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. 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

O'Reilly BSD DevCenter Daemon News Slashdot - BSD Section O'Reilly ONLamp.com

June 2005

May 2005

April 2005

March 2005

February 2005

January 2005

December 2004

November 2004

October 2004

September 2004

August 2004

July 2004

June 2004

May 2004

April 2004

June 2005

02 Jun 2005 - pkgsrc will freeze for pkgsrc-2005Q2 (top)

Alistair G. Crooks announced yesterday that the NetBSD Packages Team will freeze the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period will begin on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

02 Jun 2005 - Summer of Code (top)

The NetBSD Project is pleased to participate in Google's Summer of Code 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.

01 Jun 2005 - New Developer (top)

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

May 2005

31 May 2005 - Downtime for ftp.fi.NetBSD.org (top)

Due to a relocation of the server hardware, ftp.fi.NetBSD.org will be down on June 1st, 2005, and possibly on June 2nd, 2005, depending on how well the move goes. Hosting for ftp.fi.NetBSD.org is kindly provided by the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET).

29 May 2005 - pkgsrcCon 2005 presentations online (top)

Most of the presentations given at this year's pkgsrcCon are now available online.

25 May 2005 - Remote User Access VPN Documentation (top)

Emmanuel Dreyfus recently added detailed documentation on how to set up a Remote User Access VPN under NetBSD.

21 May 2005 - AnonCVS outage (top)

The anonymous CVS server will be unavailable for much of May 21 2005, while we rework and simplify its configuration. Among other less immediately obvious benefits we hope this will allow us to begin offering anonymous CVS access over IPv6.

09 May 2005 - Sun Hardware Donation for pkgsrc work (top)

The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the generous donation of two machines from Sun Microsystems for the purpose of advancing the development of The NetBSD Packages Collection under Solaris.

“Sun is looking forward to working with the NetBSD Project, and certainly wants to support the pkgsrc efforts,” commented Alan DuBoff, a member of Solaris Engineering at Sun.

For more information, read the press release here.

09 May 2005 - Changes to the Packages Collection in March 2005 (top)

At the end of March 2005, there were 5377 packages in the Packages Collection. Please read Alistair G. Crooks' email in the mailing list archives to read about the changes to the Packages Collection in March 2005, including notable additions, notable updates, and choosing the Package of the Month.

02 May 2005 - Prospective timelines for upcoming releases (top)

The release engineers announced the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for a late July 2005 release; NetBSD 2.1 planned for a late June 2005 release; and NetBSD 1.6.3 is planned for an August or September 2005 release.

For more information, read the announcement in the mailing list archives.

When 2.1 is released, netbsd-2-0 will be shutdown. Possibly a 2.0.3 update may be done before then.

02 May 2005 - Daily builds available for public again (top)

James Chacon announced that the regular daily builds for NetBSD have begun again and are available for public consumption at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/. See the announcement in the netbsd-announce mailing list archives for more information.

02 May 2005 - Software maintenance for cvsweb.NetBSD.org (top)

This week, cvsweb.NetBSD.org (pigu.iri.co.jp) will be down at times for software maintenance. You are welcome to use one of the cvsweb mirrors during the outage.

This also affects the Japanese mailing lists (@jp.NetBSD.org) and the following Japanese mirror services

01 May 2005 - New Developers (top)

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

April 2005

28 Apr 2005 - Belgian NetBSD mirrors out of service (updated) (top)

Due to hardware failure, the following mirror servers

are unavailable at the moment.

As it is not clear at this time how long the downtime will be, please use one of the nearby European mirrors.

Note

Since 2005-05-09 the Belgian mirrors are online again.

14 Apr 2005 - NetBSD 2.0.2 released (top)

James Chacon has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 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 2.0.2 Release Announcement.

08 Apr 2005 - First Quarterly Status Report in 2005 published (top)

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's first quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK and PAM support, the opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/Foundation/reports/2005Q1.html.

