A review of the code in src/sys/netcan/ is welcome, especially for possible locking issues.''

What CAN devices would you address with NetBSD? Drop me mail!

[Tags: can, networking]

• Leonardo Taccari will work add multi-packages support to pkgsrc.
• Maya Rashish will work on the LFS cleanup.
• Utkarsh Anand will make Anita support multiple virtual machine systems and more architectures within them to improve testing coverage.

Good luck to all our students and their mentors - we look forward to your work results, and welcome you to The NetBSD Project!

[Tags: google-soc]

This first article in a blog series starts by describing regular and oven ontrolled crystal oscillators, then goes on in describing the hardware setup and how it is connected to a computer. In this case, a Banana Pi running NetBSD/evbarm is used which (of course) also has its own clock. Oscilloscope measurements show differences in quality of signals and why an adapter is needed to adjust the system's clock frequency (including changes to the NetBSD kernel).

In the next post Tobias will describe how to calibrate the clock with NTP. Stay tuned and have an eye on his blog!

[Tags: ntp, time]

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.

For more information, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/.

Changes in 2.6beta2 include:

• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17, binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10
• Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE (Testing and documentation updates welcome!)
• Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz
• Put all object files into one object directory. This may need more cleanup in the future. Feedback from people building g4u welcome!
• Disable verbose device messages on Microchannel (MCA) machines
• New drivers:
  • Toshiba Dynabook hotkeys
  • Intel S1200,C2000 (non-pch) SMBus storage controller
  • Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage controllers and devices
  • Intel Wireless WiFi Link 7xxx PCI network
  • Intel 8259x 10 gigabit PCI network
  • Realtek 8188CE/8192CE 802.11b/g/n PCI network
  • VMware VMXNET3
  • Marvell Libertas PCMCIA network
  • ASIX AX88178a/AX88179 based USB network adapters
  • Realtek RTS5209/RTS5229 Card Reader
• Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!

• The g4u 2.6beta2 floppy images (zipped/ uncompressed floppy one, floppy two, floppy three, and floppy four)
• The g4u 2.6beta2 ISO CD image (zipped/uncompressed)
• The g4u/NetBSD kernel for PXE boot (gzipped)
• The g4u 2.6beta2 source code
• Some md5 checksums:

  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-1.fs) = 8214c1ded55e78aed2f34d3e318dc75d
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-2.fs) = 8b55f3fe6a4806c9a65a3d176463e1bc
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-3.fs) = 0f9629353ddd470d17c5b4fd4ec7fd8e
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-4.fs) = c25a955e5d876d64943fd03f957ed4c9
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso) = acabb0fb73d4a2f9062fb070b4ddd825
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.tgz) = f8387d5bf146f98dda040dfcc1c53e44
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.fs.zip) = 8ef324c71ae7b000708e69019e55ef4e
  MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso.zip) = 1f4bd37784405350ee3e8e6c75a6b6b6
  

The announcement of this will happen on May 4th 2017 - stay tuned!

[Tags: google-soc]

The article starts out with printing a blog article of my choice, which is from the recent series on the NetBSD scheduler. This is followed by the actual interview with yours truly, asking about myself, how i started with blogging in general, why I do it and my best and worst posts. Things go to a wider focus then, musing about why Unix is the best since sliced bread, what role NetBSD plays today with its 7.1 release and in the future, and what my personal plans are in that regard. See pages 44-48 of March 2017's BSD Magazine (registration required for PDF download!) for the full text.

[Tags: bsdmagazine, hubertf]

``
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 54th quarterly release
of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system.  pkgsrc is available
with more than 17500 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more
information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/
A neutral overview can be found at https://www.openhub.net/p/pkgsrc

For the 2017Q1 release we welcome the following notable package
additions and changes to the pkgsrc collection:

  - python 3.6
  - Nextcloud 11
  - firefox 45.8.0 and 52.0.1
  - gradle 3.4
  - pkg_comp 2.0
  - qmail 1.03nb24 binary packages work, supporting common use cases
  - many additional Python, Perl and Ruby modules
  - many additional TeX packages

The default version of Apache has been changed to 2.4 (from 2.2); set
PKG_APACHE_DEFAULT=apache22 in mk.conf to stay with 2.2.

Package removals include gcc 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 and Xen 3.1, 3.3 and 4.1;
these are old and notable only because of their stature.

