
  • pseye(4) makes the Sony Playstation Eye USB webcam usable with the new video(4) framework
  • ath(4) now uses the recently-released source-based version of the Atheros HAL, no more binary blob!

Available files:

• netbsd-i386pkg-3.1.iso
• netbsd-i386pkg-3.1.md5
• netbsd-i386pkg-3.1.README

Those that didn't pay attention^W^Whaven't followed the discusion can read the full proposal. for all the details.

Now we'll see if someone finds this useful (or if I just go and commit this, or lose interest over yet another pointless bikeshed "discussion").

[Tags: hubertf, iso]

• I've done a bit more work on the next version of g4u, baseically moving the whole build infrastructure to use NetBSD's new 'makefs -t cd9660' and bootxx_cd9660
• While there, I've been working on a framework to build bootf-cds (like the current bootfloppies, i.e. just a small CD with a kernel and a ramdisk with sysinst, no install sets). The latest version of the framework works on i386 and amd, but it actually reinvents a wheel that's already present twice in the NetBSD source tree. So I'll try to find more time to think about the src/etc 'iso-image' target and esp. all the code in src/distrib/cdrom before persuing this.

  My current theory is that NetBSD needs to split the concept of building a "release" into #1 the compiling of all the stuff in $RELEASEDIR, and #2 the postprocessing (creating a bootable CD *with* install sets, taring up sources, and making sure there's a pkgsrc snapshot there, too). Maybe the source taring-up should even be moved to another step #3 that's only done after performing step #2 *all* platforms.

  We'll see when I find more time for this, or maybe if someone picks it up...

• After NetBSD got permission from The Open Group and the IEEE to use text from the POSIX(R) standard some time ago, I'm finally preparing the press release (available soon!) with them.
• Various other coordination stuff for the NetBSD booth at the Chemnitz Linuxday is also taking ways too much time, getting t-shirts and flyers and posters done.

Update: The file is now also available as torrent - please use it!

[Tags: iso, packages, sparc]

I've also played a bit more with that "RSS aggregation" thing, and after planetplanet, the thing that many "planet"-sites seem to use, didn't want to recognize this blog's RSS feed (even when it works fine elsewhere!), I have looked a bit more, and rawdog looked VERY promising. I just need a bit more time to customize the layout, and then decide where to run this (it needs python).

[Tags: hubertf, iso, sparc]

Update: The amd64 packages were done by Jan, not Manuel. Sorry!

[Tags: amd64, iso, packages]

Update: Jeff Rizzo was fast in creating a bittorrent tracker and you can download the file by pointing your favourite bittorrent client at the i386pkg-3.0.iso.torrent file now. Have fun!

[Tags: i386, iso, packages]

The initial plan was to use qemu to boot NetBSD from a CD(image), and then mount my ISO, copy the files to a harddisk(image) and then move then over from there using qemu's builtin network.

The two problems that I expected were: 1) how do I access a second CDROM when I've booted from a first one (as I remembered qemu only being able to handle one CDROM) and 2) will the qemu networking be fast enough to move over a whole CD in finite time.

After some frobbing, the solution was even easier: I created a 2GB harddisk file (just in case ;), and then ran qemu to boot from a NetBSD install CD, with the harddisk file for wd0 and my ISO as wd1 (who said I can't have a harddisk in ISO format :-):

 % qemu -hda harddisk.qemu -hdb 4y.iso -cdrom i386cd.iso -boot d -m 32 

 # mount -o ro -t cd9660 /dev/wd1d /mnt 

 # tar vcf /dev/wd0d /mnt/. 

 % tar vxf harddisk.qemu 

Update: Andreas Fuchs also has documentation on how to install

Update #2: The HowTo is now also available on the NetBSD webpage. NetBSD on a Cobalt Cube.

[Tags: cobalt, iso]

Update: Permission problem with the checksum files, so here it is until the checksum files are fixed:

 MD5 (i386pkg.iso) = 038771fda4723ccc4d1dcbbe2b04323c