06 Apr 2005 - Binary packages for 2005Q1 available (top)

Hubert Feyrer has uploaded a total of about 10GB of binary packages built for NetBSD 2.0/i386 and NetBSD 1.6.2/i386 from the pkgsrc-2005Q1 branch to ftp.NetBSD.org. To install the binaries, set your PKG_PATH for pkg_add as follows:

Some of the highlights:

Updated 2005-04-09: Jan Schaumann uploaded binary packages for NetBSD-2.0/amd64 and IRIX64-6.5, and Manuel Bouyer uploaded binary packages for NetBSD-2.0/sparc, all including PGP signed checksum files to:

04 Apr 2005 - ipsec-tools included with NetBSD (top)

Emmanuel Dreyfus has been working on integrating NAT Traversal and recently replaced the KAME based racoon in NetBSD with the feature-enhanced “ipsec-tools” version. NetBSD can now be setup to replace Cisco 3000 VPN concentrators, while Cisco VPN clients can still be used, talking to NetBSD instead.

Many more changes come with the ipsec-tools, including dead peer detection, privilege separation, IKE mode config, IKE and ESP fragmentation, configurable path to certificate authority, and hook scripts. See Emmanuel Dreyfus' mail in the current-users mailing list archives for a more complete list.

04 Apr 2005 - IP Filter upgraded to 4.1.8 on -current (top)

Martti Kuparinen upgraded IPFilter to the latest version (4.1.8) 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 2005 - New Developers (top)

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

March 2005

31 Mar 2005 - GNOME 2.10.0 available in pkgsrc (top)

Julio M. Merino Vidal finished updating the GNOME packages in pkgsrc-current to 2.10.0, the latest stable version. Around 80 packages have been updated and some new ones have been added.

24 Mar 2005 - pkgsrc branch 2005Q1 created (top)

Alistair G. Crooks announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the NetBSD Packages Collection. The former branch pkgsrc-2004Q4 is now deprecated.

10 Mar 2005 - bouyer-xen2 merged into HEAD (top)

Manuel Bouyer has merged the bouyer-xen2 branch into NetBSD-current. This means that support for Xen 2.0 (both in privileged and unprivileged mode) will be part of NetBSD 3.0. See Manuel's email to the port-xen mailing list for details.

07 Mar 2005 - pkgsrc now frozen (top)

The NetBSD Packages Collection is now frozen for a duration of 2 weeks in preparation of the first stable branch in 2005, pkgsrc-2005Q1. During this time, no new packages will be imported in pkgsrc, and the NetBSD Packages team will focus on fixing open PRs and stabilizing the infrastructure.

Please see Alistair Crooks's announcement on the tech-pkg mailing list.

07 Mar 2005 - Changes to pkgsrc in February 05 (top)

Alistair G. Crooks has posted his monthly account of the changes to the Packages Collection in February 2005 to the tech-pkg mailing list. According to Alistair, there were 5377 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 5331 the previous month, a rise of 47 with many notable updates as well. An important change in the pkgsrc infrastructure was made due to the recent announcement that collisions have been found in SHA1: pkgsrc now supports multiple digest algorithms and distpatches and all the distinfo files in pkgsrc have been updated, where possible, to use multiple checksums. More details, including the Package of the Month Award, can be found in Alistair's email.

04 Mar 2005 - NetBSD and Xen (top)

The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.

01 Mar 2005 - New Developers (top)

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

February 2005

27 Feb 2005 - PAM enabled on HEAD (top)

Christos Zoulas announced today that most programs that perform authentication will be using PAM, including login(1), su(1), xdm(1), ftpd(8), telnetd(8), ppp, and others. Please see his email to the current-users mailing list for details.

27 Feb 2005 - NetBSD 2.0 interviews (top)

Shortly after NetBSD 2.0 was released, Newsforge ran this article entitled “Understanding NetBSD 2.0's new technology”, which included an interview with a number of NetBSD developers. Now, several weeks after this article, the author Federico Biancuzzi has published his follow-up interview.

20 Feb 2005 - NetBSD/amd64 running on Intel EM64T (top)

Release 2.0 of NetBSD/amd64 has been confirmed to run successfully on Intel x86 CPUs with 64-bit extension EM64T.

