Changes and NetBSD News in 2006

Changes in other years

December 2006

November 2006

October 2006

September 2006

August 2006

July 2006

June 2006

May 2006

April 2006

March 2006

February 2006

January 2006

December 2006

20 Dec 2006 - Hackathon#4: pkgsrc

The NetBSD Project held its fourth hackathon from December 27th to December 29th, 2006. The event focussed on preparing pkgsrc for the upcoming pkgsrc-2006q4 branch and to close as many pkg PRs as possible.

17 Dec 2006 - NetBSD ported to Sharp Zaurus C3x00 PDA

NONAKA Kimihiro has ported NetBSD to the Sharp Zaurus C3x00 series PDA. This port is currently a work in progress and is only available in HEAD. See his email to the port-arm mailing list.

14 Dec 2006 - One new security advisory

One new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

03 Dec 2006 - NetBSD 4.0 release process restarted

The NetBSD release engineering would like to announce that we have re-started the process of releasing NetBSD 4.0. The process was originally started back in August 2006, with a goal of releasing by December. Due to a big number of improvements on the NetBSD-current branch during several hackathons, it was decided to restart the NetBSD 4.0 release process, instead of identifying and pulling all those changes into the existing release branch, see our previous announcement.

The NetBSD 4.0 release branch "netbsd-4" has been re-branched now, and details on the release schedule as well as details on where to get binaries and sources of the NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 release and how you can help are available from the NetBSD release engineering team.

01 Dec 2006 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Jaime A Fournier (login: ober), who will be working on kauth and openafs.
  • Matthew Grooms (login: mgrooms), who will be working on ipsec-tools.
  • Arnaud Lacombe (login: alc), who will be working on Coverity fixes and various general tasks.

November 2006

29 Nov 2006 - Hackathon 3 Results

The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0.

Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page hosted on an external server as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is unlikely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.

27 Nov 2006 - Three new security advisories

Three new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

21 Nov 2006 - Hackathon

NetBSD will ran another hackathon, primarily dedicated to get NetBSD-current ready for the 4.0 re-branch.

18 Nov 2006 - NetBSD 4.0 release branch to be re-branched

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced their plans to re-branch the 4.0 release branch in the near future.

13 Nov 2006 - NetBSD Live! CD 2007 available (Updated)

NetBSD doesn't have an official Live CD as part of the project, but there are several ones from 3rd parties. Jörg Braun from the german publisher "Computer und Literaturverlag" (C&L) has previously made a NetBSD Live! CD which was available via the C&L FreeX magazine. Jörg has now updated his Live CD to this millennium's state of NetBSD, and released the 2007 Edition of his NetBSD Live! CD. The CD is based on NetBSD 4.0_BETA/i386 and offers a full desktop environment by using a compressed filesystem, which includes KDE, Abiword, Dia, Inkscape, GIMP, Firefox, xmms and many more.

Please note that the CD was assembled the previous weekend, and that some newssites prematurely announced this. As a result, some people may have a file with the wrong checksum - the correct MD5 hash is "22a7496a2bb37910aeb312d053755a2a".

Thanks to Jörg Braun, Rosa Riebl all the folks at C&L for their longtime support of NetBSD, and also to Michael Schneider, Daniel Sieger, Martin Laubach and Florian Stöhr for their help in translating the German-language README file into english.

The CD is made available for everyone at no cost, please note that commercial distribution requires a license from C&L.

Available files include a torrent file for downloading with Bittorrent (recommended), an ISO file, the MD5 checksum as well as a README in English and German language.

Update: A screenshot walkthrough of the CD is available at The Coding Studio.

04 Nov 2006 - NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 released

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 releases are now available. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bugfixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU, NetBSD 3.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 3.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 3.1 Release Announcement and the NetBSD 3.0.2 Release Announcement for more information.

