hubertf's NetBSD blog

More dmesg pr0n: NetBDS/Xen with 128 (virtual) CPUs

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:47:00 GMT

There was discussion about raising the number of CPU(core)s supported by NetBSD the other day, as the current limit of 32 isn't the sky any more in 2012. In the process, Xen-hacker Manuel Bouyer suggested using booting NetBSD ins a Xen DomU, as you can assign up to 128 (virtual) cores to a DomU.

Here's the dmesg output, and I'm sure this is a lot faster than simulating 128 CPUs in qemu.

So, how to go beyone 128 CPUs for testing? Anyone played with Qemu recently, or even have some decent hardware at hand? If so, be sure to post dmesg output (and CC: me)!

tetris rewrite in sed(1)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:30:00 GMT

tetris rewrite in sed(1), includes a bash(:-()script to start. Very impressive!

Playing with Amazon's EC2 and NetBSD - top(1) pr0n

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:55:00 GMT

I've played with NetBSD on Amazon's EC2 service recently, and here's a small teaser for ressources that one can get with a few mouse clicks - operating system is NetBSD 6.0_BETA/amd64, note number of CPU cores and RAM:

NetBSD/xen available for Multi-Processor machines

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:12:00 GMT

Manuel Bouyer announces that NetBSD/xen is now available for Multi-Processor machines. Citing from the release announcement:

``The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce completion of Multiprocessing Support for the port of its Open Source Operating System to the Xen hypervisor.

The NetBSD Fundation started the Xen MP project 8 month ago; the goal was to add SMP support to NetBSD/Xen domU kernels. This project has officially completed, and after a few bug fixes in the pmap(9) code it is now considered stable on both i386 and amd64. NetBSD 6.0 will ship with option MULTIPROCESSOR enabled by default for Xen domU kernels.

The availability of Xen MP support in NetBSD allows to run the NetBSD Open Source Operating Systems on a range of available infrastructure providers' systems. Amazon's Web Services with their Elastic Cloud Computing is a prominent examples here.

Xen is a virtualization software that enables several independent operating system instances ("domains") to run concurrently on the same computer hardware. The hardware is managed by the first domain (dom0), and further guest/user domains (domU) are spawned and managed by dom0. Operating systems available for running as dom0 and domU guests include Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux besides NetBSD.

NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.

NetBSD has been available for the Xen hypervisor since Xen 1 and NetBSD 2.0, released in 2004 , but until now only a single processor was supported in each NetBSD/xen domain.''

Minix 3.2.0 released... with lots of NetBSD code added

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:59:00 GMT

Version 3.2.0 of Minix, the operating system started by Andrew Tanenbaum, has been released. Started quite some time after BSD and before Linux, its userland grew somewhat outdated. To remedy this, Minix' userland was now updated to large extents with components from NetBSD as result of Minix' 2011 Google Summer of Code project, which was done by student Vivek Prakash and mentored by Gianluca Guida.

Components merged from NetBSD include:

NetBSD C library
NetBSD password file format
NetBSD bootloader
New NetBSD userland utilities: ext2 fsck&mkfs, gzip, m4, man&tools, mkdep, mkdir, mkfifo, mktemp, rm, rmdir, tic, uniq, libcurses, libcrypt, libprop, libterminfo, libutil, bzip2, date, indent, mdocml (mandoc), sed, zoneinfo ports

See the Minix release notes for more details,

NetBSD on the FriendlyARM Mini2440

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:48:00 GMT

Paul Fleischer has ported NetBSD to the FrienldyARM Mini2440 board. He writes on NetBSD's current-users mailing list: ``The FriendlyARM Mini2440 is an evaluation board based on the Samsung S3C2440 ARM SoC. It comes with a DM9000 Ethernet chip and an UDA1341 audio DAC, on-board NAND and NOR flash, a SD-card slot, and optionally a 3.5" or 7" touch display.'' See the link for dmesg-pr0n.

Detailled setup instructions are available on the port-arm mailing list and Paul's homepage. Paul is also looking for feedback on the port, so if you have a Mini2440 board, give it a spin and report back to Paul!

