Recent Xen-related Changes to NetBSD-current

With all the emphasis on NetBSD-5.0 over the last few months (and, yes, it's looking good now, there may be a third release candidate, and the final bits are being polished off now), NetBSD-current has taken a back seat. Whilst this is quite understandable, there have been some really neat features added recently. Manuel Bouyer has done even more work on NetBSD/Xen, and has added support for an i386 domain0 kernel with PAE support - this requires a i386PAE or x86_64 hypervisor (available in pkgsrc).

He has also added a PCI pass-through support for Xen3. The dom0 kernel gets a pciback PCI driver, to which the device specified in the pciback.hide boot parameter will attach. DomU kernels get a xpci device, to which pci buses will attach.

The virtualisation benefits of NetBSD are growing even more, with the recent sighting of a jym-xensuspend branch in the repository. This branch contains the code required to support the Xen save/restore/migrate facilities. It affects domU frontend drivers (xbd, xennet, xencons, hypervisor), autoconf(9) machinery, as well as MD code (mostly pmap(9)).

I have to thank both Manuel Bouyer and Jen-Yves Migeon for doing so much great work with NetBSD/Xen - formidable

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Pkgsrc-2009Q1 Freeze starts on March 22nd, 23:59 UTC

In preparation for the pkgsrc-2009Q1 branch, pkgsrc will be frozen for new packages and infrastructure changes, starting on Sunday March 22nd, at 23:59 UTC.

Some background to our freezes: pkgsrc makes four releases a year, named after the quarter in which all the work took place, and the quarter in which the packages themselves could last have been updated. The release name is thus 2009Q1, 2009Q2, etc. So that we can stabilise packages before the branch is created, we institute a freeze on new functionality - no new packages, and the infrastructure itself does not get changed. This means that we can take a look at the results of bulk build runs, and fix up any loose ends in the packages themselves, without having to worry about the basic building blocks of pkgsrc changing from under us - we have a stable platform to build upon.

It always happens that third party software vendors want to release a new version of their software just after we've entered the freeze. When that happens, we ask the pkgsrc developers to make a judgement call on it - they are the ones who will be maintaining this, after all - and if they think it needs to be updated, we ask them to get approval from the pkgsrc PMC. Again, to minimise the effect on other packages, we like to limit this to leaf packages. These are packages which can be changed easily with no consequences - packages which are not pre-requisites for any other package.

In general, pkgsrc tries to be conservative without being out of date in the versions of the packages. Trying to stay on the bleeding edge may be great fun at times, and does ensure early access to new features, but there are consequences for others in the stability of such packages. We have some packages which are maintained like this - usually, they have a -devel suffix - but the vast majority of packages are known to be good versions. We know, because we run those versions ourselves.

So what does pkgsrc-2009Q1 have in store for us? New pkg_install tools, speedups for the buildlink3 infrastructure, gnome 2.26, and many more things.

Look for pkgsrc-2009Q1 coming to a repository near you in a couple of weeks time.

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News from the 5.0 front

Today, on the 16th birthday of NetBSD, I have the pleasure of announcing the availability of NetBSD 5.0_RC3.

Below are some highlighted changes since RC2:

• Considerable improvements to WAPBL.
• Further X.Org refinements, including switching sgimips to X.Org.
• Scheduler Activations support is now disabled by default in sysctl.conf.
• ddb.onpanic is now set to 1 in the kernel by default, but 0 in sysctl.conf. This avoids trying to dump if a crash occurs during the install phase.
• puffs is now enabled by default on amd64, i386, macppc, and sparc64.
• SSP kernels should work again.
• A handful of assorted stability improvements.

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Google's Summer of Code 2009

Google has announced the mentoring organizations for Summer of Code 2009. This will be the fifth year that NetBSD has been able to participate.

A list of available projects can be found here. If you are interested in working on any of these projects, please contact the developer and/or mailing list referenced next to each item, and try to answer as many questions from our Project Application HowTo as possible. The interested developers will be glad to respond to you there.

In the meantime, prospective students should keep an eye on deadlines as application are only open between 23 March 2009 and 3 April 2009. Further information is available on the Summer of Code FAQ page.

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AsiaBSDCon 2009 ended

AsiaBSDCon 2009 was held during March 12-15 at Tokyo University of Science and successfully ended on March 15. Even though economy is quickly going down, we had more participants than we expected. We look forward to seeing you again next year.

Masao Uebayashi

On behalf of AsiaBSDCon 2009 staff

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BSDtalk interview with Andrew Doran

Will Backman (BSDtalk) interviews Andrew Doran about the upcoming 5.0 release and highlights some of the major features of the new release.

You can listen to the interview here.

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Supporting "high memory" on NetBSD/sgimips

I purchased an SGI O2 some years back, and over time I have been finding little bits of time to improve support for the hardware on NetBSD. One of the things that has always bothered me is that NetBSD could not use more than 256MB of RAM, so I set out to fix it.

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NetBSD LVM stripe target available

Thanks to the hard work of Reinoud Zandijk, NetBSD now has stripe target for device-mapper driver available. With updated device-mapper driver, user can create striped Logical Volume.

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Qt/Embedded @ wscons

Some time ago I finally found a small box of round tuits and ported Qt/Embedded to run on top of wscons. Unfortunately, day job and other things have been sucking most of my time, so after sitting on these patches for almost a month I figured that may be someone out there may be interested enough to pick this up.

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NetBSD@CeBIT 2009

The CeBIT which is the biggest IT-related fair in Europe is currently on in Hannover/Germany. The allBSD Project which was founded to focus on marketing related things for all the different BSDs was able to get a small booth. The booth is showing a Xen 3 showcase based on NetBSD and provides informational material to the visitors of the fair. I joined them for one and a half days at the booth and tried to answer all the questions. All the reactions from the visitors show that there is an interest in the BSD based operating systems.

One thing which seems to be very important in these days are small flyers which can be taken by the visitors. We need to create more informational material, anyone who is willing to contribute is a great help.

CeBIT will close its doors on Sunday 8 March 2009, make sure to visit the BSD booth in Hall 6, F50.

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German Perlworkshop and a NetBSD related presentation

I attended the German Perlworkshop from 25th February to 27th February in Frankfurt. The German Perlworkshop follows the tradition of the YAPC conferences. It's listed on their webpage, however the name has been changed to represent the German localisation.

I gave two presentations about the different usage of Perl, one was related to the NetBSD project. I maintain quite a lot of Perl packages inside the pkgsrc repository and run our Perl package update list, too. As I encounter frequent problems with our Perl modules, like missing ChangeLogs, incorrect version numbering for pkgsrc, broken dependencies, etc I decided to give a talk about these problems. It's called "Maintaining the be*st" and it deals with some of the different aspects in maintaining Perl packages for pkgsrc. I translated the slides to English, so all the English readers of this blog are able to read them. The audio recording was done during the presentation, however, it is in German.

• Maintaining the best (German|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (English|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~21mb)
• Reverse Testing (German|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (English|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~9mb)

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dhcpcd-gtk now in pkgsrc

After slaving away with more GTK+ learning, I've finished a promising new dialog for dhcpcd-gtk.

I've also spent a lot of time polishing it with nicer icons, messages and titles. Unlike the previous version, this dialog works fully! It's looking so good, I've just released dhcpcd-gtk into pkgsrc for your pleasure - enjoy :)

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