01 Nov 2006 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Matt J. Fleming (login: mjf), who will be working on security related tasks and regression tests.
  • Christian Biere (login: cbiere), who will be working on various general tasks.
  • Hauke Fath (login: hauke), who will be working on mac68k port and the NetBSD Packages Collection.

October 2006

13 Oct 2006 - NetBSD/sparc64 binary packages for pkgsrc-2006Q2 available

Havard Eidnes has announced that pkgsrc-2006Q2 binary packages for the sparc64 port are now available, and have been uploaded to ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages-2006Q2/NetBSD-2.0/sparc64/. Please use a mirror site close to you.

12 Oct 2006 - Release candidate 4 for NetBSD 3.1 available

Geert Hendrickx, member of the NetBSD release engineering team, announced the availability of release candidate 4 for NetBSD 3.1 on the FTP server of the NetBSD project. For a list of changes from the third release candidate, please see his message to the netbsd-announce list.

08 Oct 2006 - NetBSD Bugathon: Reloaded and Successful

The weekend of Oct 7/8, 2006 was the second NetBSD Bugathon -- an event that was focussed on fixing existing NetBSD PRs, and that had many NetBSD developers ("committers") and enthusiastic users work on fixing and closing over 300 open PRs.

The event was again guided by Elad Efrat, who has also posted a report on the Bugathon. See his mail to the netbsd-users list.

Further events of this kind are planned, though they will likely be more focussed, and aiming e.g. at specific areas like pkgsrc, support of certain hardware platforms, etc.

September 2006

27 Sep 2006 - NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" 2006 Summary

After NetBSD was already part of the first Google "Summer of Code" last year, we had another chance to introduce a number of students to our operating system and get them paid by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers this year. The list of selected projects was announced in May, and after a productive summer an official report on the results of NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" 2006 is now available.

25 Sep 2006 - First Bugathon a success

Around 30 developers and 20 users participated in the first NetBSD Bugathon. Over 270 problem reports were closed. The next Bugathon was scheduled for the October 7-8 weekend. Also see Elad Efrat's message to the netbsd-announce list for more information.

21 Sep 2006 - Four new security advisories

Four new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

06 Sep 2006 - NetBSD/prep on 7025-F40

Tim Rightnour reports that he was finally able to boot NetBSD/prep on an IBM RS/6000 7025-F40. Although some devices are still unsupported people should be able to test NetBSD on those machines.

04 Sep 2006 - Release candidate 2 for NetBSD 3.1 available

Geert Hendrickx, member of the NetBSD release engineering team, announced the availability of release candidate 2 for NetBSD 3.1 on the FTP server of the NetBSD project. For a list of changes from the first release candidate, please see his message to the netbsd-announce list.

02 Sep 2006 - GIO Fast Ethernet support for NetBSD/sgimips

Steve Rumble has worked on support for some Fast Ethernet boards and now that he has committed his driver for NetBSD/sgimips to CVS he asks for feedback from people owning Phobos G100/130/160 boards.

01 Sep 2006 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • OBATA Akio (login: obache), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Yvan Vanhullebus (login: vanhu), who will be working on IPsec.

August 2006

25 Aug 2006 - NetBSD 4.0 release process

The NetBSD release engineering team announced the beginning of the NetBSD 4.0 release process. NetBSD 4.0_BETA was branched on August 8, 2006 (UTC), and the beta-testing process has officially begun.

The upcoming NetBSD 4.0 release has numerous improvements and additions, such as the new tmpfs and UDF file systems, new ieee1394 framework (from FreeBSD), Common Address Redundancy Protocol (from OpenBSD), update to GCC 4.1.1, enhanced Bluetooth support, added mprotect(2) restrictions to enforce W^X policies, and kernel authorization (kauth). See the Significant changes from NetBSD 3.0 to 4.0 webpage for more changes and details.

More information about the 4.0 schedule and instructions for testing can be found in Jeff Rizzo's posting to the NetBSD-Announce list.