20 Feb 2005 - ipf 4.1.6 imported (top)

IPFilter in NetBSD-current has been updated to the latest version (4.1.6). You must recompile your kernel and the ipf tools to use the new version. See Martti Kuparinen's email to the current-users mailing list for more details.

19 Feb 2005 - Maintenance period for cvsweb.NetBSD.org (top)

cvsweb.NetBSD.org (pigu.iri.co.jp) will be down from Sat Feb 19 13:00 GMT to Mon Feb 21 00:30 GMT due to a shutdown of power for building maintenance. You are welcome to use one of the cvsweb mirrors during this outage.

This also affects the Japanese mailing lists (@jp.NetBSD.org) and the following Japanese mirror services

15 Feb 2005 - Japanese FTP mirror out of service (top)

The Japanese mirror ftp.jp.NetBSD.org, operated by the Japanese NetBSD users group, is out of service at the moment due to broken harddisks. It is expected to be available again in early March. In the meantime you can use one of the other NetBSD mirrors in Japan.

09 Feb 2005 - Changes to pkgsrc in January 05 (top)

Alistair G. Crooks has posted his monthly account of the changes to the Packages Collection in January 2005 to the tech-pkg mailing list. According to Alistair, there were 5331 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 5266 the previous month, a rise of 65 with many notable updates as well. More details, including the Package of the Month Award, can be found in his email.

08 Feb 2005 - ipf 4.1.5 imported (top)

Martti Kuparinen announced today that he upgraded IPFilter to the latest version (4.1.5) on NetBSD -current. You must recompile kernel and the ipf tools to use the new version. See Martti's email to the current-users mailing list for more details.

04 Feb 2005 - The Annual NetBSD Status Report (top)

The NetBSD Foundation held its annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what is planned for the coming year. The Annual NetBSD Status Report summarizes the meeting.

January 2005

28 Jan 2005 - NetBSD online store (top)

Jeremy C. Reed of the NetBSD Communication Executive Committee announced that NetBSD now has an online store selling various products to help raise funds at http://www.cafepress.com/NetBSD/. Items currently on sale include shirts, sweatshirts, a mug, wall clock, mousepad, logo magnets, and tote bags.

All profits from this online store will be used to directly fund NetBSD, such as hardware, promotion, legal and accounting fees, and other expenses.

Please visit http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/ for more information on how to donate to the non-profit NetBSD project.

26 Jan 2005 - NetBSD 1.5 EOLed (top)

James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced that, in keeping with NetBSD's policy of maintaining only the current (2.0) and most recent (1.6) release branches, the release of NetBSD 2.0 marks the end-of-life for NetBSD 1.5. This means that the netbsd-1-5 branch will no longer be actively maintained.

There will be no more pullups to the branch (even for security issues). There will be no security advisories made for 1.5. And the 1.5 releases on ftp.NetBSD.org have been moved to /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-archive.

14 Jan 2005 - anoncvs back online (top)

As reported earlier, the project's anoncvs server suffered from some hardware failure and had to be taken out of service temporarily. Christos Zoulas announced today on behalf of the NetBSD Systems Administration Executive Committee that anoncvs.NetBSD.org is now back in service, after the hard work of S.P.Zeidler, Tracy Di Marco White, Jason Thorpe and Thor Lancelot Simon.

For more details refer to Christos Zoulas' message to the current-users mailing list, in which he reminds users of the opportunity to donate to the project to help improve the reliability of our services.

13 Jan 2005 - NetBSD branches explained (top)

James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team explains the NetBSD naming scheme to explain future releases and upcoming changes. Please see his message to netbsd-announce for details.

12 Jan 2005 - Binary packages from pkgsrc-2004Q4 available (top)

After the last stable pkgsrc branch was cut, many developers started off their bulk-builds to provide binary packages from this branch. The first results are now available (as posted to our pkgsrc-bulk mailing list), and binary packages have been uploaded to the ftp server.

