NetBSD: Changes and News in 2001

December 2001

November 2001

October 2001

September 2001

August 2001

July 2001

June 2001

May 2001

April 2001

March 2001

February 2001

January 2001

December 2001

30 Dec 2001 - New port mailing lists created

Three new mailing lists have been created.

19 Dec 2001 - Improvements in Acorn NC support

Ben Harris has modified the "ne at podulebus" driver to work around a bug in the MX98905 chip used on EtherI and EtherN cards, so they can now be used on NetBSD. He has also tweaked the vidcvideo driver to find screen modes correctly on the ARM7500. Between them, these allow an NC_WSCONS kernel to come up multi-user, with a proper display.

Ben is now working on getting X up and running on his Acorn NC.

More information on NetBSD/acorn32 can be found at the NetBSD/acorn32 port page.

19 Dec 2001 - NetBSD/amiga now has two-stage booter

Michael L. Hitch has updated NetBSD/amiga -current to have a two-stage booter.

The first stage is bootxx_ffs (for ffs boot partitions) or bootxx_fd (for bootable floppy disk). These locate, load, and execute the second stage loader boot.amiga. The console screen is created and passed to the second stage loader.

The second stage loader uses loadfile() to load the kernel image, which can be either a.out or ELF format, and can also be compressed (via gzip(1)). It will load a kernel file from ffs file systems or the ustarfs used on floppy disks.

More information on NetBSD/amiga is available at the NetBSD/amiga port page.

18 Dec 2001 - Recent softdep changes

Frank van der Linden has pulled over some recent fixes from FreeBSD by Kirk McKusick to the softdep code. One of them is to correctly track the numbers of free blocks/inodes, taking the pending softdeps into account. For this, two new fields (previously spare ones) were added.

This means that if you're using the FFS_EI option, you should recompile and install fsck_ffs(8) before booting a new kernel, in order to have these fields correctly swapped in the case of fsck repairing the superblock.

If the kernel mutters a little when it mounts filesystems for the first time with a new kernel, don't worry about it. If it continues to do that, please file a problem report.

Also, in an unrelated change to the fixes mentioned above, the 'softdep_write_complete: lock is held' panics (for people who used DEBUG kernels) should be history now.

17 Dec 2001 - ELF m68k-based ports switched to new-toolchain

Steve Woodford has just switched all ELF m68k-based ports over to new-toolchain.

When you next update your NetBSD source tree and attempt to rebuild the world, you should read /usr/src/BUILDING, then use the build.sh shell script instead of "make build".

As usual, if you find any problems, please report them via the lists and/or send-pr(1).

17 Dec 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome six new developers:

  • Grant Beattie , who will be joining the NetBSD www team. Grant has been working on web pages for the project and has been helping out with NetBSD www-team tasks for some time.
  • John Darrow , who is an old-time pkgsrc user and contributor, and will help us out with his expertise in pkgsrc. Amongst other things, John was the first to perform xpkgwedge-based bulk builds, and his experience will help us greatly.
  • John Klos , who has been doing the bulk-package builds for the m68k systems on his collection of Amiga and Mac68k machines. He is currently working on scripts to allow a cluster of systems to co-operate in doing bulk-package builds, which is a tremendous aid for slower machines supported by NetBSD.
  • Jared D. McNeill , who has been working on audio drivers and pkgsrc. Jared is currently working on ESS Allegro-1/Maestro 3 and dbri audio drivers for NetBSD.
  • Guillain Seuillot , who will be working on NetBSD documentation.
  • Maria Zevenhoven , who will be looking after the administration of the NetBSD Project's main CVS server.

16 Dec 2001 - Newer Promise controllers support in NetBSD-current

Manuel Bouyer has added support to pciide in NetBSD-current for the following Promise controllers:

  • Ultra100/TX2
  • Ultra100/TX2v2
  • Ultra133

If you have any of these, please report how they work for you to the mailing list.

16 Dec 2001 - Integrated PPPoE support in NetBSD-current complete

Martin Husemann has completed in-kernel support for PPP over Ethernet in NetBSD-current. Changes include rc.d support, ip-up/ip-down scripts, and new documentation. The pppoe(4) man page has more details.

Due to several requests, it is planned to backport in-kernel PPPoE support to the netbsd-1-5 branch. This means that it should also be available in the NetBSD 1.5.3 release.

This support has been tested thoroughly by many people and on multiple architectures. No problems are expected, but if you do run into one please report it with send-pr(1).

14 Dec 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in November 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in November 2001 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

09 Dec 2001 - MI kernel build machinery done

Andrew Brown has finished rolling all ports over to the new MI kernel build machinery.

Kernel makefiles are now mostly assignments to make variables that get digested by sys/conf/Makefile.kern.inc, which provides the glue that makes it into a kernel. Redundancy is now gone from kernel makefiles, meaning that development drift of one kernel makefile (instead of over all) is no longer that much of a problem. Additionally, new "features" for kernels and kernel builds can now be added, modified, or removed much more easily.

Everyone should make sure their config(8) is up to date (you should do this anyway). It is also a good idea to rerun config for any -current kernels you've been building lately.

Extensive testing was done before these changes, so no problems are anticipated. If you do have any problems, please report them with send-pr(1).

08 Dec 2001 - New sysctl tunables for UVM page-replacement

Chuck Silvers has committed changes to create three new sysctl tunables that enforce a maximum amount of memory used for the different types of page allocations (anonymous process memory, cached file data, and cached executable data). He has also renamed some of the old sysctl tunables to have less obscure names.

The old tunables are now named: 

      vm.anonmin
      vm.filemin      (instead of vm.vnodemin)
      vm.execmin      (instead of vm.vtextmin)

The new tunables are: 

      vm.anonmax
      vm.filemax
      vm.execmax

The values for the new tunables are percentages of RAM, just like the old ones. The "max" limits in this context are only enforced when there isn't enough memory to satisfy all requests, so the usage for a given type can exceed the maximum if there is no demand for the other types.

More information can be found in Chuck's announcement in the tech-kern mail archive.

05 Dec 2001 - Initial IrDA support

Lennart Augustsson has added initial support for IrDA communication to the kernel. It presents IrDA frames to userland; the kernel has all the knowledge of how to talk to the actual hardware and presents a uniform interface to the userland protocol stack.

More information can be found in Lennart's post to the current-users mailing list.

03 Dec 2001 - Customizable Location of NetBSD Package Configuration files

Johnny Lam has committed some changes to NetBSD pkgsrc to implement a variable PKG_SYSCONFDIR used to specify the location of configuration files for NetBSD packages.

The idea of this change is to cater for various tastes of the user community. For example, some people like to keep all of their configuration files in /etc. Some feel that all package files should reside in /usr/pkg, whilst others wish to share /usr/pkg between several machines.

The variable can be set in /etc/mk.conf so that future packages use the facility. Furthermore, the configuration file directory can be set on a per-package basis. For example, setting 

	PKG_SYSCONFDIR.apache=/etc/apache

in /etc/mk.conf will result in the Apache package using the directory /etc/apache to hold its configuration files.

Naturally for this change to work across pkgsrc, relevant packages need to be converted to use the new variable. This process has been started.

03 Dec 2001 - ATAPI tape drive support

Manuel Bouyer has committed some final touches to NetBSD's ATAPI tape drive driver in NetBSD-current. The driver has been tested with an OnStream ATAPI drive and has been reported to work with Seagate ATAPI drives. If you have a different ATAPI tape drive and the driver works with it, please report it to .

02 Dec 2001 - Updated curses in tree

Brett Lymn has committed changes to curses in NetBSD-current to implement the newterm and set_term functions. The changes are quite extensive at a fundamental level.

One thing to look out for is that you must update your vi source and recompile that after installing the new libcurses otherwise vi will fail. This is NOT a bug with curses; this is a problem with vi stealing library function names in certain configurations. In this case vi defines its own newterm if it has been told there is not one in libcurses. I have committed the config file change for this to the vi sources so you should be ok.

If anyone has any problems with curses after this change please report them with send-pr(1).

November 2001

26 Nov 2001 - USB v2.0 support added to NetBSD-current

Lennart Augustsson has added support for USB v2.0 devices into NetBSD-current. The new ehci driver is still in development but is in a working state for some mass storage devices, such as CD-RW drives. USB v2.0 offers a vast speed improvement (480Mb/s instead of 12Mb/s) over the original USB specification, and retains a good level of compatibility.

For more details, see Lennart's announcement in the mailing list archives.

22 Nov 2001 - BSDFreak web site returns

The BSDFreak site has been restored. Its purpose is to deliver original articles on BSD written from the users' perspective. There is also an IRC gateway at the site.

BSDFreak is an Arlington, Virginia, US based non-profit division of Black Hat Networks, LLC. Its editors and authors are Alexander Chamandy and Sean Davis.

22 Nov 2001 - New Security Advisory released

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-018 has been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in the security advisory.

  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-018 - Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in BSD Line Printer Daemon 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    August 28, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: September 30, 2001

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

20 Nov 2001 - NetBSD/acorn32 port gets its own homepage

In the effort to split up NetBSD/arm32 into several ports NetBSD/acorn32 saw the light approximately a month ago, but, until now, had lacked a proper homepage and mailing list.

18 Nov 2001 - NetBSD/i386 on IBM PS/2 (MCA) machines

Jaromir Dolecek announced the IBM PS/2 (MCA) machine support in NetBSD-current has reached the point where it's usable for general work and should provide stable multiuser service. The system installation tool (sysinst) was also changed to support installation on this class of i386 machines. See the INSTALL documents for exact details, like which boot floppies to use for installation, etc. Until the next major release (NetBSD 1.6), PS/2 support will only be available via NetBSD/i386 -current binary snapshots.

The development on this support will, of course, continue, with more device drivers to be written as well as expanded documentation.

NetBSD/i386 port page: https://www.NetBSD.org/ports/i386/

NetBSD/i386 on IBM PS/2: https://www.NetBSD.org/ports/i386/ps2.html

NetBSD/i386 -current binary snapshots: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/i386/snapshot/

18 Nov 2001 - Driver for Trident 4DWAVE based AC'97 sound cards

Yoshihiko Someya has committed a new driver, to NetBSD-current, for Trident 4DWAVE based (4DWAVE DX/NX, SiS 7018, ALi M5451) sound cards.

08 Nov 2001 - Speed-ups committed to pkgsrc

Alistair G. Crooks has committed changes to bsd.pkg.mk to improve the speed of source builds.

The first stage was committed last week, when the scripts directory was removed along with the logic to look in the scripts directory for a script named pre-<target> or post-<target>, or configure, and was replaced by explicit calling of the scripts from a package Makefile's corresponding target. Please note this if you have locally-produced or maintained packages.

The next step was to remove the .USE macro, and replace it with explicit make(1) targets, and specify the dependencies on those targets in a normal Makefile way.

More details are available in Alistair's message in the tech-pkg mail archive.

08 Nov 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in October 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in October 2001 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

03 Nov 2001 - Driver for Tekram DC-395U/UW/F and DC-315/U SCSI host adapters

Izumi Tsutsui has committed a driver for the Tekram DC-395U/UW/F and DC-315/U PCI SCSI host adapters, which have the Tekram TRM-S1040 ASIC. This driver is written by Rui-Xiang Guo, with some minor changes by Izumi.

01 Nov 2001 - Darwin support added to pkgsrc

Alistair G. Crooks has added initial support for Darwin (1.4) to the NetBSD Packages Collection. Many thanks to Bill Coldwell for his help into providing Alistair the opportunity to do so.

