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. Significant Source changes from NetBSD 4.0 to 5.0 (Updated nightly) Significant Source changes from NetBSD 3.0 to 4.0 (Updated nightly) Significant Source changes from NetBSD 2.0 to 3.0 (Updated nightly) Significant Source changes from NetBSD 1.6 to 2.0 (Updated nightly) Recent packages changes (Updated nightly) Security patches Changes and News in 2007 Changes and News in 2006 Changes and News in 2005 Changes and News in 2004 Changes and News in 2003 Changes and News in 2002 Changes and News in 2001 Changes and News in 2000 Changes and News in 1999 Changes and News in 1998 One new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2008-010 Malicious PPPoE discovery packet can overrun a kernel buffer You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.ahoka; (login: ahoka), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and i18n. &a.tteras; (login: tteras), who will be working on ipsec-tools. &a.pgoyette; (login: pgoyette), who will be working on sdtemp, spdmem and sysmon_envsys. 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. &a.simonb;, &a.oster;, &a.pooka;, and &a.ad; 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 &a.simonb; for his work on the in-filesystem journal. 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. &a.wennmach;, &a.martin;, and &a.christos; 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. 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. One new security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2008-009 BIND cache poisoning You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. 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 jschauma@NetBSD.org. 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. 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. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.hans; (login: hans), who will be working on port-vax and kernel. 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. One updated security advisory was published: NetBSD-SA2008-008 OpenSSL Montgomery multiplication You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. Two new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2008-008 OpenSSL Montgomery multiplication NetBSD-SA2008-007 OpenSSL Multiple issues You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. 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. Three new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2008-006 Integer overflow in strfmon(3) function NetBSD-SA2008-005 OpenSSH Multiple issues NetBSD-SA2008-004 bzip2(1) Multiple issues You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. 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. 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). The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.tonnerre; (login: tonnerre), who will be working on kernel and pkgsrc. &a.cegger; (login: cegger), who will be working on kernel and the xen port. This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System, one of the oldest actively maintained, freely-available operating systems. The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on March 21, 1993. See this announcement for more details about NetBSD celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. Birthday celebrations will be listed at the Events Gallery. Google is doing another round of their Summer of Code project, where the idea is to attract students to write code for Open Source projects during the summer, instead of having them flip burgers. For the fourth time, the NetBSD project has been selected as mentoring organization in the Summer of Code project! Prospective students that are interested in pursuing projects for NetBSD are welcome to start thinking about what projects they'd like to do, and discuss things on our public mailing lists. We have lists of suggested GSoC projects and (harder!) general projects which can serve as inspiration. Also, please see our NetBSD Project Application/Proposal HowTo for information that we'd like to see answered in the eventual project proposals sent to Google -- this information helps us to rank the project proposals we'll get, and to put your project on the best spot! The second and finishing article with interviews about pkgsrc and alternative packaging systems is available. This issue also provides talks about MidnightBSD mports, GoboLinux and Zero Install. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer: &a.yuo; (login: yuo) will be working on wireless support, embedded platforms and device drivers. Three new security advisories were published: NetBSD-SA2008-003 IPsec in IPv6 Denial of Service NetBSD-SA2008-002 Endianness issue in fast_ipsec(4) NetBSD-SA2008-001 file(1) Integer overflow You can find more information about them on the Security and NetBSD page. NetBSD is an open source operating system project that depends on funding for its operation. A generous donation by Google has enabled us to fund development in the area of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and a fundraising drive was started to extend this activity. The goal of $50,000US of the 2007 fundraising campaign was met thanks to a lot of support from companies, users, and our community as a whole. Read more about what supporting companies have to say about NetBSD, what has been achieved recently, and what changes to expect thanks to the donations in the press release about the Results of NetBSD's 2007 Fundraising Campaign. As announced by S.P. Zeidler a few days ago, the NetBSD Web-mail archive was updated with improved functionality (email address obfuscation and threaded display of messages) and a new look&feel. (Announcement) Tim Rightnour has announced the rebirth of the ofppc port: "The port has been completely rewritten from the ground up, and is essentially a brand new port of NetBSD." (Announcement) Tim is now the new portmaster for NetBSD/ofppc: "I would like to thank the previous portmaster, Wolfgang Solfrank for his excellent work in what was the original port of NetBSD to the PowerPC." (Announcement) Support for IBM 7044-270 (POWER3-II cpu) machines was added. (Announcement) Tim Rightnour has reworked NetBSD's powerpc-ports recently. With support from Kevin Bowling he has ported NetBSD to the IBM MCA RS/6000 model 7006. This makes NetBSD the first free operating system to run on this class of machines. (Announcement) Manuel Bouyer has implemented support for Xen/i386 DomUs with PAE extensions and and full support for Xen/amd64 (Dom0 and DomU) to NetBSD-current. NetBSD/i386 has still no general PAE support yet, but the NetBSD i386-PAE DomUs can now be used on top of recent Linux x86_32 and x86_64 Xen Hypervisors out of the box. (Announcements: 1, 2) Hubert Feyrer has announced an install CD for NetBSD/i386 that already contains a collection of essential precompiled binary packages. (More details) The NetBSD support for the PC532 platform is history: Simon Burge has announced the termination of the port. (Announcement) Donald T. Hayford has posted instructions for building and installing NetBSD on the NSLU2. (Instructions: 1, 2) Nick Hudson has posted a status update about the progress of NetBSD's port to the HPPA architecture, NetBSD/hp700. (Status report) The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.stefan; (login: stefan), who will be working on Documentation, advocacy and website documentation. Federico Biancuzzi has done an comprehensive interview with more than twenty NetBSD developers speaking with them about what is new in NetBSD 4.0. The full article is available at ars technica, together with a page for comments and discussions. Joachim Schueth has beaten a reconstruction of the famous Colossus Mark II code breaking machine in November 2007. The Colossus computers were used in World War II to break the German encrypted messages. Equipped with a NetBSD-powered laptop and profound knowledge of cryptography and the Ada programming language, Schueth has won the code breaking challenge. We talked with him about the historical and technical backgrounds of the Cipher Event and the tools he has used - Read the interview. The new pkgsrc-2007Q4 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. The next hackathon will be held January 19th and 20th, 2008. The focus will be on closing PR's that are not relevant anymore after the release of 4.0. I.e. 2.0 becomes unsupported. Participation is open to everyone. Check out the Hackathon community page for more details. The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers: &a.phx; (login: phx), who will be working on the ofppc port and the amigappc port.