The binary packages available so far are: NetBSD-1.6.2/m68k (softfloat), NetBSD-2.0/powerpc and NetBSD-2.0/vax (uploaded by John Klos), the NetBSD-2.0 mipseb ports (evbmips, mipsco, newsmips, sbmips, and sgimips) and NetBSD-2.0/sparc (uploaded by Jan Schaumann—PGP signed checksums are available for these files in the respective directories) and of course the NetBSD-1.6.2/i386 and NetBSD-2.0/i386 ports (uploaded by Hubert Feyrer).

11 Jan 2005 - Fourth Quarterly Status Report published (top)

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's fourth quarterly status report, covering the months October through December of 2004. Among many other things, this status report covers the publication of the new NetBSD Logo, the new pkgsrc branch, the new NetBSD/iyonix port and of course the release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/Foundation/reports/2004Q4.html.

11 Jan 2005 - Intel donates hardware to the NetBSD Project (top)

The NetBSD project would like to express its gratitude for the fact that the department of application engineering at Intel, who provide design-in support for the XScale based I/O processors, has donated hardware to the NetBSD project.

Two Xscale boards (IOP321, IOP315) have been donated to a developer of the NetBSD project. The boards will be used for maintenance and development of the NetBSD/ARM port, as well as enhancing and completing the support for Thumb code on NetBSD. Furthermore, the boards will also serve for testing and developing the GCC compiler used by the NetBSD operating system.

As a non-profit, volunteer organisation with no commercial backing, the NetBSD Project depends on support from individuals and companies to continue development of the world's most portable operating system and packages system. Due to its 501(c)(3) status, monetary donations are fully tax deductible. Information on supporting the NetBSD project via money or hardware can be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/.

07 Jan 2005 - XFree86 3.3.6 has been EOLed (top)

Matthias Scheler has announced that XFree86 3.3.6 has been officially EOLed in NetBSD-current as of January 7th, 2005:

All NetBSD ports will use XFree86 4.x based X11 bits in future as they already do in the NetBSD 2.0 release.

04 Jan 2005 - NetBSD/evbarm ported to TS-7200 (top)

Jesse Off has announced that he has integrated support for the TS-7200 into the NetBSD/evbarm port over the christmas holidays. The TS-7200 is a low-cost mass-produced PC/104 embedded single board computer intended as a general purpose core for real embedded applications. More information can be found at http://www.embeddedARM.com/~joff.

01 Jan 2005 - New Developers (top)

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

December 2004

28 Dec 2004 - news.gw.com going offline (top)

After ten years of NNTP access to mailing lists, the news.gw.com service is being shutdown. It will be taken offline at the end of December 31. Kimmo Suominen reported that he can't justify dedicating more resources to the service, given that there are other good public services.

23 Dec 2004 - anoncvs service unavailable until further notice (top)

The anonymous CVS machine (anoncvs.NetBSD.org) is currently unavailable until a random memory corruption problem is resolved or a replacement machine is put in place. For more information, read the announcement to the announce mailing list.

20 Dec 2004 - pkgsrc-2004Q4 has been branched (top)

The new stable pkgsrc branch is now pkgsrc-2004Q4. It includes support for OSF1 and DragonFly BSD platforms. The pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch is now deprecated. The pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch is maintained for security fixes. See the message in the tech-pkg mailing list archive for more information about the pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch.

16 Dec 2004 - New Security Advisory released (top)

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-010 concerning insufficient argument validation in compat code has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

Please note, that NetBSD 2.0 is not affected by this advisory.

09 Dec 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 has been released! (top)

NetBSD 2.0, the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, has been released, with binary distributions for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.0 release announcement.

NetBSD 2.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals.

The addition of a native threads implementation for all platforms and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) on i386 and other popular platforms were long-standing goals for NetBSD 2.0. Both of these goals have now been met—SMP support has been added for i386, SPARC, and PowerPC, the SMP support on Alpha and VAX has been improved, and the new port to the 64-bit AMD/Opteron also supports SMP.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 2.0 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. In addition, you may now for the first time use net/bittorrent to retrieve all available ISO images.

Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, German, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish language translations of the NetBSD 2.0 release announcement are also available.

06 Dec 2004 - pkgsrc now frozen (top)

As announced previously, the NetBSD Packages Collection is now frozen in preparation of the fourth stable branch pkgsrc-2004Q4.

Please see Alistair Crooks's announcement on the tech-pkg mailing list.

November 2004

29 Nov 2004 - pkgsrc will freeze for pkgsrc-2004Q4 (top)

Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

See Alistair's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more details.

21 Nov 2004 - Old news items online (top)

During the conversion of various webpages to XML, Jan Schaumann resurrected the old news items from previous years, which up until now were hidden. These news items make for an interesting read, as they cover a large chunk of NetBSD history, including the release of NetBSD 1.3.2, the announcement of NetBSD supporting USB as the first Open Source Operating System, the original publication of the NetBSD Guide, as well as the dates when various key-developers joined the project and when new ports where added.

To turn on the “Way-back-when-in-NetBSD” machine, browse through news items from 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003.

20 Nov 2004 - pkgsrc documentation moved (top)

The documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection, previously located in pkgsrc/Packages.txt has moved. After a lot of work, Hubert Feyrer and others have finally converted it to XML format and we are now able to generate the “pkgsrc guide” in HTML, PDF and PS formats. A plain text version is, of course, still available in pkgsrc/doc/pkgsrc.txt.

For more details, please see Hubert Feyrer's post to the tech-pkg mailing list.

19 Nov 2004 - NetBSD LiveCD runs Contest (top)

NetBSD, frequently used at Stevens Institute of Technology, was used as the main platform for the ACM Greater New York Regional Programming Contest by means of a NetBSD Live CD to ensure a consistent and identical setup for all contestants.

The LiveCD was created by NetBSD developer Jan Schaumann—see his message to the netbsd-advocacy mailing list or this webpage for more details.

12 Nov 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC5 tagged (top)

NetBSD 2.0_RC5 has now been tagged. Changes since RC4 include fixes to various COMPAT_ emulations, IP Filter backward compatibility fixes, XFree86, pax(1), rsh(1), hp300 boot blocks, pthread fixes for amd64 and i386, documentation updates.

Binary snapshots of NetBSD 2.0_RC5 are available in the daily builds directory on the main FTP site.

01 Nov 2004 - New Developer (top)

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

October 2004

30 Oct 2004 - NetBSD has a new logo (top)

The NetBSD Foundation has selected an official logo for identifying NetBSD. Over 400 logos were submitted by 238 artists for a NetBSD logo contest started early this year. The winning logo was submitted by Grant Bissett, a new media designer from Perth, Western Australia.

Members of the NetBSD Foundation voted for the new logo from a short-list of six submitted designs selected by the logo committee. Characteristics important for the new logo were simplicity, appealing form and color choice, and identification with the project. More details can be found in the official press-release.

15 Oct 2004 - New Port: NetBSD/iyonix (top)

Gavan Fantom has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: iyonix. Iyonix is an ARM based PC. See http://www.iyonix.com/ for more details on Iyonix or join the port-iyonix mailing list.

08 Oct 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC4 tagged (top)

A new release candidate RC4 of NetBSD 2.0 has been tagged. The changes since RC3 include fixes for IP Filter (concerning IPv6 and better backwards compatibility with existing configurations), checksum processing for bridge interfaces, support for the Adaptec AAR 2810SA raid controller, linux compatibility and changes to the pagedaemon in order to improve performance under heavy disk load.

To allow for testing of this new release candidate, the final release of NetBSD 2.0 is expected to be pushed back about 1-2 weeks. Binary snapshots will soon be available on the mirrors of the NetBSD release engineering ftp server.

05 Oct 2004 - Third Quarterly Status Report published (top)

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's third quarterly status report, covering the months July through September of 2004. Among many other things, this status report covers NetBSD version numbering scheme changes and of course upcoming release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/Foundation/reports/2004Q3.html.

