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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. Changes to pkgsrc are also listed here. All of this information is 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

August 2009

July 2009

June 2009

April 2009

March 2009

February 2009

January 2009

December 2008

November 2008

October 2008

September 2008

August 2008

July 2008

June 2008

May 2008

April 2008

August 2009

02 Aug 2009 - NetBSD 5.0.1 released (top)

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 5.0.1 release is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade. See the NetBSD 5.0.1 Release Announcement for more information.

Please note that due to changes in pkg_install, users upgrading from previous releases are strongly encouraged to run "pkg_admin rebuild" after the upgrade is complete.

July 2009

29 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-013 BIND named dynamic update Denial of Service vulnerability (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

28 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-012 SHA2 implementation potential buffer overflow (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

28 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-011 ISC DHCP server Denial of Service vulnerability (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

25 Jul 2009 - GPIO Revisited (top)

NetBSD has had support for General Purpose Input/Output devices since the 4.0 release, when the GPIO framework was imported. GPIO devices, or gpios for short, provide an easy way to interface electronic circuits which can be as simple as a LED or that provide more complex functionality like a 1-Wire or I2C bus.

Since the import of the GPIO framework into NetBSD, Marc Balmer has reworked larger parts of that subsystem to address some problems and drawbacks. They are now available in NetBSD where they will be further improved. The new GPIO framework retains backwards compatibility while adding new features: It integrates with the kauth(9) security framework, has its own config file format gpio.conf(5), and integrates with the system startup scripts in /etc/rc.d.

For more information, read Marc Balmer's posting in the NetBSD Blog as well as Marc's mail to tech-kern.

14 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2009-010 ISC dhclient subnet-mask flag stack overflow (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

07 Jul 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-008 and NetBSD-2009-009 (concerning OpenSSL) (top)

Two new security advisories were published concerning OpenSSL:

  • NetBSD-SA2009-008 OpenSSL ASN1 parsing denial of service and CMS signature verification weakness
  • NetBSD-SA2009-009 OpenSSL DTLS Memory Exhaustion and DSA signature verification vulnerabilities

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

01 Jul 2009 - New Developer in June 2009 (top)

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

  • Marc Balmer (login: mbalmer), who will be working on  kernel.

June 2009

30 Jun 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-005 through NetBSD-2009-007 (top)

Three new security advisories were published:

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

22 Jun 2009 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2009-001 through NetBSD-2009-004 (top)

Four new security advisories were published:

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

April 2009

29 Apr 2009 - NetBSD 5.0 released! (top)

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system, is now available.

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL), the jemalloc memory allocator, X.Org instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers. For all the details, see the full release notes.

Andrew Doran has prepared a short presentation giving an overview of the new features and performance improvements that 5.0 provides. See http://www.NetBSD.org/~ad/50/ or http://www.NetBSD.org/~ad/50.pdf.

27 Apr 2009 - Announcing the NetBSD Project Blog (top)

It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce the new NetBSD Project Blog:

http://blog.NetBSD.org

The NetBSD Project Blog allows us to let you, the community, know about new developments in NetBSD and pkgsrc. The blog supplements our existing netbsd-announce mailing list and the "Recent Changes and News" webpage. We hope it will provide you with greater insight into the future of NetBSD.

For those that tweet - so do we - http://www.twitter.com/NetBSD

20 Apr 2009 - Summer of Code projects selected (top)

For the fifth consecutive year, the NetBSD Project is proud to participate in Google's “Summer of Code” program as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer.

The full list of all projects together with some additional details can be found in the press release.

16 Apr 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC4 binaries available for download (top)

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the fourth release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC4/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

01 Apr 2009 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Sarah Cockburn (login: sarah) will be working on marketing.
  • Tim Zingelman (login: tez) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

March 2009

21 Mar 2009 - NetBSD to participate again in Google's Summer of Code (top)

For the fifth year in a row, the NetBSD Project has been selected as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code. As in previous years, this provides a great opportunity for students to get paid to hack on NetBSD, learn about contributing to a major open source project and to become part of an exciting community.

