NetBSD Planet

NetBSD is an OS that I installed only a couple of times over the years, so I’m not very familiar with its installer, sysinst. This fact was actually what led to this article (or the whole series rather): Talking to a NetBSD developer at EuroBSDcon 2023, I mentioned my impression that NetBSD was harder to install than it needed to be. He was interested in my perspective as a relative newcomer, and so I promised to take a closer look and write about it. While it certainly took me long enough, I finally get to do this. So let’s take a look at NetBSD’s installer, shall we? The version explored here is NetBSD 10.1 on amd64.

↫ Eerie Linux

An excellent deep, deep dive into the NetBSD installer. The two earlier installments cover FreeBSD’s and OpenBSD’s installers.

On NetBSD, the SQLite Backup and Close methods used by renterd and hostd (Sia decentralized data storage) depend on CGO-specific features of the go-sqlite3 driver, which are not fully supported on this platform.
Attempts to substitute go-sqlite3 with CGO-free alternatives such as modernc.org/sqlite or ncruces/go-sqlite3 proved impractical due to required structural changes in the codebase, despite preliminary efforts.
Consequently, Backup and Close functionalities have been disabled in this howto to allow successful compilation and runtime on NetBSD 10.1.
Regular manual backups should be performed using standard SQLite commands, e.g., sqlite3 db.sqlite \".backup 'db.bkp'\".

Prerequisites

• Complete NetBSD version or without X11 (minimal version is insufficient due to missing header files).

Install necessary packages

pkgin update
pkgin -y install go124 git gcc14 tmux

Clone the repository

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/SiaFoundation/renterd.git
cd renterd

SQLite Installation (CGO)
go124 install github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3

Required modifications to the source code

• Disable the backupDB function in renterd:

Edit /tmp/renterd/stores/sql/sqlite/backup.go, replace the entire backupDB function (starting from line 36) :

func backupDB(ctx context.Context, src *dsql.DB, destPath string) (err error) {
        // create the destination database
        dest, err := dsql.Open("sqlite3", destPath)
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to open destination database: %w", err)
        }
        defer func() {
                // errors are ignored
                dest.Close()
                if err != nil {
                        // remove the destination file if an error occurred during backup
                        os.Remove(destPath)
                }
        }()

        // initialize the source conn
        sc, err := sqlConn(ctx, src)
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create source connection: %w", err)
        }
        defer sc.Close()

        // initialize the destination conn
        dc, err := sqlConn(ctx, dest)
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create destination connection: %w", err)
        }
        defer dc.Close()

        // start the backup
        // NOTE: 'main' referes to the schema of the database
        backup, err := dc.Backup("main", sc, "main")
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create backup: %w", err)
        }
        // ensure the backup is closed
        defer func() {
                if err := backup.Finish(); err != nil {
                        panic(fmt.Errorf("failed to finish backup: %w", err))
                }
        }()

        for step := 1; ; step++ {
                select {
                case <-ctx.Done():
                        return ctx.Err()
                default:
                }

                if done, err := backup.Step(100); err != nil {
                        return fmt.Errorf("backup step %d failed: %w", step, err)
                } else if done {
                        break
                }
        }
        if _, err := dest.Exec("VACUUM"); err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to vacuum destination database: %w", err)
        }
        return nil
}

with:

func backupDB(ctx context.Context, src *dsql.DB, destPath string) (err error) {
    // deactivation for NetBSD
    return nil
}

• Apply modifications to hostd:

Enable editing:
chmod +w /root/go/pkg/mod/go.sia.tech/hostd/[email protected]/persist/sqlite/store.go

Edit this file and replace the entire backupDB function :

func backupDB(ctx context.Context, src *sql.DB, destPath string) (err error) {
        // create the destination database
        dest, err := sql.Open("sqlite3", sqliteFilepath(destPath))
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to open destination database: %w", err)
        }
        defer func() {
                // errors are ignored
                dest.Close()
                if err != nil {
                        // remove the destination file if an error occurred during backup
                        os.Remove(destPath)
                }
        }()

        // initialize the source conn
        sc, err := sqlConn(ctx, src)
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create source connection: %w", err)
        }
        defer sc.Close()

        // initialize the destination conn
        dc, err := sqlConn(ctx, dest)
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create destination connection: %w", err)
        }
        defer dc.Close()

        // start the backup
        backup, err := dc.Backup("main", sc, "main")
        if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to create backup: %w", err)
        }
        // ensure the backup is closed
        defer func() {
                if err := backup.Finish(); err != nil {
                        panic(fmt.Errorf("failed to finish backup: %w", err))
                }
        }()

        for step := 1; ; step++ {
                select {
                case <-ctx.Done():
                        return ctx.Err()
                default:
                }

                if done, err := backup.Step(100); err != nil {
                        return fmt.Errorf("backup step %d failed: %w", step, err)
                } else if done {
                        break
                }
        }
        if _, err := dest.Exec("VACUUM"); err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to vacuum destination database: %w", err)
        }
        return nil
}

with:

func backupDB(ctx context.Context, src *sql.DB, destPath string) (err error) {
    // deactivation for NetBSD
    return nil
}

