Soft dependencies removed

Removal of the soft dependencies feature of the fast file system (FFS) was today completed by Andrew Doran. It was announced in a mail and discussed several times at the NetBSD mailing lists.

Soft dependencies will continue to be available in NetBSD 5.0. From 6.0 onwards the preferred method of maintaining integrity and achieving optimal performance with fast file systems is logging (WAPBL).

The file system format is upwards compatible: existing systems will continue to operate with no configuration changes, and migration to logging will be a simple matter of changing /etc/fstab.

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LVM2 tools update

LVM2 tools and libdevmapper library in the base system have been updated to version 2.02.44 for lvm2 tools and 1.02.31 for libdevmapper lib. LVM2 tools are part of NetBSD logical volume management subsystem.

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Introducing dhcpcd-dbus and dhcpcd-gtk

So one of the highlights of NetBSD-5 is dhcpcd-4, a light weight alternative to the venerable ISC dhclient. dhcpcd-5 is nearing completion and will be rolled into NetBSD -current soon after NetBSD-5 is released. Some of the new features in dhcpcd-5 include the ability to manage more than one interface, listen and act on kernel events (such as adding a new interface or the link going up and down) and a control socket so other application can hook into dhcpcd. One such application is dhcpcd-dbus.

The goal of dhcpcd-dbus is to provide a DBus interface to dhcpcd. It also provides a DBus interface to wpa_supplicant because the base install in NetBSD does not support DBus. DBus allows other applications to trivially hook into dhcpcd. One such application is dhcpcd-gtk.

The goal of dhcpcd-gtk is to show the user the state of dhcpcd via a systray icon and to provide a GUI which allows the configuration of dhcpcd. It will also show a list of wireless access points in range and allow you to configure a WEP or WPA PSK key for each.

Linux has already had this functionality in NetworkManager for some time, but that is very Linux only, depending on libnl and hal. dhcpcd-gtk differs in that it only requires the OS to support dhcpcd (which is much simpler to port than hal). Then it's just a matter of ensuring that the base GNOME libraries work. A KDE/QT or EFL port of dhcpcd-gtk should also be possible.

Anyway, enough natter, here's some screenshots

The menu showing wireless networks is almost complete. The quality bar only shows if the driver reports quality. We need to show history of relative signal strength for the drivers which don't report quality.

The preferences screen is incomplete, but does read the dhcpcd-config correctly. The drop down boxes have configuration blocks for global, interface and ssid, the right hand block showing the interface or ssid in question. It will also have windows to request specific DHCP options and configure static IP, route and DHCP options.

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OpenJDK 7 binaries for NetBSD/i386 5.0

OpenJDK 7 binaries built on NetBSD/i386 5.0 for both the JRE and JDK are now available. Note that you may need to add the -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true parameter to the java command line for IPv4 networking to work properly on an IPv6-enabled kernel such as GENERIC.

jmcneill@endeavour:/export/home/jmcneill/jdk/jdk1.7.0 > ./bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-jmcneill_2009_01_29_15_36-b00)
OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b10, mixed mode)

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X.org on NetBSD/sgimips

X.org support for NetBSD/sgimips has gone live with the addition of hardware accelerated drivers for Newport ( found in most Indys, ported from official X.org ) and CRIME ( found in all O2s, driver written by myself ). Both drivers support the usual XAA acceleration primitives including solid fills, screen-to-screen copies, colour expansion and compositing.

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NetBSD 5.0 release engineering news

Some news from the 5.0 release engineering team - we're currently in the final stages of the release process for what will be NetBSD 5.0. Binaries are available for Release Candidate 2, and we'd appreciate feedback from everyone on those binaries.

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Heads up: x86 framebuffer console changes

The i386-specific vesafb(4) framebuffer driver has been superseded by the generic genfb(4) driver. Due to this change, framebuffer console support is now available on amd64 as well as i386.

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IP6 and IP10 support in-tree

Support for Personal IRIS 4D20 (IP6) and 4D/25 (IP10) has been added to -current. [0 comments]

 

IBM 7044-270 Support added

NetBSD/ofppc has been ported to the IBM 7044-270 (POWER3-II cpu). The machine has a 64bit POWER3-II CPU, which is what the modern POWER4 and POWER5 chips were based on. Currently, NetBSD only runs on this machine in 32bit mode. See the complete details in the official announcement. [0 comments]

 

New ofppc portmaster

Tim Rightnour has taken over the role of portmaster for NetBSD/ofppc. More details are available in the official announcement. [0 comments]

 

Initial import of NetBSD/rs6000

NetBSD/rs6000, a new powerpc port for the early MCA-based IBM RS/6000 workstations, has been imported. More details (including kernel dmesg) are available in Tim Rightnour's annoucement. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD/xen Howto updated

The NetBSD/xen Howto has been updated with some details about Xen on amd64. [0 comments]