The process is pretty much straight forward, and Ryo ONODERA has verified the prerequired Windows versions and Linux packages, and has sent instructions on how to bootstrap pkgsrc on Windows 10. Now who's the first one to post a screenshot with output of pkgsrc/misc/cowsay running "cowsay hello pkgsrc"? :-)

[Tags: bash, linux, microsoft, windows]

As the whole "cloud" and "platform as a service" (PaaS) is lifting off, other virtualization platforms get popular, which need attention from NetBSD. The first one to note is IBM's SoftLayer, which uses its own virtualization technique that supports many operating systems but strange enough not NetBSD. To still get things going, Emile "iMil" Heitor has investigated the situation, and wrote how to install NetBSD (or any PV-capable system) on IBM's SoftLayer.

Another major platform to look for is Microsoft's Azure. It uses Microsoft's ohn Hyper-V technique, which there is no NetBSD support yet! There is a project description "NetBSD/azure -- Bringing NetBSD to Microsoft Azure" available that got some pretty useful links this week - any takers? As starting point, there's code for Running FreeBSD in Azure.

Last but not least, the last big virtualization platfor amiss is KVM, which is used e.g. in Google's cloud platform. While there are some mentions that NetBSD runs as guest operating system, I am not sure what the latest state is. Anyone in for a comparison? :)

[Tags: amazon, azure, ec2, google, ibm, microsoft, paas, softlayer, xen]

Platform support for eMIPS is the first part of Microsoft's contribution. The second part includes the hardware accelerator framework and will be proposed on tech-kern soon.''

Update: The NetBSD Blog has an entry with more details, including a screenshot with boot output. Oh, and there's a NetBSD/emips port page, too!

Update #2: Antti was so kind to point me at the paper published by the people behind NetBSD/emips, titled An online scheduler for hardware accelerators on general- purpose operating systems: ``This paper presents an online scheduling algorithm for hardware accelerators and its implementation on the NetBSD operating system. The scheduler uses the current performance characteristics of the accelerators to select which accelerators to load and unload. [...] The NetBSD modifications consist primarily in loadable kernel modules, with minimal changes to the operating system itself.''. Secion 7 goes into details WRT NetBSD and the (LKM based) kernel modules..

[Tags: emips, lkm, microsoft, mips]

A bit dated, but hey! More information about the "extensible MIPS" project is also available on Microsoft's website.

Maybe it's time to update my 2005 research WRT NetBSD at Microsoft? (Thanks for the initial hint, Volkmar!)

[Tags: emips, iso, microsoft, mips]

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]

``The lab contains more than 300 servers from vendors including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microtel, Penguin, Pogo, and Sun. The labs software is even more diverse, with some 15 versions of UNIX and 50 distributions of Linux including many lesser-known ones like Asianux, CentOS and NetBSD.''

Leaving the lapsus that NetBSD is Linux aside, I find the statement interesting, but not really surprising either. It's not as if NetBSD was THAT unknown... but hey. :)

[Tags: Articles, microsoft]

• Microsoft's Computer Dictionary, Fifth Edition, says for NetBSD: ``A free version of the BSD UNIX operating system developed as a result of a volunteer effort. NetBSD is highly interoperable, runs on many hardware platforms, and is nearly POSIX compliant. See also BSD UNIX, POSIX.''
• What You Need to Know Today About the New and Upgraded Features in Visual Studio .NET 2003 links to the NetBSD IPv6 Networking FAQ X-)
• Interoperability with Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory and Kerberos Services claims to show some config examples tested on NetBSD 1.4 and Solaris 2.7. The examples show extraction of a file "AD.tar.gz", but all they offer are two EXE files, Ad-unix.exe and AD.exe. Huh?!? (Thanks to logix for noticing that "unzip" will work on them!)
• LandMARC Success for Lancaster University: The Contribution of Mobile IPv6 Source Code to Microsoft Windows Server and Windows CE .NET mentions that ``Like most other academic research groups, the Lancaster team traditionally employed Unix--based operating systems--typically NetBSD, FreeBSD or Linux'' (in that order - they don't seem to like Linux :-). The question arises if the listed order of operating systems gives any hints on preference of operating systems inside Microsoft, or even a source of their Mobile IPv6 code?
• gssMonger - Tool for verifying Kerberos authentication interoperability between Windows and other platforms: This one comes with actually usable sourcecode in a real .tar.gz file, and apparently Microsoft cares that software runs on NetBSD: ``Makefiles included to compile on Linux and NetBSD for Cybersafe, Heimdal, and MIT Kerberos.'' (The page is from Sept. 2004)

Before we get dumped into the same bin as M$, let me assure you that (as far as I know) NetBSD is not sponsored in any way by Microsoft. (Not that we couldn't need the money for a lot of things :-)

[Tags: microsoft]