Also, replace the line:
sqliteVersion, _, _ := sqlite3.Version()
with:
sqliteVersion := "deactivated"

Compilation

cd /tmp/renterd
export CGO_ENABLED=1
go124 mod tidy
go124 build -v ./...
cd cmd/renterd
go124 build

Binary installation

mkdir -p /opt/renterd/bin
mv /tmp/renterd/* /opt/renterd/
cp /opt/renterd/cmd/renterd/renterd /opt/renterd/bin/

Creating a dedicated secure user

groupadd renterd
useradd -g renterd -d /var/empty -s /sbin/nologin -c "renterd Daemon" renterd

Applying strict permissions

chown -R renterd:renterd /opt/renterd
chmod -R 750 /opt/renterd

Starting renterd with tmux (simple example)
tmux new -s renterd

usermod -s /bin/sh renterd
su renterd -c 'cd /opt/renterd && /opt/renterd/bin/renterd'

On first launch, initialize with the corresponding seed phrase and wallet address.

Detach the tmux session: Ctrl+b, then d

Remove the interactive shell from the user:
usermod -s /bin/false renterd

Off course, create a service and a /opt/renterd/renterd.yml configuration file.

In order to access the web console of renterd, just create an SSH tunnel (-L9980 127.0.0.1:9980) between your client and the server, and use your browser (http://127.0.0.1:9980)

Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.

Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

Excellent reading, as always, from Cameron Kaiser.

On May 17, 21:00 UTC we had The NetBSD Foundation Annual General Meeting on #netbsd-agm IRC channel on Libera.Chat.

We had presentations from:

• board (billc)
• secteam (billc)
• releng (martin)
• core (riastradh)
• finance-exec (riastradh)
• membership-exec (martin, christos)
• pkgsrc-pmc (wiz)
• pkgsrc-security (tm, leot)
• gnats (dh)

At the end we also had a Q&A session open to anyone.

If you have missed it you can find the IRC logs here.

I've been using netbsd on my thinkpad x230 as a daily driver for a bit, and it's been a pretty good experience. The biggest papercuts I've experienced so far have been that I have to switch TTY after resume and that mouse 4/5 act like scroll up/down respectively while I'd prefer to have them be backward/forward navigation.
The TTY switching is annoying, seeing as I seem to have to wait until the keyboard accepts input (which in rare occasions it does not and instead the fan spins up and I'm left with an unresponsive computer I have to hard reset) and then do ctrl-alt-f4 then ctrl-alt-f5 to get back to X. Is there any way to set which tty to switch to after resume?

This is the scariest thing. NetBSD 10.1, i386. The drive is an SSD with FFS. I ls /root and the directory looked normal. Next I cp -a script /root and the directory /root was replaced with a file called /root, of which the contents were my script.

How is this possible?

[I got redirected here from StackOverflow as this is not a programming question (oops).]

For about the last three years or so, under X11, Alt+KP_[n] has yielded a different keycode/keysym (set?) than Alt+[n]. I have been using this difference to change fonts on the fly on urxvt. Checking the version of urxvt shows that the version has not changed since 2021...

rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.26 - released: 2021-05-14

...so, what has changed in X11 to cause this, and why has this (been) changed? Or, conversely, is there anything I can do in any of my configurations (xmodmap, etc) to re-enable this behaviour? I can't really switch to having Alt+[n] accomplish this, as I use Alt+[n] as digit-argument in bash (via .inputrc).

I would really like to get the old behaviour of Alt+KP_[n] back. KP_7 shows as a different keystroke under xev than does 7, even though it shows the same output value

This is happening on X11 under both cygwin and NetBSD.

Excerpt of xev(X11) output:

    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2440468, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x10, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2441828, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 79 (keysym 0xffb7, KP_7), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2441906, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 79 (keysym 0xffb7, KP_7), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2442734, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2445171, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x10, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2445390, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 16 (keysym 0x37, 7), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2445468, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 16 (keysym 0x37, 7), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (37) "7"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
    root 0x36f, subw 0x0, time 2445984, (174,166), root:(2818,273),
    state 0x18, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

TRIED: In a urxvt, I pressed Alt+KP_7 (sub any KP_ for 7, it makes no difference).

EXPECTED: I expected, as had happened before, the font to change, by virtue of Alt+KP_7 not being interpreted as the same keystroke as Alt+7.

ACTUAL RESULT: bash prompted (arg: 7), as though I had pressed Alt+7.