23 Aug 2006 - New security advisory

A new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

17 Aug 2006 - NetBSD 3.1 release schedule

The NetBSD release engineering team is planning to roll out the NetBSD 3.1 release in a few weeks. Prior to the final release, a few release candidates are planned. We encourage you to test these and report any bugs using the send-pr(1) utility.

The first release candidate (3.1_RC1) is scheduled for August 21, followed by a second release candidate (3.1_RC2) on September 4. If no significant problems arise, we plan to release NetBSD 3.1 final on September 18, otherwise another release candidate will follow, delaying the release another two weeks.

More information about the 3.1 schedule, and instructions for getting release candidates, can be found in Geert Hendrickx's email to the NetBSD-Announce list.

10 Aug 2006 - New security advisory

A new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

01 Aug 2006 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Iain Hibbert (login: plunky), who will be working on bluetooth and the NetBSD Packages Collection.

July 2006

24 Jul 2006 - NetBSD 3.0.1 released

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the update 3.0.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 3.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 3.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are available in the NetBSD 3.0.1 Release Announcement.

03 Jul 2006 - NetBSD running on JavaStation Espresso

Julian Coleman reported that together with Valeriy E. Ushakov he was able to make NetBSD boot in single-user mode on a JavaStation Espresso.

03 Jul 2006 - NetBSD as Domain0 for Xen3

Manuel Bouyer announced in a message to the port-xen mailing list that NetBSD is finally usable as a Domain0 with version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor.

Reports about problems, and of course success, with NetBSD as Domain0 would be welcome to shake out any possible remaining issues.

02 Jul 2006 - pkgsrc-2006Q2 has been branched

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q2 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q1 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q2 branch.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

You can also use the pkgsrc-2006Q2 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q2 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users mailing list for more information.

01 Jul 2006 - New developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome Sanjay Lal (login: sanjayl), as a new developer. His working area will be powerpc support.

June 2006

14 Jun 2006 - New security advisory

A new security advisory was published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

08 Jun 2006 - Two new security advisories

Two new security advisories were published:

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

01 Jun 2006 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Jachym Holecek (login: freza), who will be working on the evbppc port, devmon and kernel.

May 2006

26 May 2006 - Google Summer of Code projects selected

This year's participation of NetBSD in Google's Summer of Code consists of eight projects that students will work on with the assistance of mentors from NetBSD. See the NetBSD press release for details on the selected projects and for further information.

19 May 2006 - CARP support added to NetBSD-current

Liam J. Foy has committed a CARP support to NetBSD.

CARP is the Common Address Redundancy Protocol, developed by OpenBSD Project. Its primary purpose is to allow multiple hosts on the same network segment to share an IP address. CARP is a secure, free alternative to the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol and the Hot Standby Router Protocol. CARP works by allowing a group of hosts on the same network segment (known as “redundancy group”) to share an IP address, and in the event that the master host suffers a failure, the IP will move to one of the backups hosts and the service will continue unaffected.

Please see Liam J. Foy's message to the current-users maillist for details.

17 May 2006 - End of life for the NetBSD 1.6 branch

In keeping with NetBSD's policy of maintaining only the current (3.x) and most recent (2.x) release branches, the release of NetBSD 3.0 marks the end-of-life for NetBSD 1.6. This means that the netbsd-1-6 branch will no longer be actively maintained.

For example:

  • In contrast to earlier plans there will be no NetBSD 1.6.3 release. This plan was dropped due to incomplete cross build support in the netbsd-1-6 branch and lack of man power.
  • There will be no more pullups to the branch (even for security issues).
  • There will be no security advisories made for NetBSD 1.6.
  • The current 1.6 releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive.

02 May 2006 - Google Summer of Code now open (Updated)

The Google Summer of Code 2006 has now officially opened up, and students can submit proposals for projects until May 8th, 17:00 Pacific Daylight Time. The NetBSD Project is proud to be a participating mentoring organization once again and has compiled a list of possible projects at http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/projects.html. This website has been updated frequently in the last couple of days, but it remains non-exhaustive.

