• Initial support for the FriendlyArm Mini2440 board has been announced by Paul Fleischer. In a later update, most of the hardware is reported working, and the patch is available for review & comments. Furthermore, the touch screen is usable, and Qt/Embedded was built on top of wscons.

• Force10 Networks Receives Common Criteria Security Certification for Its High-Performance Ethernet Switch/Router Products. According to the article, ``Common Criteria evaluations entail formal rigorous analysis and testing to examine security aspects of a product or system. Extensive testing activities involve a comprehensive and formally repeatable process, confirming that the security product functions as claimed by the manufacturer. Security weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities are specifically examined during wide-ranging evaluation and testing.

  FTOS is the operating system software that runs on Force10 switch/router product lines, including the E-Series, C-Series and S-Series platforms. Based on NetBSD, FTOS leverages a distributed, multiprocessor architecture that delivers highly scalable protocols and reliability. By delivering the same OS across its entire switch/router line, Force10 ensures that customers benefit from stable code, a consistent configuration environment and simpler software management. ''

• While there: Force10 Networks Delivers Ethernet-Optimized Platform for MPLS Core Networks: ``Force10 Networks, Inc. [...] announced the immediate availability of MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) functionality for its ExaScale E-Series core switch/routers. [...] The ExaScale platform combines high-density, non-blocking, line-rate 10 GbE switching and routing with robust MPLS LSR support at 1/5th of the cost of a traditional core router, enabling carriers to fully capitalize on the economic advantages of Ethernet.''

• Create Bootable Live Linux USB Drives with UNetbootin: ``UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you've already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn't on the list.''

  And of course we all know that NetBSD is Linux, right? See the list of supported distributions:

  

  The homepage mentions that NetBSD 4.0 is supported, maybe someone wants to give them an update on what's up with NetBSD 5.0? Would be nice to see that on the list!

• Ever wondered what happened with the BSD Certification recently? There's a video from the talk BSD Certification Group: A Case Study in Open Source Certification available that talks about the goal of the project, the two exams (BSD Associate, BSD Professional), and what's going on behind the scenes.

• With the move from XFree to X.org, the X server for the DNARD Shark's NetBSD/shark lost support for accelerated X. Thanks to Michael 'macallan' Lorenz, hardware-accelerated X for NetBSD/shark is back now: ``I finally got around to start working on an Xorg driver for the IGS CyberPro 20x0 family found in rev. 5 Sharks, Netwinder etc. - currently the driver is built only on shark and supports only the VL variant found there. Adding support for PCI chips is trivial though, just needs extra probing. The driver supports autoconfiguration ( X -configure should yield something almost usable, only DefaultDepth needs to be adjusted).''

• Staying with cool platforms, here's a quick procedure to run NetBSD/sun2 5.0.1 on The Machine Emulator (TME) (see pkgsrc/emulators/tme), compiled by Izumi Tsutsui. Who's first do get a pkgsrc bulk build done? :-)

• Jed Davis has committed the RAIDframe parity Summer-of-Code project. See his posting for the details. The project ``drastically reduces the time RAIDframe spends rewriting parity after an unclean shutdown by keeping better track of outstanding writes (thus, "parity map"). The tech-kern archives have more details [...]

  This feature is enabled by default on all sets (other than RAID 0). It can be administratively disabled with the new "raidctl -M" flag, which is described in the changes to the raidctl(8) man page; however, the I/O overhead for updating the parity map is expected to be unnoticeable in practice.''

After Danger was bought by Microsoft in 2008, one would expect that their upcoming models will run Microsoft's embedded operating system Windows CE as operating system. Apparrently that's not the case, and the new Sidekick will rather run NetBSD as operating system. It seems Danger did too much work that they didn't want to throw away. :-)

So where's the actual news from on those websites? Besides some "internal sources", there were some job posts by Microsoft seeking a NetBSD programmer in several places.

I guess we'll have to wait for the final product to hit the store to confirm this, unless we get hold of someone at Danger^WMicrosoft to tell us what's going on. Nevertheless, NetBSD and its BSD license can be used fine in a commercial product like the Sidekick, it gives the company full protection of investment. I guess when time comes by, we (NetBSD) will see how we can cooperate to support development and code maintenance, and also get the word out about another major company using NetBSD.