Clara and I bought an apartment last year, and it’s been fun—and exhausting!—setting it up with everything we want. Our plan is to eventually get Ethernet wired up to each room, but in the interim our hobby room is a sufficient distance from the router that using cable isn’t feasible. This is a pain, because my retrocomputers don’t have Wi-Fi; and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t support the latest security protocols.

Then I remembered we had a few dusty Raspberry Pis in a box, a Wi-Fi dongle, and a Fast Ethernet hub. Yes, a hub! None of this would be fast, or even tolerable in a modern setting, but I figured it’d be more than sufficient as a temporary hack for these ancient machines.

The Raspberry Pi Model A+ was a no-go, because its lone USB port would need its own powered hub for the Wi-Fi module and Ethernet, and my serial-to-pi console cable is in another box I couldn’t find. But the first-gen Rasberry Pi from 2011 has two USB ports and Ethernet.

I downloaded the latest NetBSD earmv6hf image, and followed the NetBSD Guide to configure wireless and create a bridge. I was going to write a guide here, but everything described just… worked. I have a wireless bridge in this room, which lets these old machines access our network in the other room. And it was cobbled together from stuff we already had.

NetBSD! One day it’ll surprise me when I can’t use it for a random little project. Not today.

I feel like I should have a separate page on the Retro Corner specifically about how to interface old machines with the modern world. Well okay, FTP and gopher aren’t exactly modern world. But they’re hosted in FreeBSD jails, which are.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-25.

The idea of starting this thread crossed my mind a while ago.

This thread is meant to gather update requests for packages found in the pkgsrc collection. In a broader perspective, it could help understand which packages users care most about, and raise attention towards those which have been silently ignored for too long.

Please notice that:

• This is not an official channel.
• It may not be feasible or too complicated to update a certain package at a given time (other packages depend on that version, build system changed, backward incompatibility, patch burden, upcoming pkgsrc freeze).
• Many package maintainers do not participate in this forum.

NetBSD experts, please, help me in running NetBSD mipsel port in qemu-system-mipsel. I know QEMU has option -kernel, that will boot Linux kernel directly, now i boot Alpine Linux aarch64 via this option with Ubuntu 22.04 Cloud Image kernel. But i need to run NetBSD mipsel via this option, but i tried malta machine and a cpu that i did not remember, but it stucks after 3 lines of kernel logs. What i need to run NetBSD mipsel in qemu-system-mipsel?

Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.

• WebSysctl is Now Live!  I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it.  (via)
• The GAFA Stack.  Read section 3.
• 8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
• Mute when Locked.  (via)
• Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students.  You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point.  (PDF, via)
• At one point, “..” did not exist.
• Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
• The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright.  I don’t think people realize the scale of this.  It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
• Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
• Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
• Make Stupid Things.  (via)
• The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
• Dumbware, self-hosted solutions.  I like this except for the dockering.  (via)

Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.

For those too young to remember, or who wisely chose to forget, Windows Millennium Edition—aka, Windows Me—was notorious. Microsoft removed Real Mode DOS access which peterbed weirdos like me who loved rebooting into MS-DOS to play NFS:SE, but history will remember Windows Me for its instability and performance issues. It was available on the market for about a year in 2000 before Windows XP was released, and few people were sad to see it go… perhaps other than the technicians for whom the OS gave them a guaranteed and regular source of clients.

I had one factory-installed Windows Me machine as a kid, a Sony VAIO PCG-C1VM laptop. This I quickly “upgraded” (cough) to Windows 98 Second Edition like most people, and upon realising how easy it was, made a small fortune for a kid by offering to do it for friends and their parents. Windows 98 was an error-filled mess, but it was still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows Me. Then when Windows XP came out, I jumped to 2000 and lived with the performance drop so I didn’t have to deal with crashes.

But this is where the weirdness starts. I may have inadvertently stumbled upon a specific combination of parts and drivers that result in a stable Windows Me system; one that works faster, and more reliably than Windows 98. HOW!?

Like most of my retrocomputers, I bought this Dell Dimension 4100 on a lark for a bit of nostalgia. I never had one of these beige towers as a kid, but it seemed as though everyone in Singapore did around the late 1990s and early 2000s. My school upgraded all their disparate DIY Pentium 1 machines cobbled together at the likes of Sim Lim Square and Funan Centre for a fleet of these towers, and they imprinted. I saw someone in Canberra selling one for less than $100 in immaculate physical condition, and the rest is history.