While this support is in very new, Alistair has been able to install packages on Darwin.

Details are available in Alistair's announcement in the tech-pkg mail archive.

October 2001

30 Oct 2001 - New XFree86 4.1.0 snapshot for 1.5.2 available

Stoned Elipot has made a new snapshot for NetBSD/i386 1.5.2 of XFree86 4.1.0 made from NetBSD's xsrc/xfree sources as of 2001/10/30. The new snapshot is available at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/i386/XF86-4.1.0-1.5.2/xfree410-152.tgz. The README file in the same directory contains instructions and MD5 checksum.

22 Oct 2001 - Kernel Subsystems Documentation available

Gregory McGary has documented various interfaces of the NetBSD kernel in section 9 of the manual pages. New pages we are happy to provide include:

17 Oct 2001 - Creative Labs SBLive! driver in NetBSD-current

Yannick Montulet's driver for Creative Labs' popular series of "Sound Blaster Live" sound cards has been committed to NetBSD-current. As of now, the MIDI port is not yet supported—this support won't be difficult to add later. 

emuxki0 at pci0 dev 15 function 0: Creative Labs SBLive! EMU 10000 \ \
 
  (audio multimedia, revision 0x08)
emuxki0: interrupting at irq 5
emuxki0: SigmaTel STAC9721/23 codec; 18 bit DAC, 18 bit ADC, Rockwell 3D
audio0 at emuxki0: full duplex, mmap, independent

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

15 Oct 2001 - Timestamp capability added for dump's messages

Brett Lymn has committed changes to dump(8), in NetBSD-current, that allows one to add timestamps to the informational messages it prints. Timestamps are enable using the -t flag. The default timestamp is in %H:%M:%S %Z format (e.g. 13:50:25 UTC). The TIMEFORMAT environment variable, a customary format string containing commands for strftime(3), can be used to change the format of dump's timestamp to your own tastes. 

[09:44:10 CST] DUMP: 2.13% done, finished in 3:50 (at 13:34:16 CST)
[09:49:10 CST] DUMP: 9.82% done, finished in 1:31 (at 11:21:01 CST)
[09:54:10 CST] DUMP: 16.89% done, finished in 1:13 (at 11:07:57 CST)
[09:59:10 CST] DUMP: 23.62% done, finished in 1:04 (at 11:03:51 CST)
[10:04:10 CST] DUMP: 30.18% done, finished in 0:57 (at 11:02:00
CST)

More details are in the updated dump(8) manual page.

12 Oct 2001 - Major overhaul of NetBSD's security audit system

Luke Mewburn and Andrew Brown have finished some major changes to NetBSD's built-in security auditing system. The system watches a configurable number of files, and reports changes to them. Reports can include the changes made for text-based configuration files or general notifications of changed files e.g. for binary files. Subsystems audited include the system's network configuration, user authentication information, disk configuration and many others. Of course, users can always add more data to monitor if the need arises. See the commit log entry.

01 Oct 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in September 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in September 2001 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

September 2001

30 Sep 2001 - PCMCIA audio driver added

Jared D. McNeill has contributed a driver for the Eiger Labs PCMCIA sound card. The driver uses programmed IO to access the sound card, as the PCMCIA bus does not allow doing direct memory access (DMA) from the card. Still it the driver is capable of 8- and 16-bit audio sample playback at rates up to 44.1kHz. This is the first PCMCIA audio driver available for NetBSD!

29 Sep 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome six new developers:

  • Stoned Elipot, , who has been helping with the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) by submitting many pkgsrc PRs in the past. He will continue helping to improve pkgsrc.
  • Tetsuya Isaki, , who will be helping with NetBSD/x68k. He is already working on some device drivers, and will be continuing with others later.
  • Martti Kuparinen, , who has been contributing many PRs for the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc). He will now be able to continue improving pkgsrc with direct commits.
  • Chris Pinnock, , who will be helping with htdocs, pkgsrc, and bulk-builds of binary packages. Additionally, Chris also runs NetBSD www and ISO mirrors located in the UK, and has been helping out with NetBSD www-team tasks for a while now.
  • Tracy Di Marco White, , who will be helping with internal project maintenance tasks.
  • Someya Yoshihiko, , who will be working on miscellaneous device drivers, including drivers for PCI sound hardware.

25 Sep 2001 - Digital signatures for binary packages

Alistair Crooks has committed changes to pkg_add(1); adding the ability to verify the contents of a binary package by using digital signatures. This has been accomplished by added a "-s verification-type" command line argument to pkg_add(1).

The following verification types have been defined: gpg (pkgsrc/security/gnupg), pgp5 (pkgsrc/security/pgp5), and none. Callouts are made to the relevant programs to verify the contents of the binary package, and its provenance. You are then asked whether you want to proceed with the installation. The "none" verification type is the same as the existing behaviour, and is also the default - in which case, no verification of the binary package is done.

The verification type is passed onto recursive pkg_add(1) invocations for dependent packages

At the moment, the ability to verify packages is limited to those which are not specified by URL; removing this restriction is being looked at.

More details are located in Alistair's announcement in the tech-pkg mail archive.

22 Sep 2001 - NetBSD/atari switches to ELF

Thomas Gerner has committed changes to convert the NetBSD/atari port to ELF. With the COMPAT_AOUT_M68K kernel option, all your old a.out binaries should still work. Note that a.out versions of ifconfig(8) and route(8) will not work due to some structure alignment problems.

A NetBSD/atari ELF snapshot is available at: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/atari/snapshot/.

Instructions for upgrading from this snapshot or from source are at: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/atari/snapshot/README.ELF-UPGRADE.

15 Sep 2001 - Recent UVM changes

Chuck Silvers has committed a large amount of UVM changes he has been working on for the past few months, including the vfs_reinit and softdep-poolification changes that have been discussed recently on the NetBSD mailing lists.

Most of the changes are related to improving performance and robustness under load. As an example, on a PC, Chuck saw the elapsed time for "make release" of a NetBSD 1.5 source tree took 10% less time than it took under a 1.5 kernel. Additionally, on his DECstation 5000/200, write throughput showed improvement to within 1% of the rate of NetBSD 1.5.

A summary of the changes is available in Chuck's announcement.

If you experience any problems, please report them with send-pr(1).

15 Sep 2001 - Driver for Sun GEM Ethernet controllers

Eduardo Horvath has committed a new driver for SUN GEM, Sun ERI 10/100, and Apple GMAC Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

13 Sep 2001 - NetBSD 1.5.2 Released

NetBSD 1.5.2, a patch release improving stability, fixing bugs in, and adding some features to NetBSD 1.5.1, was released with support for 21 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5.2 release announcement.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.5.2 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you.

Update 09/27: Japanese and French language translations of the NetBSD 1.5.2 release announcement are available.

06 Sep 2001 - Recent FFS changes

Luke Mewburn has incorporated the enhanced ffs_dirpref() from Grigoriy Orlov (as found in other open source BSD variants), with minor changes.

The new algorithm has a marked performance increase, especially when performing tasks such as untarring pkgsrc.tar.gz, etc, on ffs file systems.

More details can be found in Luke's commit log.

06 Sep 2001 - Three new Security Advisories released

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2001-015, SA2001-016, SA2001-017 have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

August 2001

31 Aug 2001 - Summary of NetBSD booth at LinuxWorld Expo 2001

The NetBSD Project had a booth at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo from August 28-30, 2001. Jason Thorpe has written a short summary about the NetBSD booth at LinuxWorld. Also at the booth was the debut of NetBSD running on a Playstation 2 from Japan.

27 Aug 2001 - Driver for AMD PCnet-PCI Ethernet chips

Jason Thorpe has committed a new driver for the AMD PCnet-PCI family of Ethernet chips. This driver uses direct DMA to mbufs (like other PCI network drivers, and unlike the old "le at pci" driver), and also supports communication with the MII-connected PHYs on the 10/100 boards.

More details are available in the pcn(4) man page.

23 Aug 2001 - Two new Security Advisories released

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2001-013, SA2001-014 have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

The fixes for SA2001-013, SA2001-014, are present in the upcoming NetBSD 1.5.2 release.

  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-013 - OpenSSL PRNG weakness The logic used for PRNG was not strong enough, and allows attackers to guess the internal state of the PRNG. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    July 10, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: July 29, 2001 (1.5.2 includes the fix)
       pkgsrc: openssl-0.9.6b or openssl-0.9.6nb1
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-014 - dump(8) exposes 'tty' group dump(8) and dump_lfs(8) did not drop setgid tty rights while executing a user supplied RCMD_CMD environment variable. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    Aug 8, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: Aug 8, 2001 (1.5.2 includes the fix)

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

22 Aug 2001 - BSD API mailing lists

At the last Usenix BSD MegaBOF, the concept of mailing lists to be used for announcing changes to the BSD APIs was proposed. The notion was to have a place where people can post messages about new APIs they were adding to their flavour of BSD, so that people from other BSDs would be aware of the activity.

Since then, two mailing lists have been created. One is for announcements, and the other is for calmy discussing such APIs and their design.

These two lists are:

[email protected] [email protected]

Both lists can be subscribed to via majordomo, and they're both moderated. More information about the charter of these lists is available via majordomo by sending a mail with "info list-name" in the body.

21 Aug 2001 - New sendmail 8.11.6 in -current, pkgsrc

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded sendmail to version 8.11.6 in NetBSD-current. This version fixes a security problem, reported by SecurityFocus, regarding command line processing. This vulnerability, present in all 8.11 and 8.12.0.Beta versions up to 8.11.6 and 8.12.0Beta19, is not remotely exploitable.

In pkgsrc, the mail/sendmail package has also been updated to 8.11.6.

Also of interest are the Third Party Software Distributed with NetBSD and the Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection: by date documents.

Update 08/22: This has been fixed for NetBSD 1.5.2. A patch fixing the security problem with command line processing has been applied to sendmail 8.11.3 as on the netbsd-1-5 branch.

17 Aug 2001 - Bridge support added to NetBSD-current

Jason Thorpe has committed support for building Ethernet bridges to NetBSD-current. Bridges are configured with a combination of ifconfig(8) and the new brconfig(8) utility. brconfig(8) can also be used to show a bridge's status, like so: 

swinger:thorpej 1$ brconfig -a
bridge0: flags=41<UP,RUNNING>
        Configuration:
                priority 32768 hellotime 2 fwddelay 15 maxage 20
        Interfaces:
                fxp2 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
                        port 4 priority 128
                tlp0 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
                        port 5 priority 128
        Address cache (max cache: 100, timeout: 1200):
                00:20:6f:04:13:1d tlp0 1169 flags=0<>
                08:00:2b:2b:a9:0e tlp0 914 flags=0<>
                00:03:47:20:1b:7d fxp2 191 flags=0<>
                00:00:f8:23:43:9d tlp0 148 flags=0<>
swinger:thorpej 2$

If you use the bridge code, please send Jason a mail and report on how well it works for you. If you have problems with it, please file a bug report with send-pr(1).

This support is based off Jason Wright's bridge driver for OpenBSD, with changes by Jason Thorpe.

17 Aug 2001 - FFS_EI code changes

Luke Mewburn has committed changes so that mounting opposite-endian file systems using the FFS_EI kernel option should be significantly more stable. He has also updated various tools to reflect these changes (fsck_ffs(8), dump(8), dumpfs(8), etc).