Please see Jan Schaumann's email to the netbsd-users mailing list for more details.

Update: To help us sort out project applications, please include answers to the questions given in our NetBSD Project Application HowTo in your project proposals and applications! Also, note that project proposals must be submitted on the Google website by May 8th, 17:00 Pacific Daylight Time.

01 May 2006 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Liam J. Foy (login: liamjfoy), who will be working on CARP, networking, userland and bugfixing.

April 2006

27 Apr 2006 - NetBSD/evbppc ported to Xilinx Virtex

Jachym Holecek has ported NetBSD/evbppc to the ibm405 core embedded in Xilinx Virtex {2-Pro, 4 FX} series FPGAs. See his email to the port-powerpc mailing list.

27 Apr 2006 - New security advisory

A new security advisory was published:

  • NetBSD-SA2006-014 - An audio subsystem race condition may crash the system

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

21 Apr 2006 - pkgsrc reaches 6000th package

The NetBSD Packages Collection has reached its 6000th package on April 21st, 2006. The package imported that bumped the total number of third-party software available in pkgsrc to this marker was print/tex-fixme, a package that provides you with a way of inserting fixme notes in your TeX documents. It was committed by Min Sik Kim.

20 Apr 2006 - NetBSD ported to I-O DATA HDL-G Giga LANDISK

NONAKA Kimihiro recently introduced a port of the NetBSD Operating System to HDL-G400U device, a 400GB model of the network HDD products from I-O DATA DEVICE, Inc. This machine is now supported by evbarm port.

For more info please also see NONAKA's commit message, and HDL-G page in Japanese.

17 Apr 2006 - Status Report 2006/Q1 published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's status report for the first quarter in 2006, covering the months January through March of 2006. This status report is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2006Q1.html.

15 Apr 2006 - Summer of Code 2006 (Updated)

The NetBSD Project is pleased to once again participate in Google's Summer of Code 2006 as a mentoring organization. A list of possible projects is available from this page. If you are interested in any of these projects or have other suggestions, please contact Jan Schaumann or post to the relevant lists suggested on the projects page. (Please remember that the list of projects is not complete, and that we will be happy to add your suggestions and will accept applicants with their own ideas as well.)

Update: To help us sort out project applications, please include answers to the questions given in our NetBSD Project Application HowTo in your project proposals and applications!

12 Apr 2006 - Four new security advisories

Four new security advisories were published:

  • NetBSD-SA2006-009 - False detection of Intel hardware RNG
  • NetBSD-SA2006-011 - IPSec replay attack
  • NetBSD-SA2006-012 - SIOCGIFALIAS ioctl may cause system crash
  • NetBSD-SA2006-013 - sysctl(3) local denial of service

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

04 Apr 2006 - IPF 4.1.13

Martti Kuparinen upgraded IPFilter to the latest version (4.1.13) on NetBSD -current. For information about the changes, and recompiling the kernel and the ipf tools see the email in the current-users mailing list archives.

01 Apr 2006 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Cherry G. Mathew (login: cherry), who will be working on port-ia64.
  • Alan Ritter (login: rittera), who will be working on NDIS and drivers.
  • Pavel Cahyna (login: pavel), who will be working on bug fixing, networking and Documentation.
  • J. Chapman Flack (login: chap), who will be working on MIDI support and the NetBSD Packages Collection.

March 2006

31 Mar 2006 - pkgsrc-2006Q1 has been branched

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q1 branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches. As well as updated versions of many many packages, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support, and also for enhanced security. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q4 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q1 branch.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

You can also use the pkgsrc-2006Q1 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q1 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the netbsd-announce mailing list for more information.