05 Oct 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC3 tagged (updated) (top)

After tagging NetBSD-2.0_RC1 and NetBSD-2.0_RC2, there have been a few pullups that fix some issues with Linux emulation under NetBSD/i386 as well as some installation problems under some of the arm-based ports. This means that the final release of NetBSD 2.0 will need to be pushed back approximately 1-2 weeks to allow for testing of this Release Candidate.

As usual, binary snapshots will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server.

01 Oct 2004 - New Developer (top)

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

September 2004

30 Sep 2004 - NetBSD Version Numbering Scheme Changes (top)

Christos Zoulas announced that the NetBSD Core Team ratified the proposed changes to the NetBSD version numbering scheme to clarify the relationship between “current” and “release” versions of NetBSD. The major version number will from now on be used to indicate a major release and the minor version number to indicate a minor release.

A detailed explanation of why these changes were necessary and how they are implemented can be found in Christos' message to the tech-kern mailing list.

30 Sep 2004 - NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (top)

NetBSD does it again: after the original Internet2 Land Speed Record set by NetBSD in 2004 May 3 was broken, NetBSD shines again: Once more researchers at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have broken the Internet2 Land Speed Record, using the upcoming version of NetBSD 2.0.

The new records are 124.935 Pbmps in a single stream (was 69.073 Pbmps), and 122.367 Pbmps in multiple streams. NetBSD was used once more due to the “scalability of it's TCP code”.

More information about this record including the NetBSD configuration can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR3-s/ for single stream and http://proj.sunet.se/LSR3-m/ for multiple streams. And the website of the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition is located at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/.

29 Sep 2004 - NetBSD happily Hosted@ISC (top)

The NetBSD Project has had a number of servers hosted at ISC for a while. In the recent press release “Hosted@ISC”, the Internet Systems Consortium cites Christos Zoulas and other Open Source representatives on how this program has helped the many projects using their service. Thanks, ISC!

27 Sep 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC1 tagged (top)

The NetBSD Releng Team has announced that the first Release Candidate for NetBSD 2.0 (ie NetBSD-2.0_RC1) has been tagged. This is a major milestone in the much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0: from now on, any pullups must address some form of show-stopping issue to even be considered. The NetBSD Project encourages all users to test the binary snapshots that will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server.

If no pullups are necessary, then the 2.0 release should occur around the middle of October. Any fixes resulting in pullups will cause a second RC cycle to begin and add approximately 1-2 weeks more to the timeline.

22 Sep 2004 - Hardware failure on www.NetBSD.org (top)

The server hosting www.NetBSD.org and mail-index.NetBSD.org suffered a serious hardware failure and is currently offline. The NetBSD Admins team is working on getting the machine up and running, but in the mean time www.NetBSD.org was switched to one of our mirrors. The mailing list index remains temporarily unavailable, but our news gateway at news.NetBSD.org may provide a viable, temporary alternative. The NetBSD Project apologizes for the downtime.

20 Sep 2004 - New pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch (top)

On behalf of the pkgsrc team, Alistair G. Crooks announced today that a new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch was created, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes a total of 4959 actively-maintained and supported packages, deprecates the last stable pkgsrc branch (pkgsrc-2004Q2); all maintenance will take place on this new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch. Please see Alistair's message to the tech-pkg mailing list and our online documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection for details.

August 2004

17 Aug 2004 - New Security Advisory released (top)

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-009 concerning a ftpd root escalation has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

01 Aug 2004 - New Developers (top)

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

July 2004

27 Jul 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 status report (top)

James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailing list. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed.

This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs.

17 Jul 2004 - French BSD Book reaches 2nd Edition (top)

The second edition of NetBSD developer Emmanuel Dreyfus' book entitled “BSD - Coll. Cahiers de l'Admin” has been published. Information on the book (including some chapter preview) is available from the publisher's website.

06 Jul 2004 - Second Quarterly Status Report published (top)

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's second quarterly status report, covering the months April through June of 2004. Among many other things, this status report addresses the NetBSD Logo Contest and the upcoming release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/Foundation/reports/2004Q2.html.

