NetBSD: Recent Changes and News

On this page you will find a summary of significant changes to NetBSD. For those interested in every change to the source tree, there is no substitute for subscribing to the source-changes mailing list. Significant news related to the NetBSD Project is also included here. The contents of this file and the package changes are also available in rss/xml format.

Changes to specific areas

Changes in previous years

See also

onetbsd BSDnews Slashdot - BSD Section O'Reilly BSD DevCenter OSnews

June 2007

May 2007

April 2007

March 2007

February 2007

January 2007

December 2006

November 2006

October 2006

September 2006

August 2006

July 2006

June 2006

May 2006

April 2006

June 2007

01 Jun 2007 - New Developers (top)

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

May 2007

31 May 2007 - 2007Q1 “Quarterly” Status Report (top)

Jan Schaumann published the latest “quarterly” status report of the NetBSD Foundation, covering the months January through June 2007. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2007Q1.html.

01 May 2007 - New Developers (top)

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

April 2007

26 Apr 2007 - Next NetBSD hackathon focussed on PowerPC ports (top)

Tim Rightnour announced in a message to the port-powerpc list that the sixth NetBSD hackathon will be held on May 2nd with a focus on OEA PowerPC ports. The main goals are cleaning up the various ports (eg, removing duplicated code) and platform specific bug fixing.

19 Apr 2007 - pkgsrc-2007Q1 has been branched (top)

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2007Q1 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2007Q1 branch.

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

You can also use the pkgsrc-2007Q1 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2007Q1 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users mailing list for more information.

17 Apr 2007 - Google Summer of Code projects selected (top)

This year's participation of NetBSD in Google's Summer of Code consists of six 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.

9 Apr 2007 - Documentation hackathon - Result (top)

The fifth NetBSD Hackathon took place from Friday, 6th of April, until Sunday, 8th of April 2007. Titled "docathon", the main focus was on bringing the NetBSD WWW pages and documentation into a consistent and more up-to-date state. See Daniel Sieger's mail to the netbsd-docs list and the 5th Hackathon Wiki page for a list of results, conclusions and future directions.

5 Apr 2007 - Upcoming hackathon with focus on documentation (top)

There will be a hackathon from Friday April 6th to Sunday April 8th. Termed “docathon”, it will focus on documentation, converting old .list files into XML, and updating contents. For more information, see Daniel Sieger's announcement and the Wiki page on the 5th Hackathon.

March 2007

29 Mar 2007 - One new security advisory (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

28 Mar 2007 - Summer of Code: Student Applications are in (top)

The deadline for students to apply for a position in Google's Summer of Code program and to work with NetBSD developers on a number of exciting projects has expired, and the application evaluation process is now under way.

During the next couple of days, several of the NetBSD Project's developers will review the applications received before a final list is submitted to Google, who will then decide how many slots are awarded to NetBSD.

If you are a student who has submitted an application, please remember to periodically check its status, as possible mentors may have left some feedback or asked for clarification.

Many thanks to all who have applied, and good luck to everybody!

15 Mar 2007 - Summer of Code: Ready for Student Applications (top)

For the third time in a row, the NetBSD Project has been chosen as one of the mentoring organizations in Google's Summer of Code program, and we would like to encourage students worldwide to submit their application for a project within NetBSD.

Please take a look at our list of proposed SoC projects, and make sure to read through our Project Application HowTo. Any questions should be directed to the appropriate mailing list for the proposed project.

13 Mar 2007 - Filesystems in User-Space: puffs, refuse vs. FUSE, and more (top)

NetBSD now offers full support for running file systems in userspace. The core component inside the kernel that exposes a file system interface towards the userland programs is "puffs", and communicates with vnodes, the kernel's own idea of files. The "libpuffs" library is the interface between userland file systems and the kernel component. To facilitate running the huge amount of file systems already available for the FUSE interface, but not dictate the capabilities of puffs by it, it was decided that FUSE support should be provided as a compatibility layer on top of the native puffs interface. This compatibility is offered by re-fuse, a BSD-licensed re-implementation of FUSE. It is designed to be source code compatible with FUSE, and more information can be found in the refuse(3) manpage.

While puffs is stable for users, the library programming interface and the binary interfaces are still likely to change, and therefore puffs and the dependant librefuse are not built by default. For people tracking -current, the build of all relevant puffs components (librefuse, psshfs, etc.) by "make build" can be enabled by adding "MKPUFFS=yes" to /etc/mk.conf. Using puffs also requires the kernel option "file-system PUFFS", or alternatively loading the puffs.o kernel module, which is included in a puffs-enabled build.