29 Mar 2006 - Six new security advisories

Six new security advisories were published:

  • NetBSD-SA2006-003 - Multiple denial of services issues with racoon
  • NetBSD-SA2006-004 - Denial of services issues with pf
  • NetBSD-SA2006-005 - bridge memory disclosure
  • NetBSD-SA2006-007 - mail(1) creates record file with insecure umask
  • NetBSD-SA2006-008 - Malformed ELF interpreter causes system crash
  • NetBSD-SA2006-010 - Sendmail race condition

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

27 Mar 2006 - CVSWeb outage (updated)

A cvsweb.NetBSD.org site is temporarily offline for now, due to some hardware related troubles.

We expect it will be up within 24 hours, but not 100% sure.

During this period please use one of the following mirrors:

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/ is now back operational. Thanks for your patience.

22 Mar 2006 - Xen3 domU is now functional

Manuel Bouyer has continued his work on getting NetBSD to work on Version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor over the past few weeks, and he writes that “NetBSD should now be functional on Xen3 [unprivileged domains] with block and network devices”. Domain 0 support will be added later, after work on DomU will be finished.

Please see Manuel's mail to port-xen for more details.

12 Mar 2006 - NetBSD promo material updated

Hubert Feyrer working with Stefan Schumacher, Joerg Pernfuss and Rainer Brinkmöller, has updated a bunch of NetBSD promo material:

04 Mar 2006 - Developer Interviews

DaemonNews is running a series of interviews by Emmanuel Dreyfus with various NetBSD developers. The first two interviews were published at the beginning of February and March 2006 and are with Manuel Bouyer regarding NetBSD/xen and with der Mouse focusing on his real-time backup system.

More interviews are scheduled for the coming months.

February 2006

24 Feb 2006 - New mailing list for pkgsrc users

The NetBSD Project has created a new mailing list to better serve the pkgsrc user community and to help refocus the existing mailing list for technical discussions. The charters for these two lists are:

  • pkgsrc-users: a general purpose list for most issues regarding the pkgsrc, regardless of platform, e.g. soliciting user help for pkgsrc configuration, unexpected build failures, using particular packages, upgrading pkgsrc installations, questions regarding the pkgsrc release branches, etc. General announcements or proposals for changes that impact the pkgsrc user community, e.g. major infrastructure changes, new features, package removals, etc., may also be posted.

  • tech-pkg: a list for technical discussions related to pkgsrc development, e.g. soliciting feedback for changes to pkgsrc infrastructure, proposed new features, questions related to porting pkgsrc to a new platform, advice for maintaining a package, patches that affect many packages, help requests moved from when an infrastructure bug is found, etc.

All current subscribers to the tech-pkg mailing list are encouraged to subscribe to the pkgsrc-users mailing list.

Please see also complete announcement from Johnny C. Lam.

23 Feb 2006 - Changes to the Packages Collection in January 2006

The monthly summary of pkgsrc activities has been published by Alistair G. Crooks. At the end of January 2006, there were 5853 packages in the Packages Collection, up from 5779 the previous month, a rise of 74.

A special “thank you” goes to Mark Davies for upgrading KDE packages to version 3.5.1, whilst a number of other packages have been moved around to reflect better their primary category.

The Package of the Month award goes to sysutils/vip, nominated by Stoned Elipot. Despite its name, vip uses your editor of choice, and is most frequently found in shell pipelines, to edit text coming from one command before it is submitted to the next command. As Stoned says: “When you're in the midst of slowly building a long shell pipeline and something goes wrong it's so easy to throw |vip| somewhere in it to check the plumbing!” And Alistair adding: “I know I find myself using vip as a pager on the output from commands, since its searching capabilities are much, much better than screen's, and it's incredibly useful when those pipes get long.”

22 Feb 2006 - NetBSD iSCSI Status and HOWTOs

Alistair G. Crooks has recently added support for an iSCSI target to NetBSD, and written HOWTOs for using it. iSCSI is specified in RFC 3720 and describes a method for encapsulating SCSI commands in TCP/IP to remotely access block-level storage. In iSCSI, the party offering a SCSI device (the server) is called a “target”, and the party using that device (the client) is called an “initiator”, so the iSCSI target exports blocks to the iSCSI initiators.