[Tags: danger, embedded, microsoft, Products, sidekick]

While talking about hardware support, an ever changing area is the devices put into consumer hardware like laptops. So far, the Intel 82567LM Gigabit card found in machines like the Dell Optiplex 760 and Lenovo's ThinkPad T400 was not supported. Support for that is now ported from OpenBSD to NetBSD by Kouichirou Hiratsuka. See his posting for diffs and dmesg output.

[Tags: arm, dmesg, embedded, gumstix, lenovo]

Jörg Sonnenberger pointed out that another possible approach to save both diskspace and also (to some extent) RAM when running executables is not to use shared libs, but to use NetBSD's "crunchgen". Crunchgen statically links multiple binaries and their libs into a single executable, saving diskspace and RAM -- exactly what "busybox" does in the Linux world, just highly configurable and working with any sources. This is a very cool feature of NetBSD, which is used to prepare the install media from src/distrib, but it's also a very undocumented area of NetBSD. Any takers for a "beastybox" article? :-)

[Tags: crunchgen, embedded, libc]

• Following Wikipedia, Portability is ``the general characteristic of being readily transportable from one location to another'', and it's also a major goal of NetBSD. Things start to get interesting when looking into details, e.g. Wikipedia also states that ``Software is portable when the cost of porting it to a new platform is less than the cost of writing it from scratch. The lower the cost of porting software, relative to its implementation cost, the more portable it is said to be.'' So there's some room for interpretation when defining what is portable and what is not, and to what extent.

  Besides my essay on What makes an operating system portable, there was a posting to the netbsd-advocacy mailing-list that goes into a few details on NetBSD's current state of portability. The posting lists a number of reasons why the author considers NetBSD to be portable, including the low effort to start new projects, central maintenance in one source tree, and the efforts from machine-independent changes to all ports.

  After reading about people doing research on how to assess "security" of operating systems by counting number of exploits and how quick they are patched, I wonder if there are some metrics out there to also put "portability" into numbers.

• I've mentioned the mult project some time ago. In one of their latest recordings, there's also a interview with its creator, Kristaps Dzonsons, on it on BSDtalk, available in mp3 and ogg formats. Thanks to Mark Weinem for the hint!

• Following some discussion on NetBSD on the Freescale i.mx31 board, Matt Thomas has posted a dmesg output. Mentioned here for all the fans of dmesg pr0n. :-)

• To give new users hints on how to use NetBSD, Jeremy C. Reed has started a netbsd-tips fortune database. It's part of NetBSD-current and can be run from .login/.profile by running "fortune netbsd-tips". There's also a wiki page that allows easy submitting of new entries. Feel free to contribute your special NetBSD gems!

• NetBSD's handling of harddisks and file systems is pretty static right now - while one can add additional disks to a system, and even span them using RAIDframe and ccd(4), extending the filesystem on top of it is a problem. This is being mitigated by Juan Romero Pardines' port of growfs(8): ``I've just adapted growfs(8) from OpenBSD (they adapted the FreeBSD code), which is able to grow FFSv1 and FFSv2 filesystems.

  I tested growing a partition in FFSv1 and FFSv2 from 1GB to 4GB and the process was smooth (and fast); after this I ran 'fsck_ffs -yf /fs' and it found one error that was fixed correctly.'' For more information, including where to get the code and what to test, see Juan's posting.

  There were a few attempts to get logical volume management (LVM) onto NetBSD, which were not successful so far. This may change in the future, and when flexible handling of storage volumes, with growfs(8) will be useful to manage FFS/UFS file system sitting on top of them.

• Andrew Doran has continued his hacking to improve NetBSD on SMP machines, and he has posted about making the socket code and the Unix domain communication running fine-grained, and about speeding up device detection during booting by running device configuration in a number of concurrent kernel threads. If someone has actual numbers on boot time before/after that patch, please post them to the list!

• When needing sources for some Open Source package, I've used "make extract NO_DEPENDS=1" with pkgsrc in the past. It seems that was removed without further notice, and Obata Akio was kind enough to point out that this can be done now by using SKIP_DEPENDS=yes. Mmm, interface stability...

