The article outlines the history of the various BSDs and tells about NetBSD's source organization and build process. It then introduces the target hardware and how NetBSD abstracts the various busses and drivers that are already there, and the few bits that needed adjusting.

``Conclusion: High portability, sufficient ease of use, as well as the necessary software packet and an open source code packets and open source make NetBSD a very attractive operating system for use in embedded systems. As seen in the example, it takes quite superficial knowledge of the system architecture and minimum change in the code to run NetBSD on the IP-Plug. At the same time, the functionality and performance of the built operating system is not inferior to that of Linux, which is used by default.''

[Tags: arm, Articles, ipplug, kirkwood, marvell]

• Hosting BSD
• BSD as A Desktop
• BSD as Servers
• Infinity. Freedom. FREEBSD
• BSD Security
• Guide to FreeBSD
• PC-BSD Uncovered
• Explore NetBSD

• NetBSD's "let's move kernel parts to the userland" RUMP project is still under heavy development, and in order to make testing of compatibility after kernel changes easier, a new command "rumptest" was added to build.sh: ``Basically you say:

  	    ./build.sh ${yourargs} tools ; ./build.sh ${yourargs} rumptest
  	

  Where yourargs are what have you, e.g. '-U -u -o -O /objs'.

  The latter builds only the rump kernel libs and uses some ld+awk magic to figure out if things go right or not. This is to avoid having to install headers and build libs (which is too slow since a full build is too slow). The magic is not a substitute for a full build, but it is n+1 times faster and works probably 99.9% of the time.

  The scheme uses a number of predefined component sets (e.g. tmpfs+vfs+rumpkern) to test linkage. They are currently listed in build.sh. This area probably needs some work in the future. It would be nice to autogenerate the combinations somehow.

  If things go well, you get something like this:

          ===> Rump build&link tests successful
          ===> build.sh ended:   Wed Nov 18 20:10:59 EET 2009 

  '' See Antti's Antti's mail to tech-kern: on how to tell if things didn't go so well, and what to do in that case.

• According to Wikipedia, ``Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessors, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors.''

  Supporting NUMA in a contemporary (i.e.: Intel centric) SMP-enabled operating system requires following a bunch of standards, two of which are parsing of two tables, the System Resource Affinity Table (SRAT) and the System Locality Information Table (SLIT). Both tables are accessible via the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), and according to the German-language Wikipedia, the SRAT is used to assign local memory to local threads to boost their performance, and the SLIT defines the "distance" of the nodes among themselves, which is used to determine the "nearest" memory if local memory is not enough.

  Now, Christop Egger has posted patches to add an ACPI SLIT parser and an ACPI SRAT parser. See the two postings for dmesg pr0n from his tests on an 8-node system.

• Staying with ACPI and Christoph Egger, he found that even though the ACPI spec defines an ACPI device for fans, BIOS vendors and OEMs do their own thing. To accommodate things like the fan sensor found in the ACPI Thermal Zone in his HP Pavillion DV9700 laptop he has proposed a driver to extend the acpitz(4) driver with fan information. That way, envstat(8) can be used to display the ran's RPMs:

  [acpitz0]
    Processor Thermal Zone:     56.000   95.000                       degC
                       fan:       2840                                 RPM 

• Staying with driver games, iMil writes me that there's documentation on getting DRI, AIGLX, Composite and Compiz going with NetBSD 5.0 available in the O(ther)NetBSD Wiki now.

  The documentation covers how to enable the Direct Rendering Manager (DRI), setting up and configuring Modular X.org, assuring that everything's in place, and how to get Compitz going. Mmm, wobbly windows at last! :-)

• While we're talking funky desktop stuff: Marc Balmer has submitted a patch to get touchpanel support for ums(4). ums(4) is for USB mice, and in contrast to mice, touch panels need to deal with absolute numbers, not relative numbers.

• Back to the guts of the kernel, another patch suggested by Christop Egger was for adding x2apic. What is x2apic? X2APIC is ``an Intel-only feature but can also be found in virtual environments with support for CPU apic id's > 0xff.

  I.e. Xen 4.0 (not yet released) supports 128 CPUs in HVM guests with the CPUs enumerated with even apic id's. That means you need x2apic for the 128th CPU :) ''

• While speaking of Xen: Xen 4.0 is coming soon, and there's a call to help testing it on NetBSD!