FUSE compatibility was added within pkgsrc, and besides the required infrastructure work a number of FUSE packages were added to pkgsrc in the new "filesystem" category. Example packages that are currently available include:

puffs was originally developed during the Google Summer of Code 2005 "userfs" project by Antti Kantee. It was further polished using funding from the Ulla Tuominen Foundation and committed into the NetBSD source tree in October 2006. The work was presented at AsiaBSDCon 2007 in a paper entitled "puffs - Pass-to-Userspace Framework File System". The "refuse" library was written by Alistair Crooks and committed to NetBSD in February 2007. All components will be available in NetBSD releases starting with NetBSD 5. Work for using FUSE-enabled packages via pkgsrc was done by Juan Romero Pardines following import of the "refuse" library.

For more information, see NetBSD's webpage on file systems in userspace at http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/misc/puffs.html.

11 Mar 2007 - IPv6 Fast Forward (top)

IPv6 Fast Forward has been integrated into NetBSD. This is the counterpart to IPv4 Fast Forward, and is implemented by using flows. Each flow of packets describes a connection between two end points. The flow caches details like the route used, and it's accessed using simple hashing techniques. This technique allows IPv6 forwarding to use a lot less CPU resources, which may be scarce on legacy and/or embedded systems, and throughput is effectively limited by the bus bandwidth and the network driver's performance only.

To enable IPv6 Fast Forward, your kernel must be built with "options GATEWAY". The ip6.maxflows sysctl can be used to set the maximum number of cached flows, a value of 0 disables IPv6 Fast Forwarding. See the options(4) and sysctl(7) manpages for more information.

More information is available in the commit message.

08 Mar 2007 - Three new security advisories (top)

Three new security advisories were published:

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

07 Mar 2007 - Getting ready for Google Summer of Code 2007 (top)

The NetBSD Project is getting ready to participate as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2007 program. We would like to pick as many students as possible — which basically depends on the amount of applications we receive —, hoping to acquire some nice contributions by the end of summer. Naturally, though, we would like to get these contributors to become really involved with the project, staying with us after the program has finished. Some of the students from previous years have been already promoted to NetBSD Developers, so you can be too!

Students will be allowed to apply from the 14th to the 24th of this month through Google's web application. In order to do so, please first check the list of proposed SoC projects to see what is of most interest to NetBSD. Keep in mind that this list is in constant extension, and will be even during the period in which candidates can apply; check it periodically. Of course, you are also allowed to present a personalized project proposal that is not listed in that page, but be aware that in such case we will need to find a mentor for you and might not be able to do so on time. At last, you might also check for other ideas in the projects list, although most of these are out of the scope of the Summer of Code and/or lack mentors.

Once you have decided on a project, take some time to read the Project Application HowTo, which will aid you in filling your proposal. When writing your application, please be as verbose as possible; short applications (with very rare exceptions) are quickly discarded because they feel incomplete. It may take you a long time to write something valuable, but your time will be well spent.

We are looking forward to seeing you in the list of candidates!

02 Mar 2007 - Daily Build Cluster at Western Washington University (top)

The Computer Science Department at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (USA) is using part of their cluster of i386 machines to build daily releases for NetBSD.

Please see Phil Nelson's announcement email for more information.

The daily releases are available from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/.

01 Mar 2007 - New Developers (top)

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

February 2007

27 Feb 2007 - Daylight Saving Time Changes: Nothing new for NetBSD (top)

Daylight Saving Time (DST) was extended in a number of countries starting in 2007. For example, beginning in 2007, most of the USA will begin Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and revert to standard time on the first Sunday in November. While this has caused a number of software vendors a lot of headache, NetBSD has shipped with the appropriate timezone files for years; even though changes to timezones in general and DST rules in particular happen a few times a year throughout the world, the NetBSD operating system has of course always provided accurate and up to date zone files as soon as possible.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed into USA law on August 8, 2005. The updated tzdata package (tzdata2005m) was imported into our source tree on August 29, 2005, and was pulled up into the netbsd-2 (September 5, 2005), netbsd-2-0 and netbsd-3 (both September 6, 2005) branches and is thus present in NetBSD 2.0.3, 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.1, 3.1 and the 4.x branches.

In other words, if you're running one of these systems, no action on your part is required; your system is already prepared for the updated timezones and will continue to show the correct local time.

