As a matter of fact, I have little time for NetBSD these days, so don't expect many new articles. Just take this as a sign of life. :-)

Of course if you think I should add some entry on something here, drop me an email and who knows - maybe I can get things rolling again here?

[Tags: blog, hubertf]

Usually I cross-compile g4u from Mac OS X, but for the fun of it I did it on NetBSD (7.0-stable branch, amd64 architecture in VMware Fusion) this time. After waiting forever on the CVS checkout, I found that empty directories were not removed - that's what you get if you have -P in your ~/.cvsrc file.

I already had the hint that the "g4u-build" script needed a change to have "G4U_BUILD_KERNEL=true".

From there, things went almost smooth: building indicated a few files that popped up "variable may be used uninitialized" errors, and which -- thanks to -Werror -- bombed out the build. Fixing was easy, and I have no idea why that built for me on the release. I have sent a patch with the required changes to the g4u-help mailing list. (After fixing that I apparently got unsubscribed from my own support mailing list - thank you very much, Sourceforge ;)).

After those little hassles, the build worked fine, and gave me the floppy disk and ISO images that I expected:

>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u*fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u1.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u2.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u3.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u4.fs
>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u.iso
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  6567936 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u.iso
>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u-kernel.gz
>       -rw-r?r--  1 feyrer  staff  6035680 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u-kernel.gz 

NetBSD 7.1.1 is the first update with security and critical fixes for the NetBSD 7.1 branch. Those include a number of fixes for security advisories, kernel and userland.

[Tags: Releases]

• NetBSD Security Advisory 2018-001: Several vulnerabilities in context handling - this affects amd64, i386 and sparc64
• NetBSD Security Advisory 2018-002: Local DoS in virecover

• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRg2vuwF1hY
• Talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/8968.html

As a hint, NetBSD still has a number of Security Advisories to publish, it seems. Anyone wants to help out the security team? :-)

[Tags: 34c3, Security]

About g4u: g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

The past: When I started g4u, I had the task to install a number of lab machines with a dual-boot of Windows NT and NetBSD. The hype was about Microsoft's "Zero Administration Kit" (ZAK) then, but that did barely work for the Windows part - file transfers were slow, depended on the clients' hardware a lot (requiring fiddling with MS DOS network driver disks), and on the ZAK server the files for installing happened do disappear for no good reason every now and then. Not working well, and leaving out NetBSD (and everything elase), I created g4u. This gave me the (relative) pain of getting things working once, but with the option to easily add network drivers as they appeared in NetBSD (and oh they did!), plus allowed me to install any operating system.

The present: We've used g4u successfully in our labs then, booting from CDROM. I also got many donations from public and private instituations plus comanies from many sectors, indicating that g4u does make a difference.

In the mean time, the world has changed, and CDROMs aren't used that much any more. Network boot and USB sticks are today's devices of choice, cloning of a full disk without knowing its structure has both advantages but also disadvantages, and g4u's user interface is still command-line based with not much space for automation. For storage, FTP servers are nice and fast, but alternatives like SSH/SFTP, NFS, iSCSI and SMB for remote storage plus local storage (back to fun with filesystems, anyone? avoiding this was why g4u was created in the first place!) should be considered these days. Further aspects include integrity (checksums), confidentiality (encryption). This leaves a number of open points to address either by future releases, or by other products.

The future: At this point, my time budget for g4u is very limited. I welcome people to contribute to g4u - g4u is Open Source for a reason. Feel free to get back to me for any changes that you want to contribute!

The changes: Major changes in g4u 2.6 include:

• Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17 (shortly before netbsd-8 release branch), binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10
• Many new drivers, bugfixes and improvements from NetBSD-current (see beta1 and beta2 announcements)
• Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE (Testing and documentation updates welcome!)
• Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz
• In addition to MD5, add SHA512 checksums

Enjoy!

[Tags: g4u, Releases]

What is NCQ? According to Wikipedia, ``Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is an extension of the Serial ATA protocol allowing hard disk drives to internally optimize the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary drive head movement, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.''

Jaromir writes to tech-kern: ``I plan to merge the branch to HEAD very soon, likely over the weekend. Eventual further fixes will be done on HEAD already, including mvsata(4) restabilization, and potential switch of siisata(4) to support NCQ.

The plan is to get this pulled up to netbsd-8 branch soon also, so that it will be part of 8.0.

Status:

• ahci(4) fully working with NCQ (confirmed with qemu, and real hw)
• piixide(4) continues working (no NCQ support of course) (confirmed in qemu)
• siisata(4) continues working (without NCQ still) (confirmed with real hw)
• mvsata(4) not yet confirmed working after changes, mainly due the DMA not really working on Marvell 88SX6042 which I have available - I have same issue as kern/52126
• other ide/sata drivers received mechanical changes, should continue working as before''

A review of the code in src/sys/netcan/ is welcome, especially for possible locking issues.''

What CAN devices would you address with NetBSD? Drop me mail!

[Tags: can, networking]

• Leonardo Taccari will work add multi-packages support to pkgsrc.
• Maya Rashish will work on the LFS cleanup.
• Utkarsh Anand will make Anita support multiple virtual machine systems and more architectures within them to improve testing coverage.

Good luck to all our students and their mentors - we look forward to your work results, and welcome you to The NetBSD Project!

[Tags: google-soc]