• Masanobu SAITOH talked about Developing CPE Routers based on NetBSD (P6B, PDF-Slides)

• Masanobu SAITOH also talked about Implementation and Modification for CPE Routers: Filter Rule Scan Optimization, IPsec Interface and Ethernet Switch (P7B, PDF-Slides)

• Mindaugas Rasiukevicius talked about NPF's progress and perspective (P2B, PDF-Slides)

• pkgsrc release engineering
• pkgsrc on SmartOS
• Mancoosi tools for the analysis and quality assurance of FOSS distributions
• Go On NetBSD
• Rehabilitating pkglint
• DeforaOS and pkgsrc (presentation with workshop)

• NetBSD and MirBSD developer Benny Siegert gave a talk titled "pkgsrc on MirBSD" - see his slides! pkgsrc is a framework for packaging and building 3rd party applications from source. Besides MirBSD, it runs on many other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X.
• While building from source is fine, it costs a lot of time. pkgsrc can also create binary packages, and to manage those, there is "pkgin", a binary package manager. Its developer, Emile 'iMil' Heitor introduced it in a talk - see the slides (PDF)!

• MINIX3 and BSD, by Arun Thomas
• The Lua Scripting Language in the NetBSD Kernel, by Marc Balmer
• Touch your NetBSD - towards tablet integration, by Pierre Pronchery
• pkgsrc on MirBSD, by Benny Siegert (slides)
• Introduction to pkgsrc, and to package creation in NetBSD, by Noud de Brouwer
• pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc, also by Emile Heitor (slides)
• Automated package building, by Nicolas Thauvin

We are looking forward to seeing you!''

Indeed! :-)

[Tags: Events, hackathon]

``EuroBSDcon2012
18 - 21 October 2012, Warsaw, Poland

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for people working on and with BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDcon 2012 is the 11th EuroBSDcon and will take place in Poland, 18-21 October 2012 in Warsaw. EuroBSDcon is a great and unique time to learn more about the powerful BSD systems we use everyday and to connect with other developers around the world. ''

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

Dan continues: ``BSDCan 2012 will be held 11-12 May, 2012 in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 9-10 May.

NOTE: This will be Fri/Sat with tutorials on Wed/Thu.

We are now accepting proposals for talks.

The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.

If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also encouraged to submit a proposal. Possible topics include:

• How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam.
• and/or sysadmin.
• and/or networking.

Conference Location: Cooper Union, New York, NY Conference Dates: November 12-14, 2010''

Submission of NetBSD related entries is highly appreciated! See the call for papers for more information on important milestones, subsidizing of speakers and the mailing list to stay upto-date.

[Tags: Events, nycbsdcon]

9th European BSD Conference
October 8 - 10, 2010
Karlsruhe, Germany
http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/

Introduction

The European BSD Community will meet again this year for the ninth conference in the EuroBSDCon series. This is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community, inform your fellow BSD enthusiasts about the newest developments and work for the continued success of your favorite operating system. The two day conference program (October 9 - 10) will be preceeded by a tutorial day (Oct 8). Call for Papers

We are inviting contributions on all areas relating to the BSD family of operating systems, e.g. applications, architecture, implementation, administration and security of *BSD operating systems ranging from embedded systems to mainframes. Investigations on economic aspects regarding the operation of BSD systems are also welcome.

Prospective authors of contributions to the technical program are requested to submit an abstract via http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/. Presentations should last about 40 minutes including time for questions from the audience. Authors of accepted submissions should provide a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings and give permission to the organizers to publish the results in the printed proceedings and on the conference web site at www.eurobsdcon.org.

Call for Tutorial Proposals

Selected tutorials will be offered on the day before the conference. If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please submit your suggestion on the conference website using the same mechanism as for submitting a paper. Please indicate if this would be a half- or full-day tutorial.

Sponsorship Opportunities

We are seeking companies or institutions to sponsor various elements of the conference in order to keep delegate fees as low as possible. Sponsorship opportunities include: paying for a speaker's travel or accommodation; providing bursaries for delegates who cannot pay the conference fee themselves; sponsoring the social event or the printing of proceedings. Please see the conference website for details.