If you are running an older system, we strongly encourage you to update to one of these releases. However, we do recognize that some organizations may have the need to continue to run older releases. You can update those systems as follows: 

  # cd src
  # cvs update share/zoneinfo
  # make install

Per default, /etc/localtime is a symbolic link to the actual timezone file under /usr/share/zoneinfo. However, if on your system / and /usr are not on the same partition, you need to copy the zone file from /usr/share/zoneinfo to /etc/localtime to make sure that services starting before /usr is mounted get the correct time.

After installing the new zonefiles and making sure that /etc/localtime points to the correct file, you need to restart any and all running services that rely on the correct local time (such as crond, syslogd etc.): /etc/localtime is only read once when the application starts up, and any changes to that file are not picked up until the application is restarted.

A reboot is not required, however, it is an easy way to make sure that all services are restarted and pick up the new information.

12 Feb 2007 - Force10 Networks uses NetBSD to build Software Scalability into FTOS Operating System (top)

Force10 Networks® has leveraged NetBSD® as the foundation for the Force10 Operating System (FTOS). Based on the open source UNIX-like system, FTOS provides the software scalability and resiliency that powers the Force10 TeraScale E-Series® family of switch/routers. See our full press release for more details.

Some technical details that did not make it into the press release: Today, many of the worlds largest Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks depend on Force10 Networks. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series switches/routers support this by providing features like massive scalability, 1260 Gigabit Ethernet ports or 224 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports per chassis. The machines are battle tested and provide full function L2 switching and L3 routing.

Internally, they are equipped with PowerPC CPUs, and for communication, dedicated 100M Ethernet networks are used in each system that connect the Route Processor Module (RPM) and line cards that are for system control. There are three active CPUs on the primary RPM, and a CPU on each line card that are all active in the control plane.

While data itself is forwarded by the hardware, management overhead exists if you consider running 1.500 VRRP groups, 600 OSPF neighbors, BFD on thousands of ports, ARPs on thousands of ports, collecting statistics on thousands of ports etc. All this work is done by the Force10 Operating System, FTOS .

04 Feb 2007 - New Developers (top)

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

02 Feb 2007 - pkgsrcCon 2007: Call for presentations (top)

The fourth annual pkgsrcCon will convene in Barcelona, Spain on Apr 27 - 29, 2007. pkgsrcCon is a technical conference focusing on the technology and the use of the NetBSD Packages Collection.

A call for presentations has been announced, inviting developers and users to give talks about pkgsrc-related topics at the conference. More information about pkgsrcCon 2007 is available at http://www.pkgsrccon.org/2007/.

January 2007

23 Jan 2007 - Status Report 2006/Q2 - Q4 published (top)

Jan Schaumann published the latest “quarterly” status report of the NetBSD Foundation. Since no status reports were released for Q2 and Q3 of 2006, this report covers the months April through December in one document. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2006Q2Q3Q4.html.

04 Jan 2007 - pkgsrc-2006Q4 has been branched (top)

The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch.

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

You can also use the pkgsrc-2006Q4 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2006Q4 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the pkgsrc-users mailing list for more information.

December 2006

20 Dec 2006 - Hackathon#4: pkgsrc (top)

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)!

17 Dec 2006 - NetBSD ported to Sharp Zaurus C3x00 PDA (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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

November 2006

29 Nov 2006 - Hackathon 3 Results (top)

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.

27 Nov 2006 - Three new security advisories (top)

Three new security advisories were published:

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

21 Nov 2006 - Hackathon (top)

NetBSD will run another hackathon, primarily dedicated to get NetBSD-current ready for the 4.0 re-branch. See the Hackathon page for details.

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

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) (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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

October 2006

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

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 (top)

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 (top)

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!

September 2006

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

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 (top)

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.

21 Sep 2006 - Four new security advisories (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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

August 2006

25 Aug 2006 - NetBSD 4.0 release process (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

A new security advisory was published:

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

01 Aug 2006 - New Developer (top)

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

July 2006

24 Jul 2006 - NetBSD 3.0.1 released (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

Two new security advisories were published:

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

01 Jun 2006 - New Developer (top)

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

May 2006

26 May 2006 - Google Summer of Code projects selected (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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:

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

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 (top)

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

April 2006

27 Apr 2006 - NetBSD/evbppc ported to Xilinx Virtex (top)

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 (top)

A new security advisory was published:

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

21 Apr 2006 - pkgsrc reaches 6000th package (top)

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 (top)

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 (top)

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) (top)

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 (top)

Four new security advisories were published:

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

04 Apr 2006 - IPF 4.1.13 (top)

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 (top)

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

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