Support for reading and writing FFS in non-native byte order, conditioned to "options FFS_EI", was added to NetBSD by Manuel Bouyer. Coupled with Luke's recent changes, one should now be able to fsck, dump, dumpfs (etc) opposite endian file systems, mount and use them, and convert them with 'fsck_ffs -B newendian ....'.

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

13 Aug 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in July 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in July 2001 is available in the current-users mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

09 Aug 2001 - Recent improvements to NetBSD/mvme68k

The port of NetBSD to Motorola's 68k VME board computers, NetBSD/mvme68k, has had some improvements as of late.

Thanks to a donation of a MVME177 to the NetBSD Foundation by Matt Thomas, Steve Woodford has been able to complete the support for this m68060-based board in NetBSD/mvme68k -current.

Accordingly, Steve has made available a new NetBSD/mvme68k snapshot, based on 2001-08-07 -current sources. It is available in the NetBSD/mvme68k snapshot area of the ftp server.

Since the last -current snapshot, a number of notable changes have made it into the NetBSD/mvme68k kernel:

  1. The MI evcnt(9) interface is now used to record interrupt statistics.
  2. The standalone netboot program now supports DHCP in addition to rarp/bootparams.
  3. “Simulated” software interrupts have been replaced by real “hardware assisted” software interrupts. This reduces the amount of overhead on exit from exception handlers.
  4. Numerous pmap tweaks to improve reliability.
  5. The ECC DRAM controller(s) on MVME167/MVME177 (and optional on MVME162/MVME172) are now fully enabled. The kernel will now detect and log any errors reported by the controllers. You may need to change your kernel config files, as the memc(4) driver now attaches at mainbus0 instead of pcctwo0. Note that the memc(4) driver does not yet support the MEMC040 parity checking memory controllers found on some boards.
  6. And, of course, completed MVME177 support.

As usual, if you experience any problems, please report them using send-pr(1) and/or the port-mvme68k mailing list.

08 Aug 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome three new developers:

  • Damon Brodie, , who has been helping with the NetBSD Packages Collection for quite some time. He has contributed many packages and PRs for pkgsrc, particularly regarding perl modules, X-10, and iButtons.
  • Takashi Hosokawa, , who works for Plat'Home CO., LTD., a well-known UNIX system solution company in Tokyo, Japan. At Plat'Home, Takashi has been engaged in developing OpenBlockS, a PowerPC 860 based micro server. With great affinity, he has finished a new port of NetBSD to the OpenBlockS micro server. He will be working on integrating his new port into the NetBSD source tree, and will take on the role of NetBSD/openblocks port maintainer. Takashi's other interests include X11 and internationalization.
  • Bang Jun-Young, , who will be continuing work on uwscons (universal wscons), a multilingual console driver for NetBSD. More specifically, uwscons is an expansion to wscons (NetBSD's platform-independent workstation console driver), which allows for display of multilingual/encoding text.

03 Aug 2001 - ISC DHCP upgraded to 3.0rc10 in NetBSD-current

Matthias Drochner has upgraded ISC DHCP to version 3.0rc10 in NetBSD-current.

See also: Third Party Software Distributed with NetBSD

July 2001

31 Jul 2001 - New port-algor mailing list created

A new mailing list, port-algor, has been created to discuss issues in NetBSD/algor, the port to the Algorithmics, Ltd. MIPS-based evaluation boards.

30 Jul 2001 - Driver for Mylex AcceleRAID and eXtremeRAID controllers

Andrew Doran has committed a driver for Mylex AcceleRAID and eXtremeRAID controllers with v6 and later firmware to NetBSD-current. The driver, mly, is based off the FreeBSD driver of the same name, with changes by Thor Lancelot Simon, Eric Haszlakiewicz, and Andrew Doran.

Please see the mly(4) man page for more details.

29 Jul 2001 - New port-cats mailing list created

A new mailing list, port-cats, has been created to discuss issues in NetBSD/cats, the port to the Chalice Technology CATS motherboard.

28 Jul 2001 - New bootloader for NetBSD/arm26

Ben Harris has committed a new bootloader, with support for gzipped kernels, to NetBSD/arm26. See Ben's announcement in the port-arm26 mail archive for more details.

26 Jul 2001 - Driver for Sundance TC9021 Gigabit Ethernet

Jason Thorpe has committed a new driver, to NetBSD-current, for the Sundance Tech. TC9021 Gigabit Ethernet chip. The chip is found on the D-Link DGE-550T, and will be on the Antares Gigabit Ethernet when that board is available.

Jason has tested on both 1000BASE-SX (fiber) and 1000BASE-T (cat5) sample boards, but has not yet been successful with the 1000BASE-T version. That said, the 1000BASE-SX version has been working pretty well. 

stge0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0: Sundance TC9021 Gigabit Ethernet, rev. 7
stge0: interrupting at irq 11
stge0: Ethernet address 00:33:07:33:1a:66
gentbi0 at stge0 phy 1: Generic ten-bit interface, rev. 0
gentbi0: 1000baseSX, 1000baseSX-FDX, auto

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

25 Jul 2001 - Four new Security Advisories released

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2001-009, SA2001-010, SA2001-011, and SA2001-012 have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

The fixes for SA2001-009, SA2001-010, and SA2001-011 are all present in NetBSD 1.5.1. SA2001-012 affects releases up to and including NetBSD 1.5.1.

  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-009 - Race condition between sugid-exec and ptrace(2). A race condition can allow a local user to cause a setuid-root executable to execute arbitrary code as the superuser. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    June 15, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: June 17, 2001 (1.5.1 includes the fix)
       NetBSD-1.4 branch: July 19, 2001
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-010 - sshd(8) "cookies" file mishandling on X11 forwarding. Rogue local users can abuse this to remove any file named "cookies" using root privileges if X11 forwarding is enabled. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    June 14, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: June 25, 2001 (1.5.1 includes the fix)
       pkgsrc openssh:    openssh-2.9p2 corrects this issue
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-011 - Insufficient msg_controllen checking for sendmsg(2). Due to insufficient length checking in the kernel, sendmsg(2) can be used by a local user to cause a kernel trap, or an 'out of space in kmem_map' panic. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    July 1, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: July 2, 2001 (1.5.1 includes the fix)
       NetBSD-1.4 branch: July 19, 2001
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-012 - telnetd(8) options overflow. A buffer overflow existed in the telnetd(8) program. Any client connecting could cause the telnetd instance to SEGV, and possibly to execute arbitrary code as root 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    July 19, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: Use supplied patch
       NetBSD-1.4 branch: Use supplied patch

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

22 Jul 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in June 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in June 2001 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

16 Jul 2001 - LFS on-disk layout version 2 committed to -current

Konrad Schroder has committed changes for LFSv2 to NetBSD-current. Kernels and tools will understand both v1 and v2 filesystems, with newfs_lfs generating v2 filesystems by default.

An overview of the changes in the v2 layout is available from Konrad's commit log in the source-changes mail archive.

12 Jul 2001 - XFree86 4.0.3/4.1.0 snapshots for NetBSD/i386 1.5.1

Havard Eidnes has put together an unofficial snapshot of XFree86 version 4.0.3 built on NetBSD/i386 1.5.1. This is built from the xsrc tree just before the 4.1 version was imported. The build tree was subsequently modified to include Matrox's drivers. This means that the Matrox G450 cards are supported, instead of being probed and "refused", as would be the case with plain 4.0.3.

Also, Hubert Feyrer has put together an unofficial snapshot of XFree86 version 4.1.0 built on NetBSD/i386 1.5.1. This snapshot is based on the 4.1.0 sources in the xsrc tree as of 2001-07-09.

The XFree86 4.0.3/4.1.0 snapshots for NetBSD/i386 1.5.1 are available in the NetBSD/i386 snapshot area of the ftp server. The files xfree403+.tgz and xfree410.tgz are tar files to be extracted from /, and which contain bits which will only go into usr/X11R6.

12 Jul 2001 - Matt DeBergalis is now the NetBSD/next68k port maintainer

Matt DeBergalis, <[email protected]>, has volunteered to take on the role of NetBSD/next68k port maintainer.

Leaving the position of next68k port maintainer, due to time constraints, is Darrin B. Jewell. Darrin will still be contributing to the next68k port by fixing bugs and answering questions on the mailing lists, among other projects.

11 Jul 2001 - NetBSD 1.5.1 Released

NetBSD 1.5.1, a patch release improving stability, fixing bugs in, and adding some features to NetBSD 1.5, was released with support for 21 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5.1 release announcement.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.5.1 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you.

Update 07/12: A French Language and Japanese Language translation of the NetBSD 1.5.1 release announcement is available.

02 Jul 2001 - Article Series: A Tour through the NetBSD Documentation

A Tour through the NetBSD Documentation is a four-part series of articles by Hubert Feyrer. These articles offer an introduction to all the documentation that's shipped in a NetBSD 1.5.x system. The first two articles are introductions to Manual Pages and Info Pages. The third article gives an overview of the available documents and papers in troff or nroff format from the large collection of historic and current documentation available in NetBSD. The last article in the series goes through some of the other locations for NetBSD Documentation in a 1.5.x system, and on the NetBSD web site.

  1. Manual Pages [200104]
  2. Info Pages [200105]
  3. Runoff Documentation [200106]
  4. Loose Odds & Ends [200107]

See also: Articles about NetBSD

June 2001

30 Jun 2001 - NetBSD at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2001

Update 07/02: Luke Mewburn has made the NetBSD slides from the BSD BoF talk available at http://www.mewburn.net/luke/talks/usenix-2001-bof/.

NetBSD has been well represented at Usenix 2001, and we would like to thank everyone involved in the BSD BoF and the NetBSD booth.

The NetBSD Project had a presentation at the BSD BoF which was headed by NetBSD Core Group members Christos Zoulas and Luke Mewburn. A list of highlights is available in Chuck Toporek's "Greetings from the BSD Super BoF" article. The slides from this talk are available at http://www.mewburn.net/luke/talks/usenix-2001-bof/.

Luke Mewburn was also a part of the scripting technical session; his presentation was entitled, "The Design and Implementation of the NetBSD rc.d System". In Ellen Siever's "Usenix Technical Session Wrap-Up" article, she talks briefly about Luke's presentation. Luke's paper can be found at the Usenix 2001 web site, in both HTML and PDF formats, under FREENIX Track Refereed Papers (requires USENIX membership). The paper may also be found in PDF format at Luke's own web site.

Again, a thank you to all involved.

28 Jun 2001 - New developer

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome a new developer:

22 Jun 2001 - NetBSD/x86_64: a port for AMD's upcoming line of 64-bit CPUs

Last week, a port of NetBSD to the x86-64 (tm) architecture was committed to the NetBSD CVS repository. The x86-64 is AMD's upcoming 64-bit line of CPUs. For now, it is only known to work on the Virtutech simulator, since no x86-64 hardware is available yet. In this environment, it runs multi-user.

NetBSD/x86_64 is the 44th architecture that NetBSD runs on.

The porting was done by Frank van der Linden of Wasabi Systems, with kind support from AMD, who provided the simulator and fast machines to run it on.

The Wasabi press release about this can be found at: http://www.wasabisystems.com/news/pr20010622.html.

For information on the x86-64 CPU, see: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/64bit/index.html and http://www.x86-64.org/.

A dmesg(8) output as well as a screenshot are available on the amd64 ports page.

