NetBSD: Changes and News in 2010

December 2010

November 2010

October 2010

September 2010

August 2010

April 2010

March 2010

February 2010

January 2010


December 2010

01 Dec 2010 - New Developer in November 2010

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

  • Makoto Fujiwara (login: mef), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.


November 2010

29 Nov 2010 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-012 OpenSSL TLS race condition and NetBSD-SA2010-013 UDP6 Option Local DoS

Two new security advisories were published:

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

19 Nov 2010 - NetBSD 5.1 released!

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 5.1 release is now available for download. NetBSD 5.1 is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It includes security and bug fixes, as well as improved hardware support and new features.

Some highlights include:

  • RAIDframe parity maps, which greatly improve parity rewrite times after unclean shutdown
  • X.Org updates
  • Support for many more network devices
  • Xen PAE dom0 support
  • Xen PCI pass-through support

For all the details, see the full release notes.


October 2010

28 Oct 2010 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-011 OpenSSL Double Free Arbitrary Code Execution

One new security advisory was published:

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

21 Oct 2010 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-009 larn and NetBSD-SA2010-010 netsmb

Two new security advisories were published:

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

07 Oct 2010 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-008 sftp(1)/ftp(1)/glob(3) related resource exhaustion

One new security advisory was published:

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

01 Oct 2010 - New Developer in September 2010

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

  • Zoltan Arnold NAGY (login: zoltan), who will be working on bootloader, libsa and networking.


September 2010

30 Sep 2010 - In Memoriam of Martti Kuparinen

It is with great sadness that we report on the passing of our colleague and fellow NetBSD developer Martti Kuparinen. Martti passed away June 27, 2010 after a traffic accident.

Martti's technical contributions are too many to list here in full. He created and maintained numerous packages in pkgsrc, updated both packet filter solutions distributed with NetBSD and improved several hardware drivers. Beyond that he was always helpful and friendly. His example encouraged users to contribute to the project and share their work with the community. Some of these users later became NetBSD developers themselves thanks to Martti's efforts.

Martti will be greatly missed and never forgotten.

29 Sep 2010 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-007 Integer overflow in libbz2 decompression code

One new security advisory was published:

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

13 Sep 2010 - Introducing NPF, NetBSD's new packet filter

Today, David Young announced NPF, a new packet filter in NetBSD, designed for high performance on multiprocessor machines, and for easy extensibility. This third packet filter in NetBSD, after IP Filter and PF is unique for using a bytecode interpreter in its packet-inspection engine. Please see David's announcement for further details.

08 Sep 2010 - Funded development offer for Xen Paravirtualized Multi Processor Support

Matthias Scheler announced today on behalf of the NetBSD Board and Core teams the availability of funded development to add Xen Paravirtualized Multi Processor Support to NetBSD.

Even though NetBSD has extensive support for Xen, including running a NetBSD kernel in paravirtualised (PV) mode as the dom0 (the virtual machine instance controlling the hardware of the host system) and domU (a normal virtual instance), it does not currently support using multiple CPUs (or CPU cores) when it runs in paravirtualised mode. If you are interested in realizing this project, please send a proposal to and .

For more details, please see Matthias Scheler's announcement and full project description.


August 2010

26 Aug 2010 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-006 Buffer length checking errors in CODA

One new security advisory was published:

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


April 2010

26 Apr 2010 - Google Summer of Code Projects Chosen

Google's Summer of Code project is intended to involve students in Open Source projects, and we are proud that the following projects are selected for this summer:

  • Mateusz Kocielski: SASL client library
  • Kristaps Dzonsons: Teach PostScript output to mandoc(1)
  • Efstathios Kamperis: Audit, unit testing and improvements of the NetBSD math library
  • Jordan Gordeev: Remote kernel debugging over Ethernet
  • Lourival Vieira: Provide support for dynamic NetBSD kernel extensions using the Lua language - Lunatik/NetBSD
  • Zoltan Arnold NAGY: Implementing HTTP support for libsa

Progress will be documented at http://netbsd-soc.sf.net/ eventually. We are looking forward to the progress of the students, and wish them and their mentors a successfull Google Summer of Code 2010!

26 Apr 2010 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-004 (NX on amd64) and NetBSD-SA2010-005 (NTP daemon)

Two new security advisories were published:

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


March 2010

21 Mar 2010 - NetBSD to participate again in Google's Summer of Code

For the sixth 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 2010 - New Developers

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

  • Constantine A. Murenin (login: cnst), who will be working on sysmon, envsys and kernel.
  • Daniel Horecki (login: morr), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and pl mirror.


February 2010

16 Feb 2010 - Hackathon February 19-22 2010

NetBSD community was running the 13th Hackathon February 19-22 2010.

12 Feb 2010 - NetBSD 5.0.2 released

The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 5.0.2 release is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade. See the NetBSD 5.0.2 Release Announcement for more information.

02 Feb 2010 - New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-003 azalia(4)/hdaudio(4) negative mixer index panic

One new security advisory was published:

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

01 Feb 2010 - New Developers

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

  • Guillaume Lasmayous (login: gls), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and advocacy (French).
  • Nhat Minh Le (login: minh), who will be working on xmltools.
  • Yorick Hardy (login: yhardy), who will be working on acpi and drm.


January 2010

13 Jan 2010 - New Security Advisories: NetBSD-SA2010-001 (Module autoloading) and NetBSD-SA2010-002 (OpenSSL)

Two new security advisories were published:

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

01 Jan 2010 - New Developer in December 2009

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

  • Jukka Ruohonen (login: jruoho), who will be working on kernel, device drivers and power management/ACPI.