NetBSD Archive

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.

There is a new release candidate for the NetBSD 3.1 release, due to a series of recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities. There are more interesting improvements however, see the announcement mail for details. You can expect NetBSD 3.1, alongside NetBSD 3.0.2, to be released within two weeks.

"Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper will focus on those aspects relating to security."

"Although we'd all like it to be otherwise, the process of porting an operating system to new hardware is hardly an instantaneous one, and it is not always easy. You might run into a number of potential difficulties, especially if you are coming to the problem for the first time. This article, and likely the next couple in the Testing and measuring the TAMS 3011 series, details my experience porting NetBSD to the TAMS 3011. These articles are not about the finished port, but about the process of developing it. I can only hope you find the hilarious errors as funny as I found them frustrating at the time."

Geert Hendrickx has announced the availability of a second release candidate of NetBSD 3.1: Improvements over the first release candidate include: fixed the build of NetBSD-vax; fixed a buffer overflow in PPPoE/ISDN PPP; closed a socket leach in accept(2); removed references to sushi(8) from the afterboot(8) manpage; fixed an integer overflow in FreeType; disabled threading in named(8) to avoid a crash on sparc and sparc64, etc.

NetBSD 3.1-RC1 has been released. "NetBSD 3.1 is a feature update for NetBSD 3.0, and features domU support for Xen3, massive LFS stability improvements, and lots of other, smaller improvements, additions, and bug fixes." Get it here.