The following infrastructure changes were introduced:
  - mk/curses.mk enabled packages to depend on curses without specifying
      a particular version

In total, 192 packages were added, 25 packages were removed, and 1,458
package updates were processed since the pkgsrc-2016Q4 release.

Instructions on using the binary package manager can be found at
http://pkgin.net, and pkgsrc itself can be retrieved from
https://github.com/jsonn/pkgsrc or via cvs or tar file -- see
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html.  The branch name
for the 2017Q1 branch is "pkgsrc-2017Q1".''

We have a list of project ideas available.

Please feel free to discuss project ideas beforehand on our mailing lists. When discussing project ideas, make sure you had a look at our guidelines, and answer as many questions as possible.

[Tags: google-soc]

For reference, here is the text that was added to the sysctl(7) manpage:

     kern.sched (dynamic)
             Influence the scheduling of LWPs, their priorisation and how they
             are distributed on and moved between CPUs.

                   Third level name              Type       Changeable
                   kern.sched.cacheht_time       integer    yes
                   kern.sched.balance_period     integer    yes
                   kern.sched.average_weight     integer    yes
                   kern.sched.min_catch          integer    yes
                   kern.sched.timesoftints       integer    yes
                   kern.sched.kpreempt_pri       integer    yes
                   kern.sched.upreempt_pri       integer    yes
                   kern.sched.maxts              integer    yes
                   kern.sched.mints              integer    yes
                   kern.sched.name               string     no
                   kern.sched.rtts               integer    no
                   kern.sched.pri_min            integer    no
                   kern.sched.pri_max            integer    no

             The variables are as follows:

             kern.sched.cacheht_time (dynamic)
                     Cache hotness time in which a LWP is kept on one particu-
                     lar CPU and not moved to another CPU. This reduces the
                     overhead of flushing and reloading caches.  Defaults to
                     3ms.  Needs to be given in ``hz'' units, see mstohz(9).

             kern.sched.balance_period (dynamic)
                     Interval at which the CPU queues are checked for re-bal-
                     ancing.  Defaults to 300ms.  Needs to be given in ``hz''
                     units, see mstohz(9).

             kern.sched.average_weight (dynamic)
                     Can be used to influence how likely LWPs are to be
                     migrated from one CPU's queue of LWPs that are ready to
                     run to a different, idle CPU.  The value gives the per-
                     centage for weighting the average count of migratable
                     threads from the past against the current number of
                     migratable threads.  A small value gives more weight to
                     the past, a larger values more weight on the current sit-
                     uation.  Defaults to 50 and must be between 0 and 100.

             kern.sched.min_catch (dynamic)
                     Minimum count of migratable (runable) threads for catch-
                     ing (stealing) from another CPU.  Defaults to 1 but can
                     be increased to decrease chance of thread migration
                     between CPUs.

             kern.sched.timesoftints (dynamic)
                     Enable tracking of CPU time for soft interrupts as part
                     of a LWP's real execution time.  Set to a non-zero value
                     to enable, and see ps(1) for printing CPU times.

             kern.sched.kpreempt_pri (dynamic)
                     Minimum priority to trigger kernel preemption.

             kern.sched.upreempt_pri (dynamic)
                     Minimum priority to trigger user preemption.

             kern.sched.maxts (dynamic)
                     Scheduler specific maximal time quantum (in millisec-
                     onds).  Must be set to a value larger than ``mints'' and
                     between 10 and ``hz'' as given by the kern.clockrate
                     sysctl.  Provided by the M2 scheduler.

             kern.sched.mints (dynamic)
                     Scheduler specific minimal time quantum (in millisec-
                     onds).  Must be set to a value smaller than ``maxts'' and
                     between 1 and ``hz'' as given by the ``kern.clockrate''
                     sysctl.  Provided by the M2 scheduler.

             kern.sched.name (dynamic)
                     Scheduler name.  Provided both by the M2 and the 4BSD
                     scheduler.

             kern.sched.rtts (dynamic)
                     Fixed scheduler specific round-robin time quantum in mil-
                     liseconds.  Provided both by the M2 and the 4BSD sched-
                     uler.

             kern.sched.pri_min (dynamic)
                     Minimal POSIX real-time priority.  See sched(3).

             kern.sched.pri_max (dynamic)
                     Maximal POSIX real-time priority.  See sched(3).