21 Jun 2001 - More information in Subject: lines for commit log mailing lists

Hubert Feyrer has improved the Subject: lines for the commit message mailing lists (pkgsrc-changes, source-changes, and www-changes). All commit messages still include any optional branch, but also now include the least common path of directories affected by the commit (as opposed to just the module name):

CVS commit: [optional-branch] least/common/path

As an example, if there were a commit to /pkgsrc/www/w3m/Makefile the Subject: line of the message sent to pkgsrc-changes would be:

CVS commit: pkgsrc/www/w3m

19 Jun 2001 - Driver for Sundance Tech. ST-201 10/100 Ethernet chip

Jason Thorpe has committed a new driver, to NetBSD-current, for the Sundance Tech. ST-201 10/100 Ethernet chip. The chip is found on the D-Link DFE-550TX board, which is what Jason has tested the new driver on: 

ste0 at pci0 dev 9 function 0: D-Link DFE-550TX 10/100 Ethernet
ste0: interrupting at irq 9
ste0: Ethernet address 00:50:ba:00:00:06
sqphy0 at ste0 phy 1: Seeq 80225 10/100 media interface, rev. 0
sqphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

19 Jun 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome four new developers:

  • Nathan Ahlstrom, , who will be working with the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc). In the past, he has contributed dozens of additions and fixes for pkgsrc via send-pr(1).
  • Jason Fink, , who's already been contributing to the NetBSD Guide and the NetBSD web site, and will be continuing his efforts to help build and improve our documentation. In addition to documentation, he'll still be helping out with testing and helping debug kernel patches, and with tracking NetBSD-current.
  • MAEKAWA Masahide, , who has been working on USB improvements. He is now developing a dynamic assignment framework of devsw.
  • YAMAMOTO Takashi, , who has sent in several PRs via send-pr(1), covering everything from device drivers to userland programs. He'll be mainly working on i18n.

18 Jun 2001 - Driver for Adaptec AIC-6915 10/100 Ethernet chip

Jason Thorpe has committed a driver for the AIC-6915 10/100 Ethernet chip, also known as the "Starfire".

This chip comes on several Adaptec Ethernet boards:

  • ANA-62011 Single port 10/100 64-bit
  • ANA-62022 Dual port 10/100 64-bit
  • ANA-62044 Quad port 10/100 64-bit
  • ANA-62020 Single port 100baseFX 64-bit
  • ANA-69011 Single port 10/100 32-bit

Jason has tested it on the following board: 

sf0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0: ANA-62011 (rev 0) 10/100 Ethernet, rev. 3
sf0: interrupting at irq 11
sf0: Ethernet address 00:00:d1:a8:16:08
sqphy0 at sf0 phy 1: Seeq 80220 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
sqphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

18 Jun 2001 - ISC DHCP upgraded to 3.0rc8 in NetBSD-current

Matthias Drochner has upgraded ISC DHCP to version 3.0rc8 in NetBSD-current.

See also: Third Party Software Distributed with NetBSD

18 Jun 2001 - High performance pipe implementation in NetBSD-current

Jaromír Dolecek has committed a port of the high performance pipe implementation, written by John S. Dyson for the FreeBSD Project, to NetBSD-current. It's optional at the moment, and you'll need to add 'options NEW_PIPE' to your kernel configuration file if you wish to use it.

The speed enhancement between the old socketbased-pair implementation and this one ranges from 20% to 300%, with machines having a slow CPU receiving the most notable boost. Since the new pipe implementation was changed to take advantage of UVM uvm_loan() facilities to avoid one memory to memory copy, all machines should see a performance improvement.

After further testing, this new implementation is planned to become the default.

14 Jun 2001 - NetBSD/cesfic: a port to the FIC8234 VME processor board

Matthias Drochner has ported NetBSD to the FIC8234 VME processor board, made by the Swiss company CES (Geneve). These boards are (or have been) popular in high energy physics data acquisition.

The port is far along enough for multiuser and self-hosting at this point - but SCSI support, among other things, haven't been added yet.

Matthias Drochner is the NetBSD/cesfic port maintainer.

More information is available at the NetBSD/cesfic port page.

14 Jun 2001 - NetBSD/walnut: a port to IBM's 405GP Reference Board

Eduardo Horvath and Simon Burge have ported NetBSD to IBM's 405GP Reference Board, also known as the "Walnut".

The Walnut is an ATX form-factor motherboard designed to drop into a PC case. It has the usual PCI bus, peripherals, and such. More information on the Walnut can be found on IBM's web site:

http://www.chips.ibm.com/products/powerpc/tools/ek.html and http://www.chips.ibm.com/products/powerpc/evalkits/405refbd.pdf

Eduardo Horvath and Simon Burge are the NetBSD/walnut port maintainers. Their porting efforts were sponsored by Wasabi Systems; who've put out their own press release regarding NetBSD/walnut.

14 Jun 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in May 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in May 2001 is available in the current-users mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

09 Jun 2001 - BSD BoF at NetWorld+Interop Tokyo summary

On June 7th, 2001, a BSD BoF was held as one of the night sessions at NetWorld+Interop Tokyo. Over 300 people attended in person, 50-100 people attended over IRC (volunteers typed the discussions to a couple of IRC channels), and some watched the discussion over RealVideo transmission. Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino wrote up a summary of the BSD BoF at NetWorld+Interop Tokyo.

06 Jun 2001 - New pmap module for Motorola MPC6xx CPUs in -current

Matt Thomas has committed a new pmap module for the PowerPC 60x, 7xx (G3), 74xx (G4) CPUs to NetBSD-current. The new pmap is simpler and faster than the previous pmap module it replaced. As an example, with the new pmap module, kernel time on a GENERIC NetBSD/macppc kernel build dropped by 40%.

Also in Matt's commits were organization changes. In the near future, support for PowerPCs with different MMUs will be added to NetBSD. In preparation for this, the new pmap and its files were placed in two new directories: sys/arch/powerpc/mpc6xx and sys/arch/powerpc/include/mpc6xx. The MPC6xx dependent header files in powerpc/include (bat.h, hid.h, hid_601.h, pte.h) have been moved to powerpc/include/mpc6xx along with the mpc6xx specific pmap.h.

A new kernel configuration option has been defined (PPC_MPC6XX) and has been added to std.<port> for the bebox and macppc ports. The prep port will be updated soon.

03 Jun 2001 - Driver for Initio INIC-940/950 PCI SCSI controllers

Izumi Tsutsui has added a driver for the Initio INIC-940/950 SCSI controllers to NetBSD-current. This driver is based on OpenBSD's iha driver, with some modified structures.

03 Jun 2001 - New developer

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome a new developer:

03 Jun 2001 - Hardware IPv4/TCP/UDP checksumming support

Jason Thorpe has committed his changes to support in-bound and out-bound IPv4, TCP, and UDP checksumming to NetBSD-current. It is currently supported on the NatSemi DP83820 Gigabit Ethernet (gsip), 3Com Etherlink XL (ex), and Alteon Tigon/Tigon2 Gigabit Ethernet (ti). There is also support for caching the IPv6 pseudo-header checksum, which should save some CPU time for IPv6 users, as well.

If you have any problems with these changes, please report them with send-pr(1).

May 2001

31 May 2001 - NetBSD/vax now runs multicpu

Anders Magnusson got his VAX 8350 to use all three processors. From the testing done so far, the system works quite fine. Most of the code is in the source tree already, the rest will undergo a bit more cleanup and polishing, and will then be committed to the development branch, NetBSD-current.

The VAX 8350 system is probably the slowest multiprocessor system that NetBSD will ever support; each CPU does about 2VUPS (~2MIPS). Note that the 8350 normally only has two CPUs, the third one was plugged in for testing purpose.

It shouldn't be too hard to make NetBSD/vax running on some funnier machines, like the 8800, which has two 6VUPS KA88 CPUs, and the 6000 series, which can take up to six CPUs with upto 32VUPS altogether. Stay tuned!

For curious parties, there's a dmesg(8) and top(1) output below. Also, for all the youth out there spoiled by workstations and PCs, here are a few pictures showing what a real computer looks like:

Here's a VAX 8800 (the four rightmost sections with brown top), the 8350 Anders has been working with, and here's a picture of a 6000, merely a 6320 (two CPUs with 4 VUPS each).

dmesg(8) says: 

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5V (GENERIC.MP) #41: Wed May 30 17:46:57 CEST 2001
    ragge@bakfull:/usr/home/ragge/tmp/syssrc/sys/arch/vax/compile/GENERIC.MP

VAX 8200
total memory = 49148 KB
avail memory = 41848 KB
using 640 buffers containing 2560 KB of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bi0 at mainbus0
klesi at bi0 node 0 [sadr 20400000 eadr 20440000] not configured
cpu0 at bi0 node 2: ka825 (master) cpu rev 2, u patch rev 28, sec patch 1
kdb0 at bi0 node 4 vec 520
mscpbus0 at kdb0: version 3 model 2
ra0 at mscpbus0 drive 0: RA90
ra0: nspt 52 group 1 ngpc 15 rct 780 nrpt 1 nrct 2
ra1 at mscpbus0 drive 1: RA90
ra1: nspt 69 group 1 ngpc 13 rct 414 nrpt 1 nrct 4
cpu1 at bi0 node 7: ka825 (slave) cpu rev 2, u patch rev 29, sec patch 1
ni0 at bi0 node 8 vec 540: DEBNA
ni0: hardware address 08:00:2b:0b:cd:05
cpu2 at bi0 node 9: ka825 (slave) cpu rev 2, u patch rev 28, sec patch 1
dmb32 at bi0 node 10 unsupported
mem0 at bi0 node 11: size 16MB, 1M chips
mem1 at bi0 node 12 [sadr 1000000 eadr 2000000]: size 16MB, 1M chips
mem2 at bi0 node 13 [sadr 2000000 eadr 3000000]: size 16MB, 1M chips
booted from type 98 unit 0 csr 0x20010000 adapter 8 slave 0
boot device: ni0
root on ni0
mountroot: trying cd9660...
mountroot: trying nfs...
nfs_boot: trying DHCP/BOOTP
nfs_boot: BOOTP server: 130.240.16.34
nfs_boot: my_addr=130.240.16.204
nfs_boot: my_mask=255.255.255.0
root on zen:/export/root/nisse
root time: 0x3b0d6ac7
Clock has lost 11256 day(s) - CHECK AND RESET THE DATE.
root file system type: nfs
cpu1: running
cpu2: running
init: copying out path `/sbin/init' 11
/etc/rc.conf is not configured.  Multiuser boot aborted.
Enter pathname of shell or RETURN for sh:
Terminal type? [unknown]
#

top(1) output: 

load averages:  0.77,  0.61,  0.28    09:42:47
11 processes:  8 sleeping, 3 on processor
Memory: 2476K Act, 156K Wired, 38M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE     TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
   38 root      49    0   108K  368K onproc    0:05 74.31% 16.46% top
   37 root      31    0   132K  352K onproc    0:51 26.59%  7.86% bc
   32 root      10    0   444K   92K sleep     0:01  9.83%  3.56% sh
   36 root      28    0   132K  352K onproc    0:05  9.17%  3.03% bc
   31 root      10    0    24K  268K sleep     0:03  5.12%  1.86% time
   29 root      10    0   444K  136K sleep     0:01  4.85%  1.76% sh
   35 root      10    0    24K  268K sleep     0:00  5.03%  1.66% time
   28 root      10    0   444K   80K sleep     0:01  0.00%  0.00% sh
    1 root      10    0   248K   64K sleep     0:01  0.00%  0.00% init
   33 root      10    0   444K  136K sleep     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
   11 root      10    0   444K  312K sleep      ???  0.00%  0.00% sh

Note the "3 on processor" in top(1) output running two 'echo "2^9999/3^6308" | /usr/bin/time bc'.