Important Dates

Final abstract deadline: July 6th 2010
Final tutorial deadline: July 6th
Final papers due: September 1st
Tutorial day: October 8th
Conference: October 9 - 10

For more, see http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/''

[Tags: eurobsdcon, Events]

• People owning a Marvell PCMCIA WiFi card can how have a look at the malo(4) driver. If you use this on a gumstix ARM board, have a look as some fiddling with drvctl(8) is needed to get the card recognized properly.

• Speaking about Gumstix, KIYOHARA Takashi has declared the porting effort as finished. Support for the baex, connex, verdex and verdex-pro modules is available, as is support for the support modules.

• Staying in the "embedded" corner, KIYOHARA Takashi has announced that Plathome's OpenBlockS600 (AMCC 405EX) can now boot NetBSD via NFS. See the posting for dmesg output. The OpenBlockS600 comes with a AMCC 405EX PowerPC CPU, two GigE ethernet ports and a bunch of other goodies for a price of about $600US.

• Coming from hardware to software, pkgsrc-2009Q4 was released some time ago, and of course binary packages are available for a number of platforms: 5.0/macppc, 4.0.1/sparc and 5.0.1/sparc, 4.0.1/i386, 5.0.1/i386 and the same for 4.0.1/amd64 5.0.1/amd64. Also, binaries of pkgsrc-2009Q3 are available for 5.0/shark.

• Google's Summer of Code was a big success for NetBSD and all of the Open Source community, and it seems there will be one again this summer.

  Preparations are in an early stage, but there are already a FAQ and a timeline as well as the Program Terms of Service. From the NetBSD side, we're always happy for project suggestions (please use our mailing lists for discussions), and in NetBSD, we are currently working on out projects page. If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our project application/proposal form If you plan to submit a proposal for a project with NetBSD, please see our Project Application/Proposal HowTo.

• Getting back to the NetBSD code, a number of interesting changes were made in the previous weeks. The first to mention is that David Young has continued is work on the new shutdown order for device drivers: ``cgd, dk, dm, md, raid, and vnd gracefully detach from the device tree during shutdown. I believe that ccd is the only virtual disk that does not detach.'' This allows having arbitrary stack of file systems, and still have them unconfigured properly in the right order on system shutdown.

• Another major change that went into NetBSD recently is that terminfo was imported into NetBSD-current. Terminfo replaces termcap, but provides a backward compatible termcap interface. This move follows discussion from last summer, and docs by The Open Group (the people who make things like the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification), which indicates that the termcap specification will be withdrawn in the future.

• Moving from userland inside the kernel, David Holland has proceeded with work to unhook LFS from UFS. Historically, the Log structured File System was written after the Berkeley Fast File System. With the idea of sharing the core "Unix File System" code for both file systems, this resulted in a strong relationship between LFS and FFS, which was/is not always the best for the advantage and stability of either one: ``sharing ufs between both ffs and lfs has made all three entities (but particularly lfs) gross. ffs and lfs are not similar enough structurally for this sharing to really be a good design.''

• Another major addition to the NetBSD kernel was made recently by Darren Hunt: ``Courtesy of CoyotePoint Systems, I've been working on a port of DTrace [...] to NetBSD for i386.'' Citing Wikipedia, ``DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.

  DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments with which a specific function is being called, or a list of the processes accessing a specific file. ''

  The code is available in NetBSD-current. I haven't looked into this yet, but I'm looking forward of reports and blog postings if the wikipedia command line examples work.

  (I think like with ZFS, Dtrace could use a hand with documenting the NetBSD side of things. Any takers?)

• The last kernel change to mention is related to security: mapping the address 0 from userland was disabled. This issue went through the press late last year, and it this is now addressed in NetBSD, too. Those that still beed to map address 0 can do so via the USER_VA0_DISABLED_DEFAULT kernel option or the vm.user_va0_disable sysctl.

• So much about about the NetBSD code for now. Of course having all those fine features added screams for an immediate (*cough*) release, which brings me to the fact that NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released: `` NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons.

  Please note that all fixes in critical/security updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. ''

• There's a hackathon going this weekend (Feb 20/21 2010)
• Volunteers are wanted to setup & man a NetBSD booth at FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich, Switzerland, on Sep 17/18 2010
• pkgsrcCon 2010 will be held in Basel, Switzerland, from May 28ths to 30ths 2010.