  Install Mercurial, check out latest Xen sources, apply a bunch of patches, build and install. Examples of commands are given, in addition to changes required for /boot.cfg etc.

  Report your findings to port-xen!

• Last one for today: Michal Gladecki, Editor-in-Chief of BSD Magazine writes: ``We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter at www.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox. Also, you can now download any of the previous issues from our website. The first online issue -- 2/2010 -- is coming out in February. Please spread the word about BSD Magazine. '' Click!

Unrelated, I've been playing with git a bit over the past few days, and wile I have a number of questions building up (which will be subject to tech-repository or so), what I can say today is that the speed of "git pull" with NetBSD's git repository and my 1MBit DSL line reminds me a lot of the times when I used SUP with my 56k modem - it took forever, too. :-(

[Tags: acpi, acpitz, aiglx, Articles, bsdmac, compiz, dmesg, dri, numa, rump, slit, touchpanel, ums, x2apic, xen]

The article introduces real-time scheduling and the scheduling classes found in NetBSD 5.0, and gives an estimate on the response timeframe that can be expected for real-time applications. Setting scheduling policy and priority from a userland application is shown next, and programming examples for thread affinity, dynamic CPU sets and processor sets are shown. Besires C APIs, there are also a number or new commands in NetBSD 5.0 that can be used to control things from the command line, e.g. to define scheduling behaviour and manipulate processor sets. My favourite gem is the CPU used in the cpuctl(8) example, which is identified as "AMD Engineering Sample". :-)

[Tags: Articles, dmesg, posix, pthread, smp]

Karoina Lesinska was kind enough to provide me with detailed information, and here's what I can report about the contents of the mag and the included DVD:

• There's a 3/4 page announcement of NetBSD 5.0, or what it will contain once released. Includes the long list of news & goods already announced elsewhere.

• NetBSD install, by Patrick Pippen. He talks about how to go through the NetBSD installer (sysinst), including language and keyboard selection, selecting and partitioning the harddisk to install to, installing bootblocks, selecting the installation media, installing the base system, selection of the system password encryption algorithm, and setting the root password and shell.

  Beyond that, the article also gives help on getting started after the installation. Format of the text is interesting, with parts of the pkgsrc setup description being included as comments in the typescript, but the contents' still there.

• BSD live, by Jan Stedehouder, compares BSD-based Live CDs. Includes NetBSD-based ones like NewBIE and NetBSD Live. No Jibbed, thought. :( The article gives an overview of the contents of each Live CD, and includes lots of screenshots for an early impression of the look & feel.

• Play Music on Your Slug with NetBSD, by Donald T. Hayford. A previous issue of the BSD Mag described how to install NetBSD on the Linksys NSLU2 (AKA slug), and this article explains how to set the system up so it can act as a web-based mp3 player that you can hook up to the stereo.

• Interview about NetBSD WAPBL, with Simon Burge, Antti Kantee and Greg Oster. Federico Biancuzzi asks the NetBSD developers who worked to get journaling into NetBSD about what it is, how it is integrated in the current file system implementation, what features there are, benchmark results, ideas for future improvements, how to set it up, space requirements, interaction with backups. Furthermore, the development and testing process with its interaction with the RUMP subsystem is discussed, and finally under what license the implementation is available.

• Besides those articles that focus on NetBSD and/or pkgsrc, they are also mentioned in further articles, including "Multi-User Conferencing" by Eric Schnoebelen and Michele Cranmer, "Installing Prelude IDS" by Henrik Lund Kramshoj, and "If it moves! crypt it" by Marko Milenovic.

• Last, the included DVD is bootable on i386 to install NetBSD from CD. It also contains the 2008Q2 snapshot of pkgsrc, precompiled binary packages for 4.0/i386 and bootable ISO images for amd64, i386, and the i386pkg CD from the NetBSD 4.0 release.

  Last, there's a snapshot of NetBSD-current as of Sep 7 2008, with bootable ISOs for installing on i386 and amd64, plus sources.

  There's a full page in the mag describing the contents of the DVD in detail, and where to get more information if needed, so noone's left out in the rain.

The NetBSD configuration article talks about basic setup for networking, ssh, the Message-Of-The-Day, NetBSD's central rc.conf config file, syslog, crontabs, time synchronization, basic system security and package management. Following that, he talks about updating the system from binary snapshots, and outlines further tweaks like softdep, silencing IDE drives, using CDroms and wscons, changing your shell, installing a new bootloader and some others. The last part covers building NetBSD from source.

