fidzu : BSD

Citing from the call for papers: ``The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG).

The NYCBSDCon program committee is accepting submissions for imaginative, embryonic and energizing presentations surrounding the BSD operating systems. We are looking to attract a wide range of speakers and attendees; therefore, topics of interest range from the esoteric to development to practical, everyday sysadmin life. Of course, original topics are preferred in most cases.

Each talk is expected to be 45-50 minutes, including a few minutes for questions and answers. All presentations will be recorded for audio and video. Presenters will have audio/visual and network connectivity.

Abstracts for presentations are due July 31, 2010.

Authors of accepted submissions should be able to provide the full presentation for publication on NYCBSDCon sponsored mediums. Further instructions will follow notification of acceptance. Submissions accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement or a product advertisement will be rejected.

Abstract submissions should be emailed to cfp@nycbsdcon.org in text, ps or pdf format.

Conference Location: Cooper Union, New York, NY Conference Dates: November 12-14, 2010''

Submission of NetBSD related entries is highly appreciated! See the call for papers for more information on important milestones, subsidizing of speakers and the mailing list to stay upto-date.

14 Jul 2010 9:13pm GMT

Dru Lavigne (BSD Hacks) will be presenting "Getting Started in an Open Source Community."

06 Jul 2010 8:46pm GMT

Ladies and gentlemen: I have just released ATF 0.10! This release with such a magic number includes lots of new exciting features and provides a much simplified source tree.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Dive into the &lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~jmmv/atf/releases/0.10/"&gt;0.10 release page&lt;/a&gt; for details!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I'm now working in getting this release into the NetBSD tree to remove some of the custom patches that have been superseded by the official release. Will be there soon.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;And all this while I am a &lt;a href="http://www.meetbsd.org/"&gt;meetBSD&lt;/a&gt; in Kraków :-)&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-4316464728404819592?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

02 Jul 2010 3:48pm GMT

Olga Kartseva writes: ``BSD Magazine archives available without subscribing to BSDMag newsletter for freebsd-announce subscribers!'' Here are direct PDF links:

• Hosting BSD
• BSD as A Desktop
• BSD as Servers
• Infinity. Freedom. FREEBSD
• BSD Security
• Guide to FreeBSD
• PC-BSD Uncovered
• Explore NetBSD

Enjoy - and remember: more NetBSD content is good content, authors are always welcome!

01 Jul 2010 12:02am GMT

Antti Kantee has been, for a while, writing unit/integration tests for the puffs and rump systems (for which he is the author) shipped with NetBSD. Recently, he has been working on fixing the NetBSD test suite to report 0 failures in the i386 platform so as to encourage developers to keep it that way while doing changes to the tree. The goal is to require developers to run the tests themselves before submitting code.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Antti has just published an introductory article, titled &lt;a href="http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/testing_netbsd_easy_does_it"&gt;Testing NetBSD: Easy Does It&lt;/a&gt;, that describes what &lt;a href="http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/atf/"&gt;ATF&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://www.gson.org/netbsd/anita/"&gt;Anita&lt;/a&gt; are, how to use them and how they can help in NetBSD development and deployment. Nice work!&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-1741546407166795638?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

24 Jun 2010 8:48am GMT

NetBSD release-engineer Soren Jacobsen announces: ``The third (and hopefully final) release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC3/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC3 tag is available as well.

See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC2 to RC3.

