Recent Changes and News Changes and News in 2007 Changes and News in 2006 Changes and News in 2005 Changes and News in 2004 Changes and News in 2003 Changes and News in 2002 Changes and News in 2001 Changes and News in 2000 Changes and News in 1999 Changes and News in 1998 The NetBSD Project will hold its fourth hackathon from December 27th to December 29th, 2006. The event will focus on preparing pkgsrc for the upcoming pkgsrc-2006q4 branch and to close as many pkg PRs as possible. Please join us on IRC (irc.freenode.net, #pkgsrc)! 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. One new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2006-027 - libc glob(3) buffer overflow You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.ober; (login: ober), who will be working on kauth and openafs. &a.mgrooms; (login: mgrooms), who will be working on ipsec-tools. &a.alc; (login: alc), who will be working on Coverity fixes and various general tasks. 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 as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely 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. Three new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2006-024 - systrace(4) integer overflow NetBSD-SA2006-025 - Multiple information/memory leakage issues NetBSD-SA2006-026 - Multiple denial of service issues You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. NetBSD will run another hackathon, primarily dedicated to get NetBSD-current ready for the 4.0 re-branch. See the Hackathon page for details. The NetBSD release engineering team has announced their plans to re-branch the 4.0 release branch in the near future. 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. 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.mjf; (login: mjf), who will be working on security related tasks and regression tests. &a.cbiere; (login: cbiere), who will be working on various general tasks. &a.hauke; (login: hauke), who will be working on mac68k port and the NetBSD Packages Collection. &a.he; has announced that pkgsrc-2006Q2 binary packages for the sparc64 port are now available, and have been uploaded to . Please use a mirror site close to you. &a.ghen;, 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. 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. Check out the NetBSD Hackathon web page for updates! 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. Around 30 developers and 20 users participated in the first NetBSD Bugathon. Over 270 problem reports were closed. The next Bugathon is scheduled for the October 7-8 weekend. Details are available on the NetBSD Bugathon webpage. Also see Elad Efrat's message to the netbsd-announce list for more information. Four new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2006-020 - Integer overflows in PCF font parsers NetBSD-SA2006-021 - Integer overflows in CID-keyed font parser NetBSD-SA2006-022 - BIND recursive query and SIG query processing NetBSD-SA2006-023 - OpenSSL RSA Signature Forgery You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. &a.garbled; 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. &a.ghen;, 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. &a.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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.obache; (login: obache), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection. &a.vanhu; (login: vanhu), who will be working on IPsec. 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. A new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2006-019 - Malicious PPP options can overrun a kernel buffer You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. 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 &man.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. A new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2006-018 - sail(6), dm(8) and tetris(6) buffer overflows You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.plunky; (login: plunky), who will be working on bluetooth and the NetBSD Packages Collection. 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. &a.jdc; reported that together with &a.uwe; he was able to make NetBSD boot in single-user mode on a JavaStation Espresso. &a.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. 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 &a.agc;'s email to the pkgsrc-users mailing list for more information. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome &a.sanjayl; (login: sanjayl), as a new developer. His working area will be powerpc support. A new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2006-017 - Sendmail malformed multipart MIME messages You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. Two new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2006-015 - FPU Information leak on i386/amd64/Xen platforms with AMD CPUs NetBSD-SA2006-016 - IPv6 socket options can crash the system You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.freza; (login: freza), who will be working on the evbppc port, devmon and kernel. 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. &a.liamjfoy; 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 &a.liamjfoy;'s message to the current-users maillist for details. 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. 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 &a.jschauma;'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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.liamjfoy; (login: liamjfoy), who will be working on CARP, networking, userland and bugfixing. 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. 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. 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 &a.minskim;. &a.nonaka; 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. &a.jschauma; 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. 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 &a.jschauma; jschauma 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! 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. &a.martti; 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.cherry; (login: cherry), who will be working on port-ia64. &a.rittera; (login: rittera), who will be working on NDIS and drivers. &a.pavel; (login: pavel), who will be working on bug fixing, networking and Documentation. &a.chap; (login: chap), who will be working on MIDI support and the NetBSD Packages Collection. 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 &a.agc;'s email to the netbsd-announce mailing list for more information. 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. 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: is now back operational. Thanks for your patience. 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. &a.hubertf; working with Stefan Schumacher, Joerg Pernfuss and Rainer Brinkmöller, has updated a bunch of NetBSD promo material: There's a new DIN A4 flyer about Xen on NetBSD, in german and english language: There are german and english language flyers about NetBSD in general and security on NetBSD in particular: The poster with the list and images of all NetBSD ports was updated: General posters about NetBSD, in German and English language: DaemonNews is running a series of interviews by &a.manu; with various NetBSD developers. The first two interviews were published at the beginning of February and March 2006 and are with &a.bouyer; regarding NetBSD/xen and with &a.mouse; focusing on his real-time backup system. More interviews are scheduled for the coming months. The NetBSD Project has created a new mailing list pkgsrc-users at NetBSD.org to better serve the pkgsrc user community and to help refocus the existing tech-pkg at NetBSD.org 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 pkgsrc-users at NetBSD.org 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 &a.jlam;. The monthly summary of pkgsrc activities has been published by &a.agc;. 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. &a.agc; 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. 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. &a.reinoud; 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.gdamore; (login: gdamore), who will be working on port-mips. By calculations of &a.agc;, 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. &a.jmmv; 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. &a.jschauma; 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. 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 . 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.ruibiao; (login: ruibiao), who will be working on curses and networking. &a.ghen; (login: ghen), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.