Solutions Linux 2010 - 16-18th March, Paris Porte de Versailles

For the 11th year, was held the "Solutions Linux and Opensource" event in Paris Porte de Versailles, from March 16th to 18th.

NetBSD has been running a booth for the 2nd year in the "Associations' village", where visitors could find most of the active Free and Open Source Software associations: April, {Ubuntu,Mandriva,Fedora}-fr, as well as FreeBSD-fr and BSDFrance, among many others.

4 NetBSD developers were present on the event:

• Emile "imil" Heitor
• Antoine "tonio" Reilles
• Jean-Yves "jym" Migeon
• Guillaume "gls" Lasmayous

Several other active members of the french NetBSD community were also present to man the booth.

Even though this event is primarily business-oriented, the vast majority of questions were "end-users" oriented questions, the most common one being: how does NetBSD compare to Linux/Ubuntu ? However this year, we had a number of more technical questions, mainly from people willing to run embedded NetBSD.

We distributed something like 150 Jibbed live CDs, 250 NetBSD stickers, and 25 "Powered by NetBSD" case badges.

Next French events where NetBSD will be present:

• Rencontre Bretonnes du Logiciel Libre, on May, 15-16 in Rennes.
• Journées Méditérranéennes du Logiciel Libre on November 26-27 in Nice/Sophia-Antipolis.

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NetBSD in GSoC 2010

Google has published its list of organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code, and NetBSD has been chosen to benefit this year again (the sixth consecutive year).

If you are a student and don't have plans for the summer yet, head here and pick a project to apply for (or define your own).

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NetBSD runtime linker gains negative symbol cache

The NetBSD runtime linker now has a negative symbol cache. In a nutshell, this has reduced the startup time of the Evolution mail client from around 5 minutes to 3 seconds on my QuadCore amd64 machine. Not many applications have a lot of plugins with a large amount of links to external libraries and I doubt many other applications will gain such a drastic speed bump, but the GNOME desktop as a whole now loads small bit quicker. I would imagine that KDE will now load faster as well.

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NetBSD 5.0.2 released

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 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 5.0.2 release notes.

To download 5.0.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

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New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-003 azalia(4)/hdaudio(4) negative mixer index panic

A new NetBSD security advisory has been published affecting the azalia(4) and hdaudio(4) drivers.

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terminfo has replaced termcap

NetBSD-6 will now sport the terminfo interface which removes a lot of the problems with the old termcap which is deprecated by The Open Group. Upgrading existing systems should be quite painless as the old termcap interface is still provided, but there are some caveats.

• $TERMCAP is no longer supported, tset -s no longer exports it. So if you maintain your own terminal definition, you'll need to use tic(1) on a small terminfo database in $HOME.
• NetBSD extensions to termcap are no longer supported. Only 3rd party applications that used these would be affected.

This should allow pkgsrc not to need ncurses for a fair few console applications, like say tmux.

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first boot into multiuser (amigappc)

For the first time an A3000 with Cyberstorm/PPC booted the current powerpc userland from a hard disk connected to the A3000 internal SCSI into multi user mode. [0 comments]

 

New package security checks

The pkgsrc tools have had, for a long time, the ability to validate the installed packages against a database of known vulnerabilities. We have encouraged administrators to add the proper commands to their crontabs to refresh the database and to run the package auditing command. But... the package tools are shipped with the system, and we ship a crontab for root... we could do better then, could we?

As of now, the /etc/daily script, which is part of the default root crontab, will refresh the vulnerabilities database. And the /etc/security script, executed by /etc/daily, will run the vulnerability and integrity checks provided by pkg_admin. The result is that you will get all the package auditing checks out of the box as soon as you start installing packages on a NetBSD system!

All of these settings are, of course, tunable through /etc/daily.conf and /etc/security.conf, and they will only run if they detect any installed packages.

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Kernel modules for macppc and shark

As of past night, the macppc and shark ports have support for the new-style kernel modules. I've added support for these through a workaround in the build system, which makes the compiler generate long jumps for all calls in the code, avoiding unsupported ELF relocation types. This allows us to use the modules even if the kernel-level loader is not able to deal with such relocations. The kernel-level support is now enabled by default in macppc and shark GENERIC kernels.

We'll need to revisit this in the future and implement real support for dealing with those relocation types. Why? The modules built with this flag are slower than they should be... but at least they do work.

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New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-001 (Module autoloading) and NetBSD-SA2010-002 (OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories have been released, affecting the NetBSD kernel file system module autoloader and OpenSSL.

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NetBSD LVM enabled by default

Next release of NetBSD has received major push on storage front today, because Logical Volume Manager was enabled in current NetBSD. LVM support was committed in -current for a long time now but it was disabled by default. Today I have set MKLVM variable to yes by default which means that LVM will by included in all builds from now.

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(shark) Accelerated X support

As announced by Michael Lorenz on the NetBSD blog, the shark port recently grew better support for X. Among other things, this means it is now possible to generate an X config file by running X -configure. For full details, see Michael's blog entry. [0 comments]