Please help us test this release candidate as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment. That said, we hope your feedback is positive, as we would like this to be the final release candidate before 5.1. ''

20 Jun 2010 10:36pm GMT

Oops! Looks like I forgot to announce the &lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~jmmv/atf/news.html#20100603-atf-0-9-released"&gt;release of ATF 0.9&lt;/a&gt; here a couple of weeks ago. Just a short notice that the formal release has been available since June 3rd and that 0.9 has been in NetBSD since June 4th!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You can also enjoy a &lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~jmmv/atf/"&gt;shiny-new web site&lt;/a&gt;! It even includes a &lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/~jmmv/atf/docs/faq.html"&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;And, as a side note: I have added a &lt;tt&gt;test&lt;/tt&gt; target to the NetBSD Makefiles, so now it's possible to just do &lt;tt&gt;make test&lt;/tt&gt; within any subdirectory of &lt;tt&gt;src/tests/&lt;/tt&gt; and get what you expect.&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-5879847356596187843?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

18 Jun 2010 6:48pm GMT

From some mails I see: ``EuroBSDCon 2010 - Call for Papers

9th European BSD Conference
October 8 - 10, 2010
Karlsruhe, Germany
http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/

Introduction

The European BSD Community will meet again this year for the ninth conference in the EuroBSDCon series. This is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community, inform your fellow BSD enthusiasts about the newest developments and work for the continued success of your favorite operating system. The two day conference program (October 9 - 10) will be preceeded by a tutorial day (Oct 8). Call for Papers

We are inviting contributions on all areas relating to the BSD family of operating systems, e.g. applications, architecture, implementation, administration and security of *BSD operating systems ranging from embedded systems to mainframes. Investigations on economic aspects regarding the operation of BSD systems are also welcome.

Prospective authors of contributions to the technical program are requested to submit an abstract via http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/. Presentations should last about 40 minutes including time for questions from the audience. Authors of accepted submissions should provide a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings and give permission to the organizers to publish the results in the printed proceedings and on the conference web site at www.eurobsdcon.org.

Call for Tutorial Proposals

Selected tutorials will be offered on the day before the conference. If you are interested in presenting a tutorial, please submit your suggestion on the conference website using the same mechanism as for submitting a paper. Please indicate if this would be a half- or full-day tutorial.

Sponsorship Opportunities

We are seeking companies or institutions to sponsor various elements of the conference in order to keep delegate fees as low as possible. Sponsorship opportunities include: paying for a speaker's travel or accommodation; providing bursaries for delegates who cannot pay the conference fee themselves; sponsoring the social event or the printing of proceedings. Please see the conference website for details.

Important Dates

Final abstract deadline: July 6th 2010
Final tutorial deadline: July 6th
Final papers due: September 1st
Tutorial day: October 8th
Conference: October 9 - 10

For more, see http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/''

16 Jun 2010 11:56pm GMT

Thus it was asked on #NetBSD:

<batence> I wanna set the top command work only for users process, not
                for all system
<batence> in freebsd command is sysctl security.bsd.see_other_uids=0/1
<batence> but I dunno for netbsd
<batence> eg I don't want users see other uids
<batence> only which they owned

Looking at the output of "sysctl -a" didn'r show anything obvious, but recalling the topic and with some digging, there actually is a sysctl switch for that in NetBSD: security.models.bsd44.curtain=1

Here's an example top(1) output with the default setting (0). My username is "feyrer", note that besides my processes, other users' processes are shown as well:

load averages:  0.02,  0.01,  0.00;               up 11+15:08:30                           18:38:56
24 processes: 23 sleeping, 1 on CPU
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
Memory: 71M Act, 51M Inact, 552K Wired, 5560K Exec, 110M File, 27M Free
Swap: 512M Total, 335M Used, 178M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
    0 root     126    0     0K   16M pgdaemon   5:41  0.00%  0.00% [system]
  492 root      85    0  4792K  608K kqueue     0:06  0.00%  0.00% master
  113 root      85    0  2908K  860K select     0:05  0.00%  0.00% dhclient
  535 root      85    0  2900K  556K nanoslp    0:05  0.00%  0.00% cron
  155 root      85    0  2932K  548K kqueue     0:05  0.00%  0.00% syslogd
  496 postfix   85    0  4792K  888K kqueue     0:01  0.00%  0.00% qmgr
 4409 feyrer    43    0  2984K 1240K CPU        0:00  0.00%  0.00% top
 1197 root      85    0  8640K 3692K netio      0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
24830 root      85    0  8640K 3692K netio      0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
 6949 feyrer    85    0  8640K 2828K select     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
28093 feyrer    85    0  8640K 2828K select     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
12391 feyrer    85    0  2132K 1876K pause      0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
25579 feyrer    85    0  2132K 1876K pause      0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
 5773 postfix   85    0  4792K 1868K kqueue     0:00  0.00%  0.00% pickup
 1929 root      85    0  2128K 1828K ttyraw     0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
29212 root      85    0  2972K 1164K kqueue     0:00  0.00%  0.00% inetd
25972 root      85    0  2824K 1076K pause      0:00  0.00%  0.00% ksh 

