NetBSD takes quite some effort to keep such incompatibilites low, yet they happen. The only real solutions is: no updates. "Never change a running system" is nice for availability, but it poses security risks. The time when a big server uptime was considered a sign of good system administration are gone. Today, a long update means the system (probably) runs outdated and as such vulnerable code.

So to solve the problem a compromise is needed: little updates, but crucial security updates do get done. Which is where NetBSD's "minor" release like NetBSD 7.0.2 come into play. With its set of changes, a number of external software packages got security-related updates (e.g. OpenSSL, NTP, BIND, X), and a smaller number of security related changes were also added, e.g. a race condition in mail.local(8), crashes in the Networking File System (NFS) and the native Fast File System (FFS) plus some platform-specific crashes on MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC64.

For more information on downloading and installation see the release announcement as well as the platform-specific install documentation, e.g. for NetBSD 7.0.2/arm64's INSTALL.html file.

[Tags: bind, mips, ntp, openssl, powerpc, Releases, sparc64]

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]

Probably the two most significant improvements in NetBSD 5.0 will be journalling for UFS (nore more fsck, yai!) and the move from XFree to X.org. Download now, or have a look at the changes in 5.0 if you need more reasons to check it out.

While talking about NetBSD 5, Izumi Tsutsui has updated his Restore CD for MIPS based Cobalt machines, see his email to the port-cobalt@ list for more details.

[Tags: cobalt, journaling, mips, releases, ufs, xfree, xorg]

The funny part is: would you expect your Linux installer to ask you THESE questions?

# sysinst

SSD/Linux 0.4-20051205/2.6.12 Installer

  Why do you choose Linux ?
  We recommend you to use NetBSD, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD instead.

Are you sure to install [y/N] ? y
Really [y/N] ? y 

:-)

[Tags: funny, linux, mips]