• Last but not least a note from the "products based on NetBSD" department: Saitoh Masanobu from IIJ, Japan, has notified us that the SEIL/X series that IIJ unveils at AsiaBSDCon 2008 is based on NetBSD. There's a brochure on SEIL/X that mentions a long list of features supported by the machine, including all state of chw art in routing, bridging, VPN, firewalling, quality of service and more. This is made possible by the "SEIL Engine", a software architecture that's based on NetBSD that allows porting the application stack to a number of hardware platforms easily, while offering flexibility to add support for custom hardware and software modules:

  

  For more information on the SEIL Engine, see IIJ/SEIL's homepage (Japanese). and PDF brochude (English).

  Also, for some impression of the SEIL/X machine on the geek level, there's dmesg output of the machine available.

Catching up on NetBSD's source-changes mailing list from Feb 21st 2008 to Mar 1st 2008, here's what people not following things closely may find interesting:

• Chris Gilbert made process on the chris-arm-intr-rework branch, which aims at reworking the ARM interrupt code to provide a shared set of interrupt routines that can be used across all ARM based machines.

• The PowerPC routines for bcopy, memcmp, memcpy and memmove were updated to use tuned versions that were written by IBM and released under a 3-clause BSD license as part of the perflib project, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/ppcperflib/.

• Keiichi Shima has imported the Mobile IPv6 code developed by the SHISA project. The work can be found on the "keiichi-mipv6" branch.

• Matt fleming has started work on a device file system that supports dynamic device nodes, which is of relevance when loading kernel modules for device drivers, so you don't have to run /dev/MAKEDEV manually. The work is on the "mjf-devfs2" branch.

• Nick Hudson is currently working on syncing NetBSD's WiFi (net80211) code with FreeBSD, so that these two operating systems (and possibly others) can share a common codebase. The work currently affects only the kernel, but this may extend to the userland eventually.

• The glob(3) wildcard extension routines got a new options GLOB_NO_DOTDIRS added, which hides . and .. even if the pattern would otherwise include them.

• Juan Romero Pardines has ported the mfi(4) driver from OpenBSD. The driver supports disk controllers with PowerPC IOSs such as the LSI SAS1078 and the Dell PERC6.

• The boot-only ISOs built for releases included several kernels (with ACPI, without ACPI) for some time now. Stephen Borrill has added a menu to make kernel selection easier. Mmm, user friendliness!

• The machine-independent versions of strcspn(3), strpbrk(3) and strpspn(3) were improved from O(mn) to O(n+m) based on ideas from DragonFlyBSD.

• Power management hooks for suspend, shutdown and resume were added to many device drivers, to support the new power management framework by Jared McNeill.

• A whole lot of changes were pulled up from NetBSD's development branch into the release branches for NetBSD 3.x and 4.x.

FTOS support is now available on the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of chassis-based switch/routers (E1200, E600, E300), C-Series family of distribution switches (C300, C150) and S-Series access switches (S50, S50V and S25).''

Force10 E-Series	Force10 C-Series	Force10 S-Series

There's also an official Force10 press release for this. And as a reminder: Force10 uses a modified version of the NetBSD operating system on their routers and switches, see our joint press release from some time ago.

[Tags: embedded, force10]

The post includes links to a package for 'mkimage', which, according to the packages' DESCR file, ``adds a header to a kernel image with information and checksums for the u-boot bootloader used in embedded systems'', instructions on how to derive a NEO1973/OpenMoko port for NetBSD from the existing evbarm/SMDK2410 port, and discussion about running OpenMoko under Qemu.

[Tags: embedded, neo1973, openmoko, uboot]

• AsiaBSDCon paper: SHISA: The Mobile IPv6/NEMO BS Stack Implementation Current Status, Keiichi Shima (Internet Initiative Japan Inc., Japan), Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa (Keio University, Japan), Tsuyoshi Momose (NEC Corporation, Japan), Keisuke Uehara (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: A NetBSD-based IPv6 NEMO Mobile Router, Jean Lorchat, Koshiro Mitsuya, Romain Kuntz (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: Implementation and Evaluation of the Dual Stack Mobile IPv6, Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa, Jun Murai (Keio University, Japan)
• AsiaBSDCon paper: puffs - Pass to Userspace Framework File System, Antti Kantee (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) (OK, i already had that somewhere... :)
• NYCBSDCon 2006 mp3: Brian A. Seklecki: A Framework for NetBSD Network Appliances
• NYCBSDCon 2006 mp3: Johnny C. Lam: The "hidden dependency" problem