29 May 2001 - NetBSD ported to Algorithmics MIPS evaluation boards

Update 06/01: Jason Thorpe, the NetBSD/algor port maintainer, has added support for the Algorithmics P-4032 board. This new support is untested as Jason doesn't have a P-4032 yet.

Jason Thorpe has ported NetBSD to the Algorithmics MIPS evaluation boards. The new port is called NetBSD/algor, and it currently supports the P-5064, which has a QED RM5xxx CPU soldered on.

There is some skeletal support for the P-4032 (an older board, which has an R4xxx CPU). There are some placeholders for the P-6032, which is their newest board, but no real code yet (the P-6032 has a different PCI controller, the Algorithmics BONITO).

There are still some issues with the NetBSD/algor kernel (apparently softintr-related), but it works well-enough to self-host.

Thank you to Allegro Networks for loaning Jason a P-5064 board on which to do the port.

29 May 2001 - Three new Security Advisories released

Update 05/31: SA2001-006 has been fixed on the netbsd-1-4 branch.

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2001-006, SA2001-007, and SA2001-008 have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

The fixes for these have been pulled up to the netbsd-1-5 branch, and will be in the NetBSD 1.5.1 release.

  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-006 - Malicious parties may be able to prevent a NetBSD node from communicating with other nodes by transmitting a lot of bogus fragmented IPv4 packets. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    April 17, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: April 24, 2001
       NetBSD-1.4 branch: May 31, 2001
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-007 - IP Filter (ipf), the IP packet filtering software in NetBSD, has a bug where the checks on a fragmented packet are incomplete and it may be possible to abuse this to bypass filter rules. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    April  6, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: April 14, 2001
       NetBSD-1.4 branch: April 14, 2001
  • NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-008 - Missing validation of user-supplied arguments to a system call can allow user applications on the sh3 platform to execute code with supervisor privileges, bypassing normal system protections. This problem is only present on the sh3 platform, which includes the dreamcast, evbsh3, hpcsh and mmeye ports. 
    Fixed: NetBSD-current:    May 16, 2001
       NetBSD-1.5 branch: May 27, 2001

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

28 May 2001 - New sendmail 8.11.4 in -current, pkgsrc

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded sendmail to version 8.11.4 in NetBSD-current.

Regarding pkgsrc, sendmail 8.11.4 or 8.12.0.Beta10 are available. For 8.11.4 see the mail/sendmail package, and for 8.12.0.Beta10 see the mail/sendmail-current package.

Also of interest are the Third Party Software Distributed with NetBSD and the Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection: by date documents.

22 May 2001 - Luke Mewburn has released lukemftpd 1.1

A new release of lukemftpd, a port of the enhanced NetBSD ftp server to older versions of NetBSD and to foreign systems (such as Solaris and Linux), is now available. lukemftpd uses an autoconf configure script and replacement library for systems which don't have NetBSD-specific library functions.

Some of the changes in this version are:

  • Fixed checkportcmd for the IPv4 case.
  • Added support for S/Key authentication.
  • Use method other than glob(3) to do ~ expansion.
  • Improve portability.
  • Rewrite method of handling out-of-band operations, in order to more easily support RFC2228 security extensions in a future release.

Also the net/lukemftpd package in the NetBSD Packages Collection has been updated for the release of version 1.1.

The main ftp site for lukemftpd is ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/lukemftp/. The same location also holds lukemftp, a port of the enhanced NetBSD ftp client to other systems.

18 May 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome two new developers:

18 May 2001 - NetBSD developer map

A NetBSD developer map is available, which marks the locations of the people who make NetBSD happen.

17 May 2001 - Driver for National Semiconductor DP83820 Gigabit Ethernet

Jason Thorpe has committed a driver for the National Semiconductor DP83820 Gigabit Ethernet chip to NetBSD-current. This chip is found on several low-cost Gigabit Ethernet boards, including the NetGear GA-622 and the Asante FriendlyNet GigaNIX boards. 

    gsip0 at pci0 dev 9 function 0: NatSemi DP83820 Gigabit Ethernet
    gsip0: interrupting at irq 9
    gsip0: Ethernet address 00:50:fc:2c:b4:da
    ukphy0 at gsip0 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
    ukphy0: OUI 0x1000e8, model 0x0006, rev. 0
    ukphy0: 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseTX, 1000baseTX-FDX, auto

Jason hasn't written a driver for the PHY yet, but you should still be able to use the case in 100base and 1000base modes. There is still some tuning to do for this driver, but it certainly works well enough for people to use now.

If you have any problems, please send a bug report with send-pr(1).

17 May 2001 - BIND upgraded to 8.2.4 in -current, pkgsrc

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded BIND to version 8.2.4 in NetBSD-current.

Regarding pkgsrc, BIND 8.2.4 or 9.1.2 are available. See the net/bind9 pages under the NetBSD Packages Collection.

13 May 2001 - New am-utils 6.0.6 imported

Bernd Ernesti has imported am-utils 6.0.6 into NetBSD-current. An overview of changes is available in Bernd's commit message in the source-changes mail archive.

See also: Third Party Software Distributed with NetBSD

12 May 2001 - NetBSD/next68k switches to ELF

Chuck Silvers has committed changes to convert the NetBSD/next68k port to ELF. With the COMPAT_AOUT_M68K kernel option, all your old a.out binaries should still work. Note that a.out versions of ifconfig(8) and route(8) will not work due to some structure alignment problems.

No full NetBSD/next68k ELF snapshot has been made available yet, but you can grab the NetBSD/sun3 ELF snapshot at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sun3/snapshot/

The NetBSD/sun3 ELF snapshot will do fine for userland, and Chuck has put a NetBSD/next68k ELF kernel and boot program at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/next68k/ELF/

11 May 2001 - Recent additions to NetBSD/sgimips

Rafal K. Boni has added a lot of new support to NetBSD/sgimips that has been committed to NetBSD-current. Most notably is new support for the IP22 (Indigo2, Indy, Challenge S). A list of all the major new additions is as follows:

  • Support for the IP22 (Indigo2, Indy, Challenge S)
  • Support for the HPC I/O peripheral ASIC. There is where SCSI, Ethernet, etc. live on the Indigo2 and Indy
  • Support for the Seeq 8003 Ethernet attached to the HPC ASIC, found on the Indigo2 and Indy
  • Support for the Dallas 1286 clock found on the Indigo2 and Indy
  • IOC1/2 memory map
  • Support for the Indigo2/Indy IMC (this is that to which all other devices are attached)
  • Support for the SCC serial ports on Indigo2 and Indy
  • Support for configuring an SCC console
  • Generic software interrupt implementation, derived from NetBSD/mipsco
  • Basic EISA support for the Indigo2
  • Dynamic system configuration support, derived from NetBSD/pmax

An example kernel configuration file for Rafal's Indigo2 can be found in sys/arch/sgimips/conf/TEAL.

More information about NetBSD/sgimips is available at the NetBSD/sgimips port page.

09 May 2001 - New developer

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome a new developer:

09 May 2001 - New information on the NetBSD 1.5.1 release cycle

Update: 1.5.1_BETA2 snapshots are available for NetBSD/alpha, NetBSD/amiga, NetBSD/arc, NetBSD/arm32, NetBSD/atari, NetBSD/hp300, NetBSD/hpcmips, NetBSD/i386, NetBSD/macppc, NetBSD/mvme68k, NetBSD/news68k, NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/sparc, NetBSD/sparc64, NetBSD/sun3, NetBSD/vax, and NetBSD/x68k.

On April 6th, the release cycle for NetBSD 1.5.1 started. NetBSD 1.5.1 will be a patch release, improving stability and fixing bugs in NetBSD 1.5.

The release cycle started with a thorough testing period of the netbsd-1-5 branch. This was NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA; and so far it looks to have been successful. During this period, the 1.5.1 source tree did see some activity - as documentation was updated, a couple of bugs were fixed, and some drivers from the trunk (NetBSD-current) were pulled up to the netbsd-1-5 branch. A complete list of changes to the netbsd-1-5 branch from the release of NetBSD 1.5 through the end of NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA is available.

What will happen now are 1.5.1_BETA2 snapshots. This is to ensure that the fixes and additions during NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA sit well (there's no reason to believe otherwise, but better safe than sorry). The 1.5.1_BETA2 snapshots will be appearing shortly (both the relevant port pages and this news entry will be updated when they're available). If you can, please test these.

The 1.5.1_BETA2 source tree is the netbsd-1-5 branch as it is now. If you want to retrieve it - anoncvs, ftp, and sup are three ways for you to do so.

  • anoncvs: If you want to retrieve the NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA2 source code using anoncvs, update your source tree using the "-r netbsd-1-5" flag to the cvs "update" command, or check out a separate tree using this flag to the "checkout" command. If you want to update your 1.5.1_BETA2 source tree, you should always use the "-r netbsd-1-5" flag to make sure you aren't retrieving NetBSD-current mistakenly.
  • ftp: On the FTP server, the 1.5.1_BETA2 source tree is available in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-1-5/ directory. The extracted sources are updated daily, and the tar files are updated weekly.
  • sup: For people who want to retrieve the 1.5.1_BETA2 source tree via SUP, you'll want the "release-1-5" collection.

The planned release date of NetBSD 1.5.1 is after 1.5.1_BETA2. This most likely means early June.

Note: You may wish to also see the original April news entry regarding the 1.5.1 release cycle, "NetBSD 1.5.1 release cycle started (06 Apr)".

09 May 2001 - NetBSD ported to the Sun 2

In January 2001, Matthew Fredette began porting NetBSD to the Sun Microsystems Sun 2 series of computers. These machines are based on the Motorola 68010 CPU with a Sun-designed custom MMU, and were sold as both servers and desktop workstations from the early to mid 1980's. They were superceded by the Sun 3 systems, which are supported by NetBSD under the NetBSD/sun3 port.

After some work, Matt had his new port booting multiuser; and in April 2001 he began merging it into the NetBSD tree.

More information about the current status of NetBSD/sun2 is available at the NetBSD/sun2 port page.

04 May 2001 - Improved support for VIA chipsets in NetBSD-current

Manuel Bouyer has committed some improvements to the VIA code in pciide(4). On capable controllers, it should now run reliably at Ultra/66. Also, preliminary support for the 686b has been added.

02 May 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in April 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in April 2001 is available in the current-users mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

01 May 2001 - Support for the VAX 4000/705A in NetBSD/vax

Michael Kukat has written support for the VAX 4000/705A in NetBSD/vax. This new support has been committed, and is available in NetBSD/vax -current.

More information about NetBSD/vax is available at the NetBSD/vax port page.

April 2001

26 Apr 2001 - New menu structures for sushi

Tim Rightnour has committed new networking configuration and processes menu structures to sushi. In addition, a new sysctl form has been added to the existing system menu structure.

Sushi is an interactive, menu-based program that is designed to aid the user or administrator with administrative and complex tasks on their machines. Sushi provides a menu of various functions that the user can perform on his or her machine. Once the user selects a desired function, the function is either performed outright, or in most cases, the user is asked to fill in a simple form with required and optional information, which is then processed by sushi, and the action occurs.

The new networking configuration menu structure allows sushi to do tasks like edit /etc/exports, modify NIC configuration, and setup YP/NIS. The processes menu structure will allow starting / stopping / showing / restarting of things in /etc/rc.d. The new sysctl form in the system menu structure allows a user to both set sysctl's interactively, and save them in /etc/sysctl.conf.