Cobalt RestoreCD/RestoreUSB based on NetBSD 5.1.2

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:33:00 GMT

Right after NetBSD 5.1.2 is out, Izumi Tsutsui has updated his NetBSD-based Restore CD/USB-image for the Cobalt machines.

The files are available at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/cobalt/restore-cd/5.1.2/. Citing from the announcement: ``The only changes from 5.1.1 version are CHANGES file and 5.1.2 binaries, so the following instructions are same as 5.1.1 ones:

restorecd-5.1.2-20120205.iso.gz is a gzipped RestoreCD ISO9660 image as prior releases.

restoreusb-5.1.2-20120205.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.''

NetBSD 5.1.2 released

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:30:00 GMT

Soren Jacobsen from NetBSD's release engineering team announced on the NetBSD blog: ``On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.1.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.1.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade. For full details, please see the 5.1.2 release notes. To download 5.1.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/''
Among the changes are:

Fixes from ten Security Advisories: openssl, bind, kernel memory exhaustion, IPCOMP, dhclient, LZW, openpan
More security fixes for 3rd party Products: libtelnet, openssl, postfix, dhcpcd, xrdb, glob(3), openssh
Improvements of logging in wapbl(4)
Improved handling of ECN, NFS
Various minor updates and bugfixes
Note that the NetBSD x.x.x releases only contain security and critical bug fixes over the last full release (5.0). The number is kept down to improve stability. More updates and changes are available on the NetBSD x.x releases and their related branches, e.g. netbsd-5. (see also)

FOSDEM talks/slides: pkgsrc on MirBSD, pkgin (Updated)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:03:00 GMT
Last weekend the Free and Open Software Developer Meeting (FOSDEM) happened. As in previous years, there was a booth manned by people from various BSD-projects, and there were also two(?) talks related to NetBSD and its related project pkgsrc:
NetBSD and MirBSD developer Benny Siegert gave a talk titled "pkgsrc on MirBSD" - see his slides! pkgsrc is a framework for packaging and building 3rd party applications from source. Besides MirBSD, it runs on many other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X.
While building from source is fine, it costs a lot of time. pkgsrc can also create binary packages, and to manage those, there is "pkgin", a binary package manager. Its developer, Emile 'iMil' Heitor introduced it in a talk - see the slides (PDF)!
Update: Thomas 'wiz' Klausner pointed out that there was actually a whole "BSD Devroom", and there were many BSD-talks there, including:

MINIX3 and BSD, by Arun Thomas
The Lua Scripting Language in the NetBSD Kernel, by Marc Balmer
Touch your NetBSD - towards tablet integration, by Pierre Pronchery
pkgsrc on MirBSD, by Benny Siegert (slides)
Introduction to pkgsrc, and to package creation in NetBSD, by Noud de Brouwer
pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc, also by Emile Heitor (slides)
Automated package building, by Nicolas Thauvin
Besides other talks that were less focused on NetBSD/pkgsrc, this event shows that there's a pretty active group of BSD advocates in Europe that manage to advocate "BSD" in its entirety pretty well. Well done, guys!

Automatic building of Amazon EC2 images from NetBSD

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:17:00 GMT
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.

Google Summer of Code 2012 will happen - first NetBSD directions

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:40:00 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!

NetBSD Hackathon - February 10th to 12th, 2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:27:00 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! :-)

EuroBSDCon 2012: Warsaw, Poland

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:12:00 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. ''

IPv4 address change for {many}.NetBSD.org

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:14:00 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 :-)

Latest IPfilter merged into NetBSD-current

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:51:00 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.''

EuroBSDcon 2011 NetBSD Presentation

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:57:00 GMT
spz@ gave a presentation with a status report of NetBSD during last EuroBSDCon. Slides in HTML format are available now - enjoy!

NetBSD vs. disk transfer speeds vs. BIOS settings

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:40:00 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)

BSD Certification and the lack of training material - a call for participation! (Updated)

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:03:00 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!

BSDCan 2012 - call for papers (Updated)

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:57:00 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.

Cobalt RestoreCD/RestoreUSB Beta based on NetBSD 5.1.1

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:10:00 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 :)