Students interested in applying should now start to outline their project proposals and initiate contact with possible mentors and the community at large. A list of project suggestions is available here, though students may also wish to review our general projects page.

Our NetBSD Project Application/Proposal HowTo should be a good resource to help students develop their best proposal and the answers to those questions will help us to rank all applications.

01 Mar 2009 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Marek Dopiera (login: dopiera), who will be working on GNU/Hurd xlator support in VFS/GNUMach binary support.
  • Emile Heitor (login: imil), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and Documentation.
  • Jens Rehsack (login: sno), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

February 2009

20 Feb 2009 - BSD Magazine covers NetBSD (top)

The January issue of the BSD Magazine is out with a special focus on NetBSD. See Hubert Feyrer's blog entry for more details: hubertf's NetBSD Blog

11 Feb 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC2 binaries available for download (top)

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the second release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC2/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

02 Feb 2009 - Preparing for Summer of Code 2009 (top)

Recently, Google announced that there will be another instance of their popular Summer of Code program in 2009. The NetBSD Project has participated in this program as a mentoring organization since its conception in 2005 (see our results from 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005), and hopes again to be fortunate enough to take part in this year's iteration.

As part of our preparation for the Summer of Code 2009, we have begun reviewing and updating our list of suggested projects and would like to invite all interested students to likewise begin their research and start discussions with the possible mentors as well as on our public mailing lists.

Stay tuned for further updates!

02 Feb 2009 - Summer of Code 2008 Summary (top)

In previous years, the NetBSD Project released a formal summary soon after that year's Summer of Code project deadline. In 2008, we neglected to do this, but since we feel that the students and mentors deserve the full recognition for their hard work, we have finally prepared a press release summarizing last year's project.

We apologize for the delay in getting this published. On the bright side, publishing this followup several months after the formal end of the program allowed us to include the work that was done after the "pencil's down" date: since then, six of the students have become full NetBSD developers with commit privileges, and a lot of the work has been imported into our main source tree.

Please see this page for details.

January 2009

29 Jan 2009 - NetBSD 5.0_RC1 binaries available for download (top)

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Soren Jacobsen announced that the first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC1/.

Please see Soren's email for details.

01 Jan 2009 - New Developers in December 2008 (top)

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

  • Patrick Mahoney (login: pmahoney), who will be working on video support (USB video drivers and v4l2 API).
  • Martin Schütte (login: mschuett), who will be working on syslogd.
  • Roy Marples (login: roy), who will be working on dhcpcd and the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Sergey Svishchev (login: shattered), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

December 2008

01 Dec 2008 - New Developer in November 2008 (top)

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

  • Tuomo Mäkinen (login: tjam), who will be working on port-atari.

November 2008

01 Nov 2008 - New Developers in October 2008 (top)

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

  • Hasso Tepper (login: hasso) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Darran Hunt (login: darran) will be working on cryptography in NetBSD, OpenSSL, network and device drivers.
  • Jean-Yves Migeon (login: jym) will be working on port-xen.
  • Jeremy Morse (login: jmorse) will be working on video and usb.

October 2008

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-015 ICMPv6 Packet Too Big messages (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-014 Cross-site request forgery in ftpd(8) (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

27 Oct 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-013 IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

27 Oct 2008 - Updated Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning (top)

One updated security advisory was published:

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

14 Oct 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q3 released (top)

The new pkgsrc-2008Q3 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

14 Oct 2008 - NetBSD 4.0.1 released (top)

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 4.0.1 release is now available. NetBSD 4.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 4.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 4.0.1 Release Announcement for more information.

13 Oct 2008 - NetBSD developers speak at NYCBSDCon (top)

Three NetBSD Foundation members presented at the New York City BSD Conference. Anders Magnusson discussed the design and implementation of the modern Portable C Compiler. Julio M. Merino Vidal introduced the Automated Testing Framework and some testing goals for NetBSD. And Jeremy C. Reed introduced DNSSEC including some examples using ISC BIND. (The pcc(1), atf(7), and named(8) projects are all included with NetBSD.) Several other NetBSD developers and end-users also attended the conference. And previous to the event, a NetBSD summit was held.