People running a NetBSD system with sushi already installed can update their menu structures easily by running 'make install' in 'sharesrc/share/sushi'. Of course if you do a 'make build' or install a snapshot based on NetBSD-current sources past 2001-04-26, you'll get the updated menus also.

25 Apr 2001 - Merge of thorpej_scsipi branch in NetBSD-current

Manuel Bouyer has merged the thorpej_scsipi branch in NetBSD-current. The thorpej_scsipi branch was created for a complete rewrite of the SCSI/ATAPI mid-layer. After the merge today, that rewrite is now in NetBSD-current. The following is an overview of the changes and features:

  • All xfers are queued in the mid-layer, rather than doing so in an ad-hoc fashion in individual adapter drivers.
  • Adapter/channel resource management in the mid-layer, avoids even trying to start running an xfer if the adapter/channel doesn't have the resources.
  • Better communication between the mid-layer and the adapters.
  • Asynchronous event notification mechanism from adapter to mid-layer and peripherals.
  • Better peripheral queue management: freeze/thaw, sorted requeueing during recovery, etc.
  • Clean separation of peripherals, adapters, and adapter channels (no more scsipi_link).
  • Kernel thread for each scsipi_channel makes error recovery much easier (no more dealing with interrupt context when recovering from an error).
  • Mid-layer support for tagged queueing: commands can have the tag type set explicitly, tag IDs are allocated in the mid-layer (thus eliminating the need to use buggy tag ID allocation schemes in many adapter drivers).
  • Support for QUEUE FULL and CHECK CONDITION status in mid-layer; the command will be requeued, or a REQUEST SENSE will be sent as appropriate.

The core scsipi is well tested, but a number of HBA drivers need testing. If you encounter any problems please report them with send-pr(1) and they'll get handled as soon as possible.

21 Apr 2001 - FSMLabs announces RTLinux support for NetBSD

FSMLabs announced that its RTLinux operating system is now available with a NetBSD component. The new RTLinux on BSD (RTL/BSD) uses NetBSD as its general purpose OS.

RTLinux is a 'high speed, efficient and small realtime kernel' based on the POSIX 10003.13 PS51 specification. Using a patented dual-kernel design, RTLinux runs a general purpose OS as the lowest priority thread of the realtime kernel.

FSMLabs Principal Engineer Michael Barabanov stated that "RTLinux applications can transparently make use of either Linux or BSD. We are very happy to be able to be able to give customers this additional choice."

RTL/BSD is available from FSMLabs and is provided with source code, under a binary distribution license.

See the full FSMLabs press release for more information.

20 Apr 2001 - NetBSD/alpha MP goes multi-user, code in NetBSD-current

Jason Thorpe has gotten multiprocessor NetBSD/alpha kernels to go multi-user, running both user and kernel code on multiple processors. So far, through a kernel build and full userland build, it seems pretty stable.

All the code to make this work has been committed to NetBSD-current, and testing so far has been on an AlphaServer 1200. This is the same systype as the AlphaServer 4100, so MP configurations of that should also work well.

Systems that should work in an MP configuration:

  • AlphaServer 1200
  • AlphaServer 4100
  • DEC/Alpha Processor, Inc. DP264
  • DEC/Alpha Processor, Inc. UP2000
  • DEC/Alpha Processor, Inc. UP2000+
  • API CS20
  • Compaq DS20

The AlphaServer 8200/8400 won't work yet. There are a couple fixes which will need to be done before the 8200 and 8400 will work in an MP configuration.

More information, including dmesg output from Jason's system, is available in his announcement in the tech-smp mail archive.

20 Apr 2001 - NetBSD/netwinder reaches multi-user mode

The port of NetBSD to the ARM-based netwinder is stable enough to reach multi-user mode. See the post to tech-ports by Matt Thomas.

19 Apr 2001 - VMware compatibility package available

Frank van der Linden has created a VMware compatibility package for NetBSD/i386. The package consists of a set of kernel modules and scripts that will allow owners of the Linux version of VMware to run their binaries under NetBSD. To use this software, a user will need to buy a copy of VMware for Linux and download and install the VMware compatibility package. This can be downloaded at:

http://www.wasabisystems.com/vmware-survey.html

More details are available in the netbsd-announce mail archive.

Frank's work on the VMware compatibility package was sponsored by Wasabi Systems.

Update: Matthias Scheler has added a emulators/suse_vmware package to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The process to set up VMware compatibility in NetBSD is now as simple as the following:

  1. Install the suse_vmware package (e.g. "cd emulators/suse_vmware && make install" in your pkgsrc tree). After that your /emul/linux will be set up and ready to go.
  2. Download and install the NetBSD VMware compatibility package from Wasabi Systems. Installation instructions are located in the README.

If you're not running NetBSD-current or NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA, you'll need to run a 1.5 branch kernel (based on netbsd-1-5 sources after March 31st, 2001) also. You can either compile that yourself, or just grab the kernel from the NetBSD/i386 1.5.1_BETA snapshot.

18 Apr 2001 - Interview with NetBSD's Luke Mewburn

There's a short interview with NetBSD Core Group member Luke Mewburn available in the European Unix Platform e-zine. The interview was conducted by Daniel de Kok, and is located at:

http://e-zine.nluug.nl/hold.html?cid=143

17 Apr 2001 - Improvements in pkgsrc

Alistair Crooks has made some more structural changes to the pkgsrc system. All the distfile and distpatch digests have been moved from files/md5 into a new file called distinfo. Also, if applicable, the digests for any patches have been moved from files/patch-sum to distinfo also.

These changes mean that, due to information being centralized in the distinfo file, there are a reduced number of files in pkgsrc. You'll see that in the majority of cases there will be no files/ subdirectory in packages now. Also, you should see a corresponding speedup in extraction from the pkgsrc.tar.gz file, and any cvs updates should also be quicker now.

More information is available in Alistair's announcement in the current-users mail archive.

12 Apr 2001 - NetBSD ported to the Motorola Sandpoint reference platform

NetBSD/sandpoint is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola Sandpoint reference platform.

The Sandpoint is a reference platform designed by Motorola to help people develop hardware and software around various PowerPC processors. The basic system is an ATX form-factor motherboard with standard PC devices (IDE, floppy, serial, parallel), 4 PCI slots, and a mezzanine slot to which several different processor modules may be attached.

Two processor modules have been tested with this port: The "Unity" module with the MPC8240, and the "Altimus" with MPC7400 (G4) and MPC107.

Allen Briggs is the NetBSD/sandpoint port maintainer. His porting efforts were sponsored by Wasabi Systems; who've put out their own press release regarding NetBSD/sandpoint.

11 Apr 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome four new developers:

10 Apr 2001 - Security Advisory for ftpd

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-005 has been released. It contains a description and instructions to fix a remote buffer overflow vulnerability in ftpd.

09 Apr 2001 - Luke Mewburn has released lukemftpd 1.0

The first release of lukemftpd, a port of the enhanced NetBSD ftp server to older versions of NetBSD and to foreign systems (such as Solaris and Linux), is now available. lukemftpd uses an autoconf configure script and replacement library for systems which don't have NetBSD-specific library functions.

More information is available in the README present in the lukemftpd 1.0 distribution, and in Luke Mewburn's announcement in the current-users mail archive.

The main ftp site for lukemftpd is ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/lukemftp/. The same location also holds lukemftp, a port of the enhanced NetBSD ftp client to other systems.

06 Apr 2001 - NetBSD 1.5.1 release cycle started

Note: There's a newer entry regarding the NetBSD 1.5.1 release cycle, "New information on the NetBSD 1.5.1 release cycle (09 May)".

Today, the release cycle for NetBSD 1.5.1 has started. NetBSD 1.5.1 will be a patch release, improving stability and fixing bugs in NetBSD 1.5.

A complete list of changes, so far, from NetBSD 1.5 to NetBSD 1.5.1 is available. It is planned that what is now on the netbsd-1-5 branch, after a thorough testing period, will be NetBSD 1.5.1.

The testing period has started now; 1.5.1_BETA snapshots for NetBSD/alpha and NetBSD/i386 are available via ftp, and snapshots for other ports will show up soon. Please test these if you can, and report any bugs you find via send-pr(1).

The 1.5.1 source tree (which is the netbsd-1-5 branch as it exists now) is available to you in a number of ways - three of which are anoncvs, ftp, and sup.

  • anoncvs: If you want to retrieve the NetBSD 1.5.1 source code using anoncvs, update your source tree using the "-r netbsd-1-5" flag to the cvs "update" command, or check out a separate tree using this flag to the "checkout" command. To be sure that you get the 1.5.1 source tree, you should always use the "-r netbsd-1-5" flag.
  • ftp: On the FTP server, the 1.5.1 source tree is available in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-1-5/ directory. The extracted sources are updated daily, and the tar files are updated weekly.
  • sup: For people who want to track the 1.5.1 source tree via SUP, you'll want the "release-1-5" collection.

The planned release date of NetBSD 1.5.1 is sometime in early May granted no major problems are found; else a BETA2 may be cut first, to give a further opportunity to test.

There will be a few changes to the 1.5.1 source tree as bugs found in the testing period are fixed and documentation is updated. You may wish to follow the source-changes mailing list (also available in digest form) to keep up with any commits to the netbsd-1-5 branch. These commits are to a branch, so you'll see "[netbsd-1-5]" in the Subject: lines of any commits updating what will be NetBSD 1.5.1.

06 Apr 2001 - Short summary of NetBSD at Comdex Spring 2001

A short summary of NetBSD at Comdex Spring 2001 is available. Thanks to the efforts of Charles Hannum and others for organizing and contributing to the NetBSD Project booth.

06 Apr 2001 - BRANCHES file now available

There is now a doc/BRANCHES file available; which contains a list of branches that exist in the NetBSD CVS tree and their current state. It will be continually updated as necessary.

05 Apr 2001 - NTP Security Advisory

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2001-004 has been released. It contains a description and a patch for a buffer overflow vulnerability in the NTP time synchronisation daemon which (if it is running) could lead to remote root compromise.

03 Apr 2001 - New developer

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome a new developer:

  • Matthew Fredette, , who will be integrating and polishing his port of NetBSD to the Sun 2.

02 Apr 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in March 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in March 2001 is available in the current-users mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

March 2001

31 Mar 2001 - Driver for Yamaha DS-1 PCI audio controllers

Minoura Makoto has committed a driver for Yamaha YMF724/740/744/754 (DS-1) PCI audio controllers to NetBSD-current. More information is available in yds(4).

Update: This has been pulled into the netbsd-1-5 branch, so it will be available in NetBSD 1.5.1.

31 Mar 2001 - NetBSD-current now using nvi 1.79

Aymeric Vincent has imported nvi 1.79 into NetBSD-current. If you have any problems, please send-pr(1) them.

28 Mar 2001 - Support for MCT USB-RS232 Converter in NetBSD-current

Ichiro Fukuhara has added support for the MCT USB-RS232 Converter in NetBSD-current. More information is available in umct(4).

28 Mar 2001 - Support for fas controller added to ncr53c9x driver

Andrey Petrov has committed changes to the ncr53c9x driver to support Sun's fas controller on sparc64 machines. More details are available in Andrey's announcement in the current-users mail archive.

27 Mar 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome two new developers:

  • Andrew Brown, , who has already contributed numerous patches to NetBSD, and will continue working on general improvements.
  • Chris Gilbert, , who has been instrumental in organizing NetBSD's presence at various Acorn shows (the next one being Wakefield 2001 on May 19th and 20th). Chris will be contributing to NetBSD/arm32 in general, and support for the Castle Kinetic board in particular.