NetBSD's iSCSI implementation was developed from the original Intel code (BSD-licensed) and has been tested with version 1.06 of the Microsoft initiator as well as with its own test harness; an iSCSI initiator for NetBSD is currently under development.

Please see the HOWTOs on setting up both a target and an initiator, as well as the original email from Alistair.

15 Feb 2006 - Permission to Incorporate POSIX® Material

The IEEE and The Open Group have granted permission to the NetBSD Foundation to incorporate documentation for more than 1,400 interfaces from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX® standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6 into its NetBSD operating system.

The POSIX standard, which also forms the core volumes of Version 3 of The Open Group's Single UNIX® Specification, defines a set of fundamental services needed for the construction of portable application programs. The more than 1,400 interfaces from the standard the NetBSD Foundation can now use includes header files, interfaces for system and library calls, and utilities.

Please see the press release for more information.

02 Feb 2006 - UDF file system added

Reinoud Zandijk has added a new implementation of the UDF file system to the NetBSD source tree. UDF is a file system defined by the OSTA standardisation group and is tailored for data interchange on optical discs (like CDs and DVDs) between different operating systems. Its also more and more common on other media like Compact Flash (CF) cards.

See Reinoud's mail to the current-users mailing list for more details.

02 Feb 2006 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Garrett D'Amore (login: gdamore), who will be working on port-mips.

January 2006

31 Jan 2006 - Changes to the Packages Collection in December 2005

By calculations of Alistair G. Crooks, at the end of December 2005, there were 5779 packages in the Packages Collection, up from 5737 the previous month, a rise of 42.

The pkgsrc team branched the pkgsrc repository, and released the pkgsrc-2005Q4 branch in December. The pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering has started on pkgsrc-2005Q4. We're quite proud of the new branch - we hope you enjoy it.

The Package of the Month award goes to Eterm (x11/eterm). “I've been using it as my terminal program of choice for over 6 years, and recently I enabled the Escreen mode with it. The Escreen mode interacts with screen—misc/screen—in a seamless way, provides tabbed access to screen windows, and integrates frequent screen commands in an Eterm menu. Highly recommended.” - says Alistair.

See his complete email message to netbsd-users.

28 Jan 2006 - NetBSD Internals book added

Julio Merino has published documentation about file system internals in the form of a new on-line book: the NetBSD Internals book. This aims to be a detailed guide about the design and implementation of NetBSD, including its kernel and user-land utilities.

Most of this text was written during tmpfs development — his Google Summer of Code project — as one of its goals was precisely to write such documentation.

Please note that this documentation is still incomplete and very much work-in-progress. Feedback, fixes and extensions are certainly welcome.

25 Jan 2006 - Status Report Q3/Q4 2005 published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's first status report in 2006, covering the months July though December of 2005. Among many other things, this status report includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and NetBSD 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2005Q3Q4.html.

24 Jan 2006 - Announcement of pkgsrcCon 2006

The third pkgsrc conference will be held on May 5-7, 2006 in Paris, France. Universite Paris 7 - Denis Diderot is graciously hosting the conference on their campus.

pkgsrcCon is a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc), focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure. Developers, contributors, and users are all welcome to attend, and to share an excellent opportunity to gather and to discuss ideas face-to-face on how to improve pkgsrc.

For more information, including:

  • How to register, and
  • How to submit a presentation proposal,

please visit http://www.pkgsrcCon.org/.

09 Jan 2006 - Two new security advisories

Two new security advisories were published:

  • NetBSD SA-2006-001 - Kernfs kernel memory disclosure
  • NetBSD SA-2006-002 - settimeofday() time wrap

You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page.

NetBSD 3.0 is not affected by any of the vulnerabilities.

01 Jan 2006 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Ruibiao Qiu (login: ruibiao), who will be working on curses and networking.
  • Geert Hendrickx (login: ghen), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.