Quick procedure to run NetBSD/sun2 5.0.1 on TME

A pre-built disk image of NetBSD/sun2 5.0.1 release for TME is available for easy trial of NetBSD/sun2 on the machine emulator using pre-compiled tme binaries on modern machines. See annoucement message for details. [0 comments]

 

OpenGrok for NetBSD

The opengrok code search and cross reference service has been set up and is available at:

http://opengrok.netbsd.org

It contains the NetBSD sources which are updated every three hours.
This service is running on NetBSD-5 using opengrok with openjdk from pkgsrc.

Happy Grokking :)

[2 comments]

 

Summer of code results: NetBSD zfs port

This summer I worked on a port of ZFS file system to NetBSD and was mentored by Andrew Doran. This entry details the results of my Summer of Code project and future plans.

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BSD Magazine: NetBSD sshfs

In BSD Magazine issue 4/2009 I write about out-of-the-box support for sshfs on NetBSD 5.0. The article goes over the basic principles, use, tuning, and features in store beyond NetBSD 5.0. See the magazine website for purchase/subscription instructions.

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Summer of Code results: GPT-aware boot loader support

Mike Volokhov developed initial support for booting i386 and amd64 systems from GPT-formatted disks on legacy PC BIOS-based systems for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

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Summer of Code Results: Improve and Extend resize_ffs

This is the summary of the "Improve and Extend resize_ffs" Summer of Code 2009 project.

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pkgsrc, Solaris, and 5000 binary packages

Jonathan Perkin has posted an interesting blog entry entitled "apt-get" and 5,000 packages for Solaris10/x86 about using pkgsrc and the binary package manager pkgin on Solaris 10/x86. In pkgsrc, we can get conditioned to the fact that package management, in a coherent, well-controlled way; it's nice to see this gaining further traction in Solaris circles too.

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Summer of Code results: A tool to dump and restore pf(4) state

This summer I mentored Arnaud Degroote's Summer of Code project 'A tool to dump/restore the pf state table'.

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Summer of Code results: PXE Bulk Install

This is the summary of Maxwell Winderbaum's "PXE Bulk Install" Summer of Code 2009 project.

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Summer of Code results: Miniaturize NetBSD

Here is my summary of project goals and results for Lloyd Parkes' Summer of Code project, Miniaturize NetBSD.

Lloyd's project was concerned with helping developers to build small, bootable NetBSD system images by extending NetBSD's cross-compilation toolset and adding new kernel facilities.

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Summer of Code results: Improving RAIDframe parity handling

The work to improve the parity handling in RAIDframe was done by Jed Davis as a 2009 Google Summer of Code project in NetBSD. The mentoring on this project was done by Greg Oster. This document summarizes the project and the results.

Goals

RAIDframe (the software RAID implementation in NetBSD) suffers from long parity checking/rebuilding times in the event of an unclean shutdown. The goal of this project was to implement a solution that greatly reduces the amount of time required to ensure that the parity is correct after an unclean shutdown.

Results

The main project goals were met. Jed's solution to the parity rebuilding problem is based on a "parity map". In this solution, the RAID set is divided into some number of "zones", where the parity status of each zone is reflected in the parity map. So while the existing RAIDframe code can be though of as having just a single zone (i.e. the entire RAID set) the new parity map code uses simple heuristics (e.g. minimum zone size of 25MiB per component, maximum of 4096 zones) to determine the number of zones and the size of the zones.

Part of the work involved exploring various zone sizes and investigating the performance implications of not only the zone sizes but the frequency of updating the parity map as well. There were also data consistency (e.g. order of write operations) and update issues (e.g. drive cache flushing) to deal with.

The code has yet to be merged into the main NetBSD tree, pending additional testing and verification of the code involved.

[1 comment]

 

network maintenance planned at ISC Oct 8th 14:00-15:00 UTC

ISC has informed us of network maintenance to happen between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC today (Oct 8th). This concerns most public services directly under NetBSD.org (including this blog). Expected outage duration is 20 minutes. Please stay calm :)

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