26 Mar 2001 - IP Filter 3.4.16 imported into NetBSD-current

Mike Pelley has imported IP Filter 3.4.16 into NetBSD-current. IPv6 filtering has been reenabled with this import. If you have any problems, please send-pr(1) them.

19 Mar 2001 - NetBSD/news68k switches to ELF

Izumi Tsutsui has committed changes to convert the NetBSD/news68k port to ELF. With the COMPAT_AOUT_M68K kernel option, all your old a.out binaries should still work. Note that a.out versions of ifconfig(8) and route(8) will not work due to some structure alignment problems.

A NetBSD/news68k ELF snapshot is available at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/news68k/snapshot/20010311/

Instructions for upgrading from this snapshot or from source are at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/news68k/elf-upgrade/README.ELF-UPGRADE

16 Mar 2001 - NetBSD 1.5 available to try through Compaq Test Drive Program

The Compaq Test Drive Program has added NetBSD 1.5 to the list of operating systems available for you to try.

The Test Drive Program is a free service of Compaq, with the main purpose of providing developers with access to new Compaq hardware running a variety of operating systems and applications. After you register, you can get a free shell account which you can use to log into the systems on their Test Drive network and try out the software and operating systems running on them. More information on what the Test Drive network is, and what you can do with your account, is located in the Test Drive FAQ.

NetBSD 1.5 is the latest formal release of NetBSD, which includes many significant new features and enhancements. You can try NetBSD/alpha 1.5 running on an AlphaServer DS-10L and see if NetBSD supports your software, or if it's something you'd like on your own system.

13 Mar 2001 - NetBSD-current in-tree Postfix upgraded to 20010228

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded the NetBSD-current in-tree Postfix to release 20010228, with the latest KAME IPv6 patch also pulled in. A Postfix Changelog for this new release is available.

12 Mar 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome three new developers:

  • Tamura Kent, , who is one of the most active developers of the PEACE Project, an effort to provide a Win32 API implementation on NetBSD. In the NetBSD Project, he will be working on reflecting their activity to the NetBSD Project, especially on the toolchain and development environment.
  • Tomasz Luchowski, , who will help NetBSD by fixing bugs and adding new and exciting software to the NetBSD Packages Collection. In the past, he has contributed packages for various programs from Dan Bernstein (sysutils/daemontools, net/ucspi-tcp, net/djbdns; a package for qmail is on its way) and added patches to enable IPv6 on several packages.
  • Andrei Petrov, , who has already added FAS support to the ncr53c9x driver (which will be in the tree soon). Andrei will be mainly focusing on NetBSD/sparc64.

12 Mar 2001 - Linux compatibility enabled for PowerPC ports

Emmanuel Dreyfus has integrated the Linux compatibility feature for the NetBSD PowerPC ports (macppc, prep, bebox, ofppc, and amigappc). Linux compatibility on the PowerPC is still an experimental feature, but some real world applications such as Netscape Communicator already work. Now, it is time to crash test your favourite application and to report problems if you want the Linux compatibility to be really reliable.

In order to enable Linux compatibility for NetBSD/PowerPC, you need to upgrade your kernel to NetBSD-current, rebuild it with the COMPAT_LINUX option, and install the emulators/linuxppc_lib package. More details are available at http://gizmo.minet.net:8080/emul_linux/.

08 Mar 2001 - UBC memory usage-balancing code committed

Chuck Silvers has committed UBC memory usage-balancing code to NetBSD-current. Chuck's log message was as follows:

"Add UBC memory-usage balancing. We track the number of pages in use for each of the basic types (anonymous data, executable image, cached files) and prevent the pagedaemon from reusing a given page if that would reduce the count of that type of page below a sysctl-setable minimum threshold. The thresholds are controlled via three new sysctl tunables: vm.anonmin, vm.vnodemin, and vm.vtextmin. These tunables are the percentages of pageable memory reserved for each usage, and we do not allow the sum of the minimums to be more than 95% so that there's always some memory that can be reused."

This should fix a lot of the interactive performance problems that people have been reporting. Hopefully the default settings for the new sysctl tunables will be reasonable for everyone, but if anyone finds that things are much better with different settings, please post about it to the tech-kern mailing list.

If you experience problems, please send-pr(1) them.

01 Mar 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in February 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in February 2001 is available in the current-users mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

February 2001

28 Feb 2001 - NetBSD-current now using sendmail 8.11.3

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded sendmail to 8.11.3 in NetBSD-current. This new version contains bug fixes for problems found after 8.11.2 was released.

Update: This has been pulled into the netbsd-1-5 branch, so it will be available in NetBSD 1.5.1.

26 Feb 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome two new developers:

  • Jukka A Andberg, , who will be continuing his work on completing wscons(9) support for NetBSD/amiga.
  • Erno Palonheimo, , who, in addition to doing internal project maintenance, will be concentrating his efforts on porting NetBSD to a new platform.

22 Feb 2001 - NetBSD/sun3 switches to ELF

Chuck Silvers has committed changes to convert the NetBSD/sun3 port to ELF. With the COMPAT_AOUT_M68K kernel option, all your old a.out binaries should still work. Note that a.out versions of ifconfig(8) and route(8) will not work due to some structure alignment problems.

A NetBSD/sun3 ELF snapshot is available at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sun3/snapshot/

Instructions for upgrading from this snapshot or from source are at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/sun3/elf-upgrade/README.ELF-UPGRADE

21 Feb 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in January 2001

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in January 2001 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

20 Feb 2001 - NetBSD/hpcarm: a port for StrongARM-based WinCE PDA machines

NetBSD/hpcarm brings the NetBSD operating system to Intel StrongARM family based Windows CE PDA machines. Visit NetBSD/hpcarm page for details.

16 Feb 2001 - Security Advisories for Secure Shell and i386 USER_LDT

Two new Security Advisories have been released:

NetBSD-SA2001-002 describes a vulnerability that could lead to local root compromise on i386 systems with the USER_LDT kernel option enabled.

NetBSD-SA2001-003 describes NetBSD's vulnerability position with regard to various implementations of the Secure Shell (SSH) daemon, either integrated releases or via pkgsrc. It also describes a requirement for all users to ensure that the rnd(4) device is properly configured to prevent weak random number generation by integrated SSH and OpenSSL on NetBSD-1.5.

These advisories both contain recommendations that may require some users to rebuild kernels; they have been released together so that users can apply both fixes in the one kernel build if necessary.

14 Feb 2001 - Simon Burge is now the NetBSD/pmax co-port-maintainer

Please welcome Simon Burge to the NetBSD/pmax co-port-maintainer position. Simon has been a long-term contributor to the pmax port (and NetBSD in general), and has effectively performed many of the pmax port-maintainer tasks, including building the past few NetBSD/pmax releases.

Simon joins Jonathon Stone as co-port-maintainer of the pmax port.

10 Feb 2001 - Security Advisory for BIND vulnerabilities

NetBSD-SA2001-001 has been released, which documents the vulnerabilities and upgrade procedures to correct the recent BIND problems. This contains no new vulnerabilities beyond those addressed by the recent upgrade to BIND 8.2.3.

06 Feb 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome two new developers:

  • Tatoku Ogaito, , who has already contributed the cs428x sound drivers to NetBSD. He will be continuing with his work there and in other areas.
  • Reinoud Zandijk, , who will primarily be working on the ARM-based NetBSD ports.

04 Feb 2001 - Support for new system models in NetBSD/vax

Michael Kukat has written support for a bunch of new system models in NetBSD/vax. Among those newly supported are MicroVAX 3100m90, MicroVAX 3100m95, VAX 4000/100, VAX 4000/105A, VAX 4000/108, VAX 4000/400, VAX 4000/500 and VAX 4000/600.

More information about NetBSD/vax is available at the NetBSD/vax port page.

02 Feb 2001 - NetBSD/dreamcast supports the SEGA Broadband Adapter

Marcus Comstedt and Jason Thorpe have added support for the SEGA Broadband Adapter to the NetBSD/dreamcast port. This allows NetBSD/dreamcast to run from an NFS root file system.

In addition to the Broadband Adapter, the keyboard and display console support has been improved.

Below is a session transcript from a telnet login to a Dreamcast running NetBSD on an NFS root. The kernel was loaded over the Broadband Adapter using Marcus' IP-slave boot loader. 

dr-evil:thorpej 1$ telnet 10.0.0.2
Trying 10.0.0.2...
Connected to dreamy.
Escape character is '^]'.

NetBSD/dreamcast (dreamy.downstairs.shagadelic.org) (ttyp0)

login: thorpej
password:
Last login: Thu Feb  1 18:39:24 2001 from 10.0.0.1
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
        The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5R (DREAMY) #36: Thu Feb 1 20:27:56 PST 2001

Welcome to NetBSD!

Terminal type is xterm.
dreamy:thorpej 1$ dmesg
[ no symbols available ]
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5R (DREAMY) #36: Thu Feb  1 20:27:56 PST 2001
    thorpej@dr-evil:/u1/netbsd/src/sys/arch/dreamcast/compile/DREAMY
total memory = 16384 KB
avail memory = 13468 KB
using 230 buffers containing 920 KB of memory
mainbus0 (root)
shb0 at mainbus0
scif0 at shb0 port 0xffe80000-0xffe8000f irq 12
maple0 at shb0
Dreamcast Controller           at maple0 port 0 not configured
mkbd0 at maple0 port 3: US keyboard
wskbd0 at mkbd0: console keyboard
pvr0 at shb0: 640 x 480, 16bpp, NTSC, composite
wsdisplay0 at pvr0: console (80x30, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0
gdrom0 at shb0
g2bus0 at shb0
gapspci0 at g2bus0: SEGA GAPS PCI Bridge
pci0 at gapspci0 bus 0
pci0: memory space enabled
rtk0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0: SEGA Broadband Adapter
rtk0: interrupting at SH4 irq 11
rtk0: Ethernet address 00:d0:f1:02:ab:30
ukphy0 at rtk0 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x000000, model 0x0000, rev. 0
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
biomask c0000000 netmask c0000800 ttymask e0000800
IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing.
boot device: <unknown>
root on rtk0
nfs_boot: trying DHCP/BOOTP
nfs_boot: DHCP server: 10.0.0.1
nfs_boot: my_addr=10.0.0.2
nfs_boot: my_mask=255.255.255.0
root on 10.0.0.1:/u1/dreamy
dreamy:thorpej 2$ file /sbin/init
/sbin/init: Hitachi SH little-endian COFF executable, not stripped
dreamy:thorpej 3$ uname -a
NetBSD dreamy.downstairs.shagadelic.org 1.5R NetBSD 1.5R (DREAMY) #36: Thu Feb 
1 20:27:56 PST 2001    
thorpej@dr-evil:/u1/netbsd/src/sys/arch/dreamcast/compile/DREAMY dreamcast
dreamy:thorpej 4$ exit
Connection closed by foreign host.

January 2001

27 Jan 2001 - BIND upgraded to 8.2.3 in -current, release branches, and pkgsrc

Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino has upgraded BIND to version 8.2.3 in NetBSD-current. BIND 8.2.3 fixes several security vulnerabilities found in previous versions, as well as featuring other notable changes.

Regarding pkgsrc, BIND 8.2.3/9.1.0 are now available. See the net/bind9 pages under the NetBSD Packages Collection.