01 Jul 2004 - New Developers (top)

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

June 2004

18 Jun 2004 - UltraSPARC III Hardware Donations Wanted (top)

In order to make further improvements to the sparc64 port, we would like to solicit donations for UltraSPARC III and III+ hardware. If your company or an educational or research institute wants to buy or has a spare system like a Sun Fire V210 dual 1GHz, fully equipped Sun Fire 15000 or similar UltraSPARC III or III+ equipped desktop or server machine, donating it to The NetBSD Foundation to support operating system research would be very welcome. Being a volunteer project with no government or commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on the support of its users.

Besides support in hardware, monetary support as well as other ways are always welcome, please donate via paypal@NetBSD.org or see our contributions page at http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/ for further information how organizations as well as individuals can help.

Please contact board@NetBSD.org to arrange donations and shipping of hardware.

07 Jun 2004 - pkgsrc freeze (top)

Starting Monday, June 7th, 2004, the NetBSD Packages Collection is frozen in order to stabilize pkgsrc on the various supported platforms. See Alistair Crooks's message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

03 Jun 2004 - New Security Advisory released (top)

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-008 concerning a heap overflow in the CVS server has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

May 2004

28 May 2004 - pkgsrcCon 2004 report (top)

Hubert Feyrer wrote a report of pkgsrcCon 2004, the first pkgsrc conference that was held from April 30 to May 2, 2004 in Vienna, Austria.

21 May 2004 - Non-executable mappings update (top)

During the last few months Chuck Silvers has refined the support for non-executable mappings. Non-executable mappings make parts of the stack and heap non-executable when they are marked writable. This makes exploiting potential buffer overflows harder.

Since there seems to be some confusion about which platforms support non-executable mappings, we have added a separate page with detailed information about the current state of non-executable mappings.

12 May 2004 - New Security Advisory released (top)

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-007 has been released. The affected component is Systrace (kernel) and affects only users of -current and the netbsd-2-0 branch with sources prior to 2004-04-17.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

03 May 2004 - NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (top)

Researchers at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have broken the Internet2 Land Speed Record using two Dell 2650 machines with single 2GHz CPUs running NetBSD 2.0 BETA. SUNET transferred around 840 Gigabytes of data in less than 30 minutes, using a single IPv4 TCP stream, between a host at the Luleå University of Technology and a host connected to a Sprint PoP in San Jose, CA, USA. The achieved speed was 69.073 Petabit-meters/second. According to the research team, NetBSD was chosen "due to the scalability of the TCP code".

More information about this record including the NetBSD configuration can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR2/

The website of the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition is located at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/

03 May 2004 - New pkgsrc-bulk mailing list (top)

A new pkgsrc-bulk mailing list has been created. As the name suggests, this list will receive reports and build logs of pkgsrc bulk builds under NetBSD's various architectures as well as under other operating systems.

Subscription is via Majordomo as per the mailing list information.

April 2004

26 Apr 2004 - NetBSD trademark application completed (top)

The NetBSD Foundation is proud to announce that it has registered the “NetBSD®” trademark. The foundation would like to thank Jay Michaelson (Wasabi Systems) for filing the application and providing answers to the US Patent Office, and Carl Oppedahl (Oppedahl & Larson) for giving advice and keeping the Foundation informed about the process. An official policy on the use of the NetBSD® trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon.

21 Apr 2004 - Two New Security Advisories released (top)

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2004-005, SA2004-006, have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

16 Apr 2004 - ftp.NetBSD.org disk failure (updated) (top)

The master FTP site, ftp.NetBSD.org experienced several disk failures on April 13, shortly before 03:00UTC. All data was immediately backed up, replacement disks added to the RAID set, and data restored. The system was back in full service with data recovered on April 16 at 15:00UTC, many thanks to our excellent admins team.

The NetBSD Project apologises for any inconvenience caused, and thanks our users for their understanding during this period.

08 Apr 2004 - First Quarterly Status Report (top)

Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.

04 Apr 2004 - New Port: NetBSD/xen (top)

On March 11th, Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.

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