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 Today, a long update means the system (probably) runs outdated and as such vulnerable code.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]

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.

``The port was made to an IBM 7006-41T, which is a 601-based machine with MCA. It has not yet been tested on any other machines, but most other MCA/PowerPC based machines should be supportable. This port does not yet run on the 7012-3xx class of machines, or any other machine that has a POWER, POWER-RSC, POWER2 or POWER2-SC CPU. POWER-class machines will require significant CPU code to be written.

This port does not cover PReP-based IBM RS/6000 machines, for those, please see port-prep. For OpenFirmware based RS/6000 machines, please see port-ofppc.''

See Tim's posting for more information on machines that are likely to run this port with more or less effort, the state of the port, how to rebuild from NetBSD's source, and a sample dmesg output.

[Tags: dmesg, ibm, mca, powerpc, prep, rs6k]

See Tim's posting for some more details and a dmesg output of his machine. NetBSD's new PowerPC-developer Frank Wille also has the port running, and he reports that he has the Pegasos system running in multiuser mode with no stability problems.

[Tags: dmesg, ofppc, pegasos, powerpc]

• Part 1: Embedded Linux cross-development
• Part 2: An introduction to eCos
• Part 3: Porting a screen-management utility to eCos
• Part 4: Interfacing with flash and avoiding file systems
• Part 5: Porting NetBSD to the TAMS 3011
• Part 6: Booting NetBSD on new hardware, the saga begins

The Real Motion System consists of a robotic software development tool for programming control of robotic walking, software for implementing robotic motion, robot prototype, its 3D CAD data and mechanical simulation tool. The OS embedded in the SPC-003 is based on a UNIX-compatible NetBSD, facilitating smooth data communication between SolidWorks and COSMOSMotion. ''

Read the full article!

Update: There are a few other projects that use NetBSD in robot research at the Robot Brain project and at Futuba with more humanoid robots.

[Tags: embedded, powerpc, robot]