Update: BIND has been upgraded to 8.2.3 on both the netbsd-1-4 and netbsd-1-5 branches. This means that in addition to the next major release and pkgsrc, this will also be available in the 1.4.4 and 1.5.1 patch releases as well.

24 Jan 2001 - multibyte LC_CTYPE locale support

NetBSD-current has integrated multibyte LC_CTYPE locale support, from the Citrus XPG4DL codebase.

It currently supports both stateless and stateful multibyte encodings, including:

  • ISO2022 variant encodings, including iso-2022-jp and X11 compound text
  • EUC variant encodings, including euc-jp, euc-kr, euc-cn
  • euc-tw encoding
  • MS kanji encoding, commonly used in Japanese MS-DOS arena
  • Big5, used commonly in Hongkong
  • UTF-2 and UTF-8

We already have support for singlebyte encodings, like ISO-8859-1 or KOI8-R.

Now we should be able to start attacking other work areas, like wide character stdio functions (like fgetwc), wide character curses/regex functions, other locale types like LC_TIME and LC_COLLATE, more locale definition files, and so forth.

Note: To avoid code footprint bloat, we disabled multibyte LC_CTYPE locale support for statically linked binaries. Statically linked binaries can still enjoy singlebyte LC_CTYPE locale support (like "fr_FR.ISO8859-1"). In the future, when NetBSD supports dlopen() from within statically linked binaries, we may be able to support multibyte LC_CTYPE locale from statically linked binaries.

To understand the goals of the Citrus project, please take a look at http://citrus.bsdclub.org/index-en.html.

23 Jan 2001 - New tech-perform mailing list created

A new mailing list, tech-perform, has been created to discuss performance issues in NetBSD, especially ways to improve performance.

23 Jan 2001 - Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in December 2000

Alistair G. Crooks has sent out his monthly summary of changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection. The write up for changes in December 2000 is available in the tech-pkg mail archive.

There is also an automated list of pkgsrc changes, generated daily from pkgsrc/doc/CHANGES, available on the Recent packages changes page.

17 Jan 2001 - NetBSD/hpcsh: a port for SH3/4-based WinCE PDA machines

NetBSD/hpcsh brings the NetBSD operating system to Hitachi Super-H family based Windows CE PDA machines. Visit NetBSD/hpcsh page for details.

15 Jan 2001 - New developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome two new developers:

12 Jan 2001 - French translation of the NetBSD Guide available

Thanks to the efforts of Guillain Seuillot, the NetBSD Guide now has a French translation, in addition to the current English and Italian versions. In addition to HTML format, Federico Lupi's NetBSD Guide may also be downloaded in PostScript or RTF format.

The full text of Federico's announcement is available in the netbsd-announce mail archive.

10 Jan 2001 - 1.5/i386 pkg 2-CD set available

The 3rd party software team of the NetBSD Project is proud to be able to provide a 2-CD-set with precompiled binary packages for the i386 port of NetBSD 1.5. The CDs are based on the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) as of start of January 2001. At that time, pkgsrc included almost 1800 applications ranging from shell tools over mail, web and other server software, various programming languages and a lot of programs for scientific applications to productivity software like KDE and the GNOME desktop environments, the Mozilla web browser and the GNU image manipulation program, GIMP. Many applications are ready for IPv6 to explore the full potential of NetBSD 1.5.

Some of the highlights of this compilation include: Apache 1.3.14, BIND 4/8/9, Civilisation Call To Power (demo version), Ghostscript 6.01, GNOME 1.2.4, GNU Emacs 20.7, Heretic 2 (demo version), JDK 1.1.8, KDE 1.1.2, Mozilla 0.6, perl-5.6.0, Perl 5.6.0 with many modules, Quake3-Arena (demo version), Samba 2.0.7.1.3, teTeX 1.0.7, Xemacs 21.1.12.

The set consists of the two files i386pkg1.iso (680MB) and i386pkg2.iso (660MB). See the README file that describes the contents of the CDs for more details.

09 Jan 2001 - NetBSD and Virtual PC

Connectix Virtual PC is a PC emulator for Macs. It emulates the behaviour of a fairly standard PC, including text mode video, graphics, and sound. It's totally software based, and it acts like a computer similar to a PC.

Peter Seebach tried to get "VirtualPC with Linux" working with NetBSD, and found it was quite functional. What does this mean? It means you can run NetBSD/i386, either in a window or full-screen, under Mac OS.

Peter contributed an image of NetBSD/i386 running on his PowerMac to the NetBSD in action gallery. Later he wrote an article for BSD Today entitled BSD on Virtual PC. The article mainly focused on how usable it is, and had some more (very nice) screenshots.

Paul Hoffman has now created a web page entitled Using NetBSD/i386 1.5 under Virtual PC 4. Paul covers installation and basic configuration, as well as any current problems you should know about.

Thank you to Connectix for their willingness to work with the BSD community. The folks at Connectix did a fair amount of work between version 3 and version 4 to make NetBSD work better even though NetBSD is not officially supported by them.

08 Jan 2001 - ISDN subsystem integrated

The ISDN4BSD ISDN subsystem, which is also integrated into FreeBSD, has been brought into shape for NetBSD and imported into NetBSD-current. Drivers are available for a multitude of ISA, PCI, and PCMCIA cards. Currently only the EuroISDN (DSS1) variant is supported, which means there's some needed work for the protocol variants used in the U.S.

To use ISDN, you need NetBSD-current as of 20010108. You may see the Steps to connect via ISDN in the NetBSD Documentation section for further instructions. Also, a full set of documentation is available at the ISDN4BSD site.

The NetBSD integration work was done by Martin Husemann.

Update: Amiga Zorro-Bus driver support for ISDN4BSD has been committed also. To take advantage of this, you'll need NetBSD-current as of 20010122. After that, the documentation links above will provide you with further instructions.

08 Jan 2001 - NetBSD SUP/FTP tree will switch on Jan 12

On January 12, the NetBSD SUP/FTP server configuration will switch as follows:

FTP:

  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/ switches from netbsd-1-5 branch to main trunk (NetBSD-1.5Q or later)
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release/ disappears
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-1-5/ appears as netbsd-1-5 branch (NetBSD-1.5.1_ALPHA)
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-1-4/ appears as netbsd-1-4 branch (NetBSD-1.4.3A)

SUP:

  • "current" collection switches from netbsd-1-5 branch to main trunk (NetBSD-1.5Q or later)
  • "release" collection disappears
  • "release-1-5" collection appears as netbsd-1-5 branch (NetBSD-1.5.1_ALPHA)
  • "release-1-4" collection appears as netbsd-1-4 branch (NetBSD-1.4.3A)

You will likely transfer many files due to this change.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: For those who use the "all" or "all-export" release of the SUP "mirror" collection, for the first SUP transfer after the switch, please use the "-o" option for the "sup" command or use "old" option for your SUP configuration file. Also, it is not recommended to rename existing directories for those "all" or "all-export" users, unless you have a understanding of how SUP works (if you will rename the existing directories, you have to re-create SUP "last" file).

06 Jan 2001 - NetBSD/hp300 switches to ELF

Simon Burge has committed changes to convert the NetBSD/hp300 port to ELF. With the COMPAT_AOUT_M68K kernel option, all your old a.out binaries should still work. Note that a.out versions of ifconfig(8) and route(8) will not work due to some structure alignment problems.

The instructions that Steve Woodford put together when the NetBSD/mvme68k port switched to ELF should also apply as far as building the toolchain for NetBSD/hp300. A modified version of those instructions can be found at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/hp300/snapshot/elf-upgrade/README.ELF-UPGRADE

Also, a complete -current snapshot, with all these changes incorporated is available at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/hp300/snapshot/20010106/

If you have any problems, please send-pr(1) them.

05 Jan 2001 - SEGA Dreamcast port and mailing list

In July, Saitoh Masanobu , a developer in Japan, successfully booted the NetBSD kernel on his Dreamcast, a game console made by SEGA Corporation. The port used was the NetBSD/evbsh3 port for evaluation boards using the Super-H processor family also used in the SEGA Dreamcast. Although this port contained no code specific to the Dreamcast, the fact that the CPU contained builtin peripheral modules such as timers and serial ports meant that the generic code could still make a working system with a serial port console.

The Dreamcast port has now been split from the NetBSD/evbsh3 port into a port in its own right. This means that the work on support for Dreamcast-specific hardware can now begin. The Dreamcast port can boot up in single-user mode from a ramdisk (and play Rogue!), but since the serial port is still the only supported hardware device, it is not yet very useful to end users. Please see below for a current dmesg output.

The NetBSD/dreamcast port has been made possible by the developers of NetBSD/sh3:

If you're interested in keeping up-to-date on the progress of this port, or in becoming a part of the development efforts, there's now a separate mailing list for the Dreamcast: [email protected]. This list can be subscribed to either on the NetBSD web site or by sending a mail with the body of "subscribe port-dreamcast" to [email protected]. More information will soon be available on the NetBSD/dreamcast port page.

- Marcus Comstedt (portmaster NetBSD/dreamcast)

SEGA and Dreamcast are trademarks of SEGA Corporation. 

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5Q (GENERIC) #28: Fri Jan  5 01:52:02 MET 2001
    [email protected]:/home/marcus/hack/dreamcast/netbsd/src/sys/arch/dreamcast/compile/GENERIC
total memory = 16384 KB
avail memory = 11272 KB
using 230 buffers containing 920 KB of memory
mainbus0 (root)
shb0 at mainbus0
scif0 at shb0 port 0xffe80000-0xffe8000f irq 12
scif0: console
biomask c0000000 netmask c0000000 ttymask e0000000
md0: internal 3000K image area
boot device: <unknown>
root on md0a dumps on md0b
readclock: -1900/0/0/0/0/0.0
WARNING: clock time is invalid.
WARNING: reset to epoch time!
init: copying out flags `-s' 3
init: copying out path `/sbin/init' 11

04 Jan 2001 - Sushi, a user administration tool for NetBSD

Tim Rightnour has written and imported sushi - an interactive, menu-based program that is designed to aid the user or administrator with administrative and complex tasks on their machines.

Sushi provides a menu of various functions that the user can perform on his or her machine. Once the user selects a desired function, the function is either performed outright, or in most cases, the user is asked to fill in a simple form with required and optional information, which is then processed by sushi, and the action occurs.

The programming interface for sushi is very simple. There are directories containing various files, such as menu indexes, or forms for the user to fill out. These files are interpreted by sushi to generate the menus the user sees on his/her screen. When the form is filled out by the user, the entries are passed as command-line arguments to a program, or script contained in one of the subdirectories. In this way, it is possible to add new entries to the sushi menu structure, by simply adding a new menu item, form and script, the binary does not need to be recompiled to take advantage of this new menu.

Update: People interested in trying sushi out on their machines will need to upgrade their machines to -current as of 01/06/2001 (or wait for the next -current snapshot). A number of extensive changes in libcurses were made, as well as the addition of the CDK and libform supporting libraries. The binary itself is installed into /usr/sbin, and the menu structures are installed into /usr/share/sushi. The menu structures will be installed normally as part of a make build, out of the sharesrc CVS module.

If you do try out this development version of sushi, please send any problem reports via send-pr(1). If you wish to develop menu items for sushi, these may be submitted via send-pr(1) as well.

04 Jan 2001 - Curses based forms library

Brett Lymn has implemented the a curses base forms library which forms part of the ETI suite of libraries (originally done by AT&T). This library provides a terminal independent forms interface for character terminals.