Interested NetBSD users have a variety of options to get NetBSD to talk IPv6, and Eric Haszlakiewicz has posted about his experience: ``If anyone else has been putting off setting this up because it seemed like it would be hard to do, I urge you to give it a shot.''

To test ones IPv6 connectivity, there are several websites available.

[Tags: ipv6]

• NetBSD Security Advisory 2008-013: IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol
• NetBSD Security Advisory 2008-014: Cross-site request forgery in ftpd(8)
• NetBSD Security Advisory 2008-015: ICMPv6 Packet Too Big messages

• NetBSD Security Advisory 2008-009: BIND cache poisoning

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.

Itojun used to work hard on the KAME IPv6 project and its integration into various BSD projects, among them NetBSD, into which he put a vast amount of time and energy.

This is a sad day for the community.

For Those who want to participate in the official ceremonies:

• Night ceremony (tsuya): Tue, Nov 6 2007, 18h-19h
• Funeral: Wed, Nov 7 2007, 11h-12h
• Where: Rinkai-Saijo, Tokyo, Japan

Makes me wonder what for I'm running the infrastructure here...

[Tags: hubertf, ipv6, rants]

• 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

The book consists of two parts: the first one talks about IPv6 programming, and the second one lists a number of relevant RFCs. The Programming part includes an overview of the IPv6 APIs, puts emphasis on writing address-independent programming and gives a fair number of guidelines in that area. It then describes details for porting applications to support IPv6, with details on what to look for in client and server code, followed by a number of tips for IPv6 programming. A practical example that shows how existing client and server applications (nail and popa3d) can be changed to support IPv6. The second part of the book consists of 270 (of ~360!) pages of printed RFCs, which is a bit over the top IMHO - if I'd wanted to read them I would know where to find them. On the other hand I have them all in one place, so I guess that can be excused.

Overall the book is rather technical and very much on the spot, written for people with programming and Unix background to learn on how to get the job done without much fluff. Minor nits are the long appendix and that images appear a bit blurry, but that shouldn't stop anyone from reading the book - go for it!

[Tags: books, g4u, ipv6]

Modern network cards can do a lot of things in hardware today, and -- depending on the card! -- some do support calculating checksums for IP, TCP and UDP for both IPv4 and IPv6, and some even support packet fragmentation. The latter is known as TCP segmentation offloading (TSO), as it reduces the load on the hosts's CPU by moving the job to the network card.

NetBSD supports calculating of various checksums in hardware for quite some time now (see the {ip,tcp,udp}{4,6}sum options in ifconfig(8)), and support for TSO is available for TCP/IPv4 for some time, too, see the 'tso4' option of ifconfig(8). In the past weeks, Matthias Scheler and Yamamoto Takashi have worked on adding support for TCP/IPv6 TSO and the wm(4) driver, and the code is now available in NetBSD-current, it can be enabled via the 'tso6' option of ifconfig(8).

According to measurements by Matthias, load on the host CPU was reduced from ~16% to ~12%, while throughput went up at the same time from ~710MBit/s to ~806MBit/s. For comparison: TSO for IPv4 bumps the throughput from ~624MBit/s to ~713MBit/s.

[Tags: ipv6, networking, tso]

With the success of the ipsec6 Google SoC project, the code for hardware-accelerated IPsec with IPv6 (and IPv4) is now ripe for testing, and the author has sent a second mail asking for code review and testing: ``It would be nice too if some people can test the code in more real cases and report success and failure.'' The pointer to the latest patch is in his second mail.

Happy testing!

[Tags: google-soc, ipsec, ipv6]