Likewise, I see a number of processes in ps(1):

% ps -aux | wc -l
      26

Now let's change the sysctl:

# sysctl -d security.models.bsd44.curtain
security.models.bsd44.curtain: Curtain information about objects to users not owning them.
# sysctl -w security.models.bsd44.curtain=1
security.models.bsd44.curtain: 0 -> 1

After this, the top(1) output looks like this:

load averages:  0.02,  0.01,  0.00;               up 11+15:08:45                           18:39:11
5 processes: 4 sleeping, 1 on CPU
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.2% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.8% idle
Memory: 71M Act, 51M Inact, 552K Wired, 5416K Exec, 110M File, 28M Free
Swap: 512M Total, 335M Used, 178M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
 4409 feyrer    43    0  2984K 1240K CPU        0:00  0.00%  0.00% top
28093 feyrer    85    0  8640K 2828K select     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
 6949 feyrer    85    0  8640K 2828K select     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
12391 feyrer    85    0  2132K 1876K pause      0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
25579 feyrer    85    0  2132K 1876K pause      0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh 

This reduced set of processes is also shown in ps(1):

% ps -aux | wc -l
       7

In other words, only my processes are displayed. (If you wonder about the difference between the 7 processes shown in top and the seven ps(1)-lines: the latter includes a heading).

Note that this "filtering" does not apply to the root user, i.e. he can still see all processes.

05 Jun 2010 6:42pm GMT

Jun Ebihara wrote me that there are a bunch of videos on YouTube, showing NetBSD boot on various machines:

• NetBSD/hpcarm booting on the Willcom W-ZERO3:
• NetBSD/x68k booting on an X68030 with Nereid USB and Neptune-X:
• NetBSD/atari booting on TT030 with SMC-TT and EtherNEC:
• NetBSD/sparc booting on SPARCstation 5:
• Booting NetBSD/hpcsh 5.1_RC2 from Windows CE on PERSONA:
• Booting NetBSD/dreamcast 5.1_RC2 with IDE HDD and NE2000 NIC:
• ... and of course there is NetBSD/i386 booting (via LILO?!) into KDE:

Update: Links added for those not seeing the embedded videos (which I've seen happens via at least two RSS aggregators)

Update #2: Added booting NetBSD/hpcsh 5.1_RC2 from Windows CE on PERSONA, also submitted by Jun Ebihara. Thanks a lot!

Update #3: Added booting NetBSD/dreamcast 5.1_RC2 with IDE HDD and NE2000 NIC

31 May 2010 9:15pm GMT

Soren Jacobsen writes on netbsd-announce: ``The second release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC2/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC2 tag is available as well.

See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC1 to RC2.