In pkgsrc configuration, Pierre-Philipp shows how to install packages from binaries and sources (the main part), and also covers pkgsrc security and bulk builds.

[Tags: Articles]

For today, there are a few German language articles in the 1/2009 issue of the german FreeX magazine:

• Not every software major release has a noteworthy list of features. This is different for the NetBSD 5 release - not only does it include a number of security-relevant changes, but there are substantial changes in the kernel. Read more in Markus Illenseer's article.

• File systems in user space promise to connect kernel and applications, and the boundaries between data, files and file systems start to vanish. NetBSD offers an implementation for file systems in user space since 2005, and in the mean time it has reched full source code compatibility to the FUSE standard. The article also contains an interview with Alistair Crooks, developer of NetBSD's user space-based iSCSI implementation. Read more in Ulrich Habel's article.

• Not a full article, but a useful entry from the "Tips & Tricks" section, there's one on quick creation of a chroot using mksandbox from NetBSD's new bulk build framework.

The developers are

• Anders Magnusson, long-term VAX hacker and recent PCC maintainer
• David Maxwell, former security officer
• Lubomir Sedlacik, who works on pkgsrc release engineering and security, and
• Jeremy C. Reed, who works on various BSD-related PR projects.

BTW, FreeX is always looking for (german language) authors, too!

[Tags: Articles, eeepc, freex]

• NetBSD achieves permanent charity status: ``The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

  Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment. ''

• Metadata journaling support added to FFS: ``In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

  Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a ?log? option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the ?softdep? option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information. ''

  Kudos for this go to Wasabi Systems, Darrin B. Jewell, Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran!

• Uli 'rhaen' Habel wrote me that he wrote a blosxom plugin for gnats: ``During my work for pkgsrc I started to write articles for my blog and I referred to several PRs from the NetBSD gnats system. However I just wanted to type the PR in the form of e.g. NetBSD PR pkg/39230 and would like to have my blog software to link to the webpage automatically''.

  Blosxom is the blogging software that Uli and I use, and you can learn more about his GNATS plugin, and download it, here. (Apparently I didn't get to install this plugin yet, that's why you don't see a link on the above quoted text :-).

• Stefan Schumacher wrote me that the german magazine Die Zeit has an article on operating systems showing screenshots of several operating systems, starting with C64 Basic V2, going over MS-DOS and Windows to more esoteric ones like Mac OS X, Solaris, and *cough* BSD. Check the screenshot of the latter one! ;)

• Another one from Uli Habel: His (NetBSD|pkgsrc) blog is now syndicated on www.onetbsd.org.

• Wilhelm Buehler hints me at EuroBSDcon 2008: ``EuroBSDCon is the european technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDCon 2008 will take place in Strasbourg, France 18-19 October 2008 at University of Strasbourg.''

• There's an article by Warren Webb titled "Free software encircles embedded design" at Electronic Design, Strategy, News (EDN). The article starts by illustriating open source software as a natural (and cheap, or course) alternative to commercial systems, describes benefits of the development model and the wealth of applications and how they can be used in an embedded environment. It continues talking about licenses, tools, and alternatives to Linux, including NetBSD.

• Those into funky gadgets may like the MoPods may be for you: ``As if a little charm pet wasn't reason enough for being, the MoPods are actually practical. When your mobile phone rings or receives a text within a metre of your MoPod then the little blighter will get in a tizz, spin round and round and a little light will flash wildly in reaction. The perfect visual warning if your phone is on silent or you are in a noisy bar.

  Whether hung on your bag, your clothes, your keys or your mobile, MoPods are a must-have, or as they say in Japan, a "hitsuyou".''

• Back to our fine operating system: Ian Hibbert, who has written NetBSD's bluetooth stack, has worked on a PAN daemon for NetBSD. This allows to perform personal area networking in various ways:

  NAP

  Network Access Point is like an ethernet bridge

  GN

  Group ad-hoc Network is a NAP with no external network

  PANU

  Personal Area Networking User in both host (like GN but a single connection) and client (the device that connects to all the others) mode.

  All this will come in an upcoming NetBSD release (well, and FreeBSD too, it seems, as they like it :-) near you pretty soon, see Iain's mail to tech-net.