03 Oct 2008 - NetBSD developer's summit and hackathon (top)

Leading up to this year's NYCBSDCon, a number of NetBSD developers will be gathering for an informal ``NetBSD developer's summit'' on Friday, October 10th, 2008. The event is hosted at Pilosoft and will take place in their offices at 55 Broad St, New York, NY 10004. While the developer's summit is open to the public, there is limited space, so we ask that you contact Jan Schaumann to get your name on the list if you plan on attending.

Coinciding with the developer's summit and the conference will be the 12th NetBSD Hackathon, taking place at the summit, at the conference and of course on IRC as usual. Please see http://wiki.netbsd.se/Hackathon12 for details.

01 Oct 2008 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Arnaud Ysmal (login: stacktic) will be working on rump, ukfs and fs_utils.
  • Jonathan A. Kollasch (login: jakllsch) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, drivers and miscellaneous tasks.
  • Eric Schnoebelen (login: schnoebe) will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, release engineering and userland.

September 2008

19 Sep 2008 - Video4Linux2 compatible interface and USB video capture support (top)

Patrick Mahoney, a computer science student and author of the Frameworks stop-motion frame capture program, recently coded device-independent video driver support and a USB video device driver for NetBSD as part of the 2008 Google Summer of Code.

NetBSD developer, Jared D. McNeill, imported Mahoney's video(4), video(9), and uvideo(4) drivers. And McNeill also coded and imported the pseye(4) driver for the Sony PLAYSTATION(R) Eye USB webcam.

These provide a Video4Linux2 compatible capture interface. The video layer implements some of the Video4Linux2 API including read() and provides some ioctl's to set controls in a device-independent way similar the audio(9) interface. The uvideo driver is specifically for USB Video Class devices and not just any random webcam. (Link to USB Video Class specification.)

McNeill said many Video4Linux2 applications work, such as mplayer, vlc, ffmpeg, cheese (clone of apple's Photo Booth), ucview (simple capture application on the EeePC), gstreamer (media framework used by GNOME applications), and ekiga (SIP/IAX/NetMeeting compatible video conferencing tool). (McNeill also imported the pkgsrc/net/ekiga-devel package.)

15 Sep 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-012 Denial of service issues in racoon(8) (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

04 Sep 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-011 ICMPv6 MLD query (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

August 2008

31 Aug 2008 - Updated Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning (top)

One updated security advisory was published:

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

26 Aug 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-010 Malicious PPPoE discovery packet can overrun a kernel buffer (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

01 Aug 2008 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Adam Hoka (login: ahoka), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and i18n.
  • Timo Teräs (login: tteras), who will be working on ipsec-tools.
  • Paul Goyette (login: pgoyette), who will be working on sdtemp, spdmem and sysmon_envsys.

July 2008

31 Jul 2008 - Metadata journaling support added to FFS (top)

Simon Burge has just added metadata journaling to the FFS (fast file system) code to NetBSD-current.

The journaling code, known as WAPBL - Write Ahead Physical Block Logging - was originally written by Darrin B. Jewell for Wasabi Systems, Inc., and was contributed by Wasabi to the NetBSD community earlier this year. Wasabi has been shipping WAPBL-enabled products since 2003.

Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran spent quite some time on integrating this code into NetBSD-current and enhancing it to allow automatic creation of the journal log area inside existing filesystems to ease conversion.

They also did some performance benchmarks and WAPBL performs very close to soft-dependencies mounts, and only slightly slower than (unsafe) async mounts. In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a “log” option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the “softdep” option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information.

The WAPBL feature will be available in the upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release.

Many thanks to Wasabi Systems, Inc. for contributing this code, everyone that helped to integrate it and especially Simon Burge for his work on the in-filesystem journal.