Please help us test this and any upcoming release candidates as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment. ''

28 May 2010 2:30pm GMT

Here's what I have in my source-changes folder as interesting changes between Dec '09 and May '10. YMMV:

• NetBSD/cats now uses X.org
• NetBSD/sparc64 now runs a MULTIPROCESSOR kernel by default
• NetBSD/evbsh3 now also supports the following boards: AlphaNet MS104-SH4, TAC T-SH7706LAN Ver.3, TAC T-SH7706LSR Ver.1
• NetBSD/hpcarm now supports the Sharp W-ZERO3 series
• wc(1) can print the longest line length now with -L
• cdbr(3), cdbw(3) implement constand database reader/writer routines. this shrinks the services(5) database from 2.1MB to 307kB
• /dev/{mem,kmem,zero,null} implementations are unified in machine independent code on the rmind-uvmplock branch
• Many kernel systems were prepared to be built either into a monolithic kernel, or loaded as module at runtime. This includes verbose listing of PCI devices, Berkeley Packet Filters (bpf), loading modules only after the root filesystem is mounted, others.
• New drivers:
  • acpiwmibus: a pseudo-bus to which child Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI, a subset of ACPI) devices attach
  • u2g: split into parts: u3ginit attaches to those devices that only come as a umass device in the default configuration and forces them to reinitialize in 3D mode and detach. The u3g part attaches to individual interfaces for the 3G functionality, leaving the umass interface(s) for that driver. With this change I can use the MMC card in my Huawey stick (as well as the integrated windows driver CD, which of course is pretty useless) and the 3G modem at the same time.
  • cas: Driver for Sun Cassini/Cassini+ (GigaSwift) Ethernet (also known as National Semiconductor Saturn)
  • aibs: replaces aiboost for the ASUSTeK AI Booster hardware monitor
• Software imports include NetPGP 3.99.2 (20100507 version), dhcpcd-5.2.2, BIND 9.7.0rc1, libelf from FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, tzcode2009k, pkg_install-20100220, mdocml-1.9.23, libarchive-2.8.2, ACPICA 20100121, bozohttpd-20100512

28 May 2010 2:22am GMT

Here's another bunch of NetBSD-related news that has been lingering in my inbox for far too long:

• Izumi Tsutsui's NetBSD/cobalt restore CD is available based on NetBSD versions 5.0.2 5.1_RC2. See the for information on what it is and how to use it.
• A negative symbol lookup cache was added to NetBSD's loader for shared libraries and shared objects, ld.so_elf, by Roy Marples: ``I've been researching why Evolution from GNOME takes over 5 minutes to load on my quad core amd64 beast. It boils down to dlsym looking for a symbol that does not exist directly and as such examining every needed library. However, the current implementation does not remember what libraries it as already checked. Normally this isn't a problem, but with the way Evolution is built the search chain is massive. [...]

  With this patch, Evolution (without the patches to and a glib I added to pkgsrc a few days ago) loads in under 2 seconds (5 seconds with initial disk thrashing). ''

• The NetBSD Logo is available in many variants, but a new variant was submitted via www@ these days by "Tim" - which is actually plain HTML, no image:

  ⚑ NetBSD Powered!

• SafeNet's ProtectDrive is ``a full disk encryption solution that encrypts the entire hard drive of laptops, workstations and servers, as well as USB flash drives, to protect data in the case of the theft or loss of a hardware device.''

  How do you implement such preboot authentication and harddisk encryption software, esp. if you want to provide thinks like LDAP integration for the user/key handling and two-factor authentication? Little is known, but rumors say the 32bit version of the software is based on NetBSD, as is backed by this worker bio info: ``Duties: Working on pre-boot restricted environment with loads before operation system and implemented on NetBSD. Ported and optimized the KDrive X server to NetBSD. Developed and implemented user secure authentication interface with smart card support.

  Environment and tools : NetBSD (3.0), C/C++, FLTK''

• A german-language introduction of pkgsrc on OpenSolaris was given by Michael 'kvedulv' Moll at the Munich OpenSolaris User Group back in march. Slides and a video are available.
• Running NetBSD on an Oracle Sun Fire X4140 Server? Check out this posting by Ignatios Souvatzis for the full dmesg pr0n of this machine with 12 CPU cores and 32GB RAM!
• Are you still looking for a nice small ARM-based board to start hacking on NetBSD/arm? The http://www.friendlyarm.net/products/mini2440 may be a good start, esp. after Paul Fleischer is reaching completion of NetBSD support for the board. Citing from his mail to port-arm:

  ``I have now fairly good (i.e., it works for me) support for the MINI2440 on NetBSD with support for the following:
  - S3C2440 UART
  - DM9000 (MAC+PHY)
  - S3C2440 SD Controller
  - S3C2440 DMA Controller
  - S3C2440 IIS Controller
  - FriendlyArm 3,5" LCD Display
  - S3C2440 USB Host Controller (OHCI)
  - S3C2440 Touch Screen
  - UDA1341TS audio codec
  
  Currently, support for three things on the S3C2440 are missing:
  - S3C2440 NAND Controller
  - S3C2440 USB Device Controller
  - S3C2440 RTC
  
  I've also created a stage2 bootloader for use with u-boot, which ensures that the value of bootargs is passed to the NetBSD kernel. At this point I have only tested the code with the 64Mb version of the FriendlyArm MINI2440.

  All the code is available in a Git repository[1] and is based on the netbsd-5 code base. Progress can be followed on my webpage[2]. ''

• While talking about NetBSD on cool hardware: How about NetBSD/hpcarm on WILLCOM | W-ZERO3 (WS004SH) mobile devices? Here is a screenshot of Ebihara-san's WS011SH with CCW screen, and there is also a video "booting NetBSD/hpcarm on WILLCOM | W-ZERO3(WS004SH)" posted on YouTube:

  For more details, see Izumi Tsutsui's posting on port-hpcarm.

28 May 2010 1:31am GMT

NetBSD's Bluetooth hacker #1, Iain Hibbert, wrote on tech-kern: ``I wrote a driver for the Apple Magic Mouse, as the protocol was mostly decoded by a Linux developer, and Somebody was kind enough to send me one. [...]

The mouse itself is a wireless Bluetooth mouse and operates with the USB HID protocol much like other mice, but it doesn't provide a proper descriptor and requires features to be activated and special interpretations of the touch surface reports, so doesn't fit exactly into our HID framework, which configures independent sub-devices to report id's from the descriptor.

The driver interprets the touch reports to allow emulation of a middle mouse button (for mulitple firm touches detected), and horizontal and vertical scroll actions (for touches moving over a certain distance). It works well on NetBSD-current and NetBSD-5 and the mouse is pretty slick. '' See Iain's posting for more details.

16 May 2010 10:33pm GMT

During the past few months, I've got into the habit of using a bug tracker to organize my tasks at the work place. People assign tickets to me to get things done and I also create and self-assign tickets to myself to keep them as a reminder of the mini-projects to be accomplished. Sincerely, this approach works very well for me and keeps me focused.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Since then, I've been wishing to have a similar system set up for ATF. Yeah, we could use the &lt;a href="http://www.netbsd.org/Gnats/"&gt;Gnats&lt;/a&gt; installation provided by NetBSD... but I hate this issue tracking system. It's ancient, ugly, and I do really want a web interface to manage my tickets through.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, this weekend, I finally took some time and set up a Trac installation for ATF to provide a decent bug/task tracking system. The whole Apache plus Trac setup was more complex than I imagined, but I do hope that the results will pay off :-)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Take a look at the &lt;a href="http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/atf/news.html#20100509-trac-available"&gt;official announcement&lt;/a&gt; for more details!&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-7270221803608994472?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

10 May 2010 6:48pm GMT

Almost a year ago, I decided to &lt;a href="http://blog.julipedia.org/2009/06/trying-adsense.html"&gt;give a try to AdSense&lt;/a&gt;. And, so far, the "earnings" have been ~30 EUR which I cannot even cash. Given this and how ugly and disturbing the ads look on the front page, I have disabled them. (I think the ads have gotten much worse over time... but as I do not pay attention to the front page, I didn't see them.) Thanks to Roman Valls for pointing this out!&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/17885055-3049034875819271527?l=blog.julipedia.org' alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content>

10 May 2010 9:48am GMT