Press Release: Results of NetBSD's 2007 Fundraising Campaign

NetBSD is an open source operating system project that depends on funding for its operation. A generous donation by Google has enabled us to fund development in the area of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and a fundraising drive was started to extend this activity. The goal of $50,000US of the 2007 fundraising campaign was met thanks to a lot of support from companies, users, and our community as a whole.

NetBSD is an open source project run by volunteers, and offers an operating system that scales well from embedded devices via commodity PCs and appliances to modern server hardware. In order to maintain project infrastructure and complete high profile tasks, NetBSD has always depended on contributions from its corporate and individual benefactors.

NetBSD had support for SMP since the NetBSD 2.0 release in 2004. Currently, this support is being changed to use fine grained kernel locking. This will allow better overall CPU time utilization in multiprocessor / multicore machines, which are becoming increasingly popular. The work was made possible by a generous donation from Google. Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager Open Source from Google, Inc. says:

Chris DiBona, Manager of the Open Source Programs office also from Google, Inc. adds:

After initial funding of the SMP project had been arranged, NetBSD decided to raise funds to extend the ongoing projects, and fund additional new work. The goal of our 2007 fundraising drive was to raise $50,000US, which we are happy to say was met! Numerous small and medium size donations from all over the world have reached us, and we owe great gratitude to our donors.

Why do companies donate to the NetBSD Project? Stephen Borrill from Precedence Technologies in the United Kingdom tells us:

On a similar note, Jukka Marin from Embedtronics in Finland explains:

Metrum Institute uses run their modeling and simulation grid. Jeff Hane, Ph.D. Executive Director of Metrum Institute explains:

US-based Coyote Point Systems recently selected NetBSD as the base operating system for its next generation of load balancing and acceleration appliances. According to Bill Kish, Coyote Point's Alpha Coyote,

Major new features of NetBSD 4.0 include support for Xen version 3, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP). System security has been further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the kauth Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements to the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks.

Work that was done after the NetBSD 4.0 release was to make the kernel use modern synchronization mechanisms and apply fine-grained locking to support SMP. Furthermore, a framework for running file system code in userland -- the Runnable Userspace Meta Program (rump) -- and a general framework for power management were added, the latter includes suspend to RAM on x86 with ACPI-capable machines. Also, general support as well as SMP for many new embedded PowerPC, MIPS and modern ARM platforms was added.

With the great results of NetBSD's 2007 fundraising campaign, we have several options for future work in NetBSD. Besides the usual costs for hardware, hosting and legal fees, we intend to continue and increase funded development. Areas where such work can be expected after our NetBSD 4.0 release include SMP, hardware RAID drivers and power management.

NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from large-scale server systems to powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are easily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.