30 Jul 2008 - NetBSD achieves permanent charity status (top)

The NetBSD Foundation has been granted permanent 501(c)(3) charity status under United States law. The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

To achieve the permanent "public charity" status, we needed to prove that we are publicly funded by going through the financial activity of the past 5 years and filing the necessary forms. Lex Wennmacher, Martin Husemann, and Christos Zoulas spent quite a few weekends going through all the numbers and completing the forms, and we are happy to report that the IRS accepted our paperwork.

Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment.

26 Jul 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q2 released (top)

The new pkgsrc-2008Q2 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

25 Jul 2008 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning (top)

One new security advisory was published:

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

12 Jul 2008 - NetBSD developer's summit @ NYCBSDCon 2008 (top)

A NetBSD developer's summit is currently being planned for Friday, October 10th, 2008. The event is sponsored by and leads up to this year's NYCBSDCon and will take place at Columbia University on the island of Manhattan in New York City, NY, USA.

While the program for this full-day event is not yet finalized, it will be open to the public and may include formal presentations as well as informal discussions of both technical and administrative nature. A public hackathon is anticipated to run in parallel throughout the weekend.

The common social activities such as PGP signing and consumption of refreshing beverages or communal ingestion of nutrition are likely to follow.

If you have any suggestions, would like to offer your help, plan on attending or have any other comments, please contact .

01 Jul 2008 - ftp.NetBSD.org outage (Updated) (top)

ftp.NetBSD.org is having trouble with its hardware RAID. We are aware that it's not available and are working on it. In the meantime, please refer to our mirrors where available.

Update: The machine's back up again, but may experience another reboot or two in the near future.

June 2008

20 Jun 2008 - New default license: 2-clause BSD license (top)

The NetBSD Foundation's president, Alistair Crooks, announced that “Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license.”

Please see this page for details about NetBSD's copyright and licensing terms.

01 Jun 2008 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Hans Rosenfeld (login: hans), who will be working on port-vax and kernel.

May 2008

22 May 2008 - Hackathon 11: bug fixing for NetBSD 5.0 (top)

The next hackathon will be held May 24th and 25th, 2008 with a focus on working on critical and high priority bugs in preparation for NetBSD 5.0. Check out the Hackathon community page for more details.

13 May 2008 - One Updated security Advisory (top)

One updated security advisory was published:

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

08 May 2008 - Two new security advisories (top)

Two new security advisories were published:

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

April 2008

21 Apr 2008 - Summer of Code projects selected (top)

For the fourth consecutive year, the NetBSD Project is proud to participate in Google's “Summer of Code” program as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer. The 14 accepted proposals cover a wide range of topics (“something for everyone!”) and we're looking forward to an exciting summer!

The full list of all projects together with some additional details can be found in the press release.

21 Apr 2008 - Three new security advisories (top)

Three new security advisories were published:

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

13 Apr 2008 - pkgsrc-2008Q1 released (top)

The new pkgsrc-2008Q1 branch has been released. Many packages have been updated to newer versions and more packages than in previous branches are supported. Furthermore, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support. See the release announcement for more information.

02 Apr 2008 - Summer of Code student applications period extended (top)

Google has extended the student applications period for this year's Summer of Code until April 7th, 2008. This means, it's not too late to submit your proposal. With the extra days, students have more time to get in touch with a mentor, to discuss their proposal on one of our mailing lists and to solicit feedback before refining and submitting it.

The NetBSD Project would also like to take this as an occasion to remind everybody that students' own proposals not explicitly listed on the projects page are equally welcome. If you have a great idea on how to make NetBSD better, just flesh out your thoughts and hand in your application.

Due to the strong competition in the Summer of Code program, you may even wish to submit a second proposal; often we receive multiple proposals for the same project and have a hard time choosing one student over the other -- a second proposal of equal quality might increase your chances to be accepted.

If you have any questions, please contact the appropriate mailing list or see if some of your possible mentors are available on #netbsd-code on IRC (freenode.net).

01 Apr 2008 - New Developers (top)

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

  • Tonnerre Lombard (login: tonnerre), who will be working on kernel and pkgsrc.
  • Christoph Egger (login: cegger), who will be working on kernel and the xen port.