My intention was to make it a glorified display piece on our study Museum Shelf of Doom, but when it arrived I was shocked to discover it was the most capable retro PC I own. It sports an absolutely blazing 800 MHz Pentium !!! CPU, 128 MiB of PC-133 memory, and… a dreadful proprietary ATI Rage 128 card which I quickly swapped out for a cheap and cheerful 4× AGP Radeon 9600 XT. This is now my primary Win 9x game machine for the likes of Train Simulator, Flight Simulator 98, Age of Empires II, Golf 95 (shaddup), The Sims, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and my old Borland IDEs.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Windows Me? Well those of you who’ve tinkered with PCs of this vintage know that SATA was either in its infancy, or not available at all. I’ve had the most success with Transcend IDE SSDs with the internal ATAPI controller, or by using industrial CF Cards. The challenge though has been getting the host machine and OS to detect UDMA support and use it, or your performance will almost make you long for the days of you 7200 RPM hard drive. Hope it’s not a Deathstar.

Windows 98 SE on this machine, despite being the factory standard OS at the time, simply doesn’t like this SSD. It takes forever to boot, copy files, and crashes upon shutdown, no matter how many times I’ve reinstalled it. The authentic Windows experience, in other words! This despite the fact UDMA is shown in Control Panel, and in the BIOS POST screens when the machine starts. The same configuration works on my other old PCs without issues, so I assume its a weird combination of stuff on this specific tower.

I thought I’d try Windows Me for a bit of a joke, but it’s had the last laugh. It’s been one of the two bootable OSs on this machine for more than a year now (I always dual-boot retro computers with NetBSD, partly for fun, but also so I can use it to copy files and so on), and it’s only crashed a handful of times. It boots quickly, all the hardware was detected and installed the first time, games run absolutely flawlessly, and I can even run Netscape Communicator to launch my Retro Corner.

I’m… kinda speechless to be honest. I guess Windows Me was testy about what it ran on, and I’ve somehow stumbled upon the perfect mix of parts to make it work, entirely by accident.

Would I recommend running Windows Me for your retrocomputing adventures? I mean, if Windows 98 SE is performing crap with your IDE SSD, maybe give it a try!? But, is a word with three letters.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-18.

At the risk of invoking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, I pose this post as a question because it’s a bit open-ended.

I’m in a bit of an awkward situation right now. For the longest time I used to buy whatever cheap HP Microserver I could get on eBay. They’re cheap, quiet, yet still manage to pack four hard drive bays. Tower chassis more than three times the size still usually only support the same number of hard drive bays, for reasons that utterly confound me. It’s as though everyone shook hands and said if they want more drives, get a noisy 2U rack server.

When our home needs began to outgrow these HP Companion Cubes, I cobbled together a server out of a Supermicro workstation board, 32 GiB of ECC DDR4-2133 memory, and a Xeon E3-1240 v6 CPU off Gumtree and eBay for less than AU $200 total. This was put into an old Antec 300 case with large, slow-spinning fans and eight drives. Almost five years later (wow!), and I’m surprised how well this is all still working. This four core machine is whisper quiet, sips power, and the FreeBSD host delivers:

• Plex; Jellyfin didn’t work out for $REASONS
• Minecraft with our increasingly massive “forever map”
• Postgres family database for finances, inventory, organising, etc
• OpenZFS pools
• svn and git backup target
• Ansible host/VM/desktop deployer
• AFS/NFS/Samba/rsync for backups
• Wireguard VPN gateway; I leave IPsec adventures for work
• Musikcube CLI audio player connected to our lounge amplifier!
• Web server/proxy/update mirror
• Ad filtering
• Rudimentary network monitoring
• NetBSD, Debian, and Tribblix VMs
• Hair tonic, and
• Salad dressing

Ah Monty Python. But I think we’ve reached the system’s limit, not in speed necessarily, but threads. There’s some CI stuff I’d like to try on it, and Clara and I want to try running a Stardew Valley server (cough), but I’ve already over-provisioned it as it is.

As Allan Jude one quipped at an AsiaBSDCon, the biggest challenge with homelab servers is that they often become production. Those above use cases make it eminently useful, but it limits the live tinkering I can do with it. I don’t want to be responsible for a backup failing, or a game not loading, or the TV not working, because I’m messing with some optimisations or experimental builds. Clara is the most accommodating person in the universe, but I suspect even she has limits! As do I.

My plan, such that it is, is to build a slightly more modern home server, maybe with 8 cores or more if it doesn’t push the power envelope too high. That can run our production home stuff, and I can relegate this older machine to tinkering and testing. I haven’t run the -CURRENT FreeBSD branch in years, which is a poor showing for someone so invested in the platform.

The thing is, I have no idea what’s out there. At work I live in “enterprise” server land, which is all way too hot and expensive for what I’d need. AMD might be fun, but is their consumer silicon really ECC compatible? I’m not that worried about IPMI or equivalents, because I use inexpensive network-attached KVMs. I’m a big fan of buying two generation or older hardware, because it’s (a) tested and (2) significantly cheaper, which perhaps rules out AM5 for now? Not sure.

I haven’t had to research a new budget server for a while, so I’m interested to see what I can get. Something second-hand, a bit older, and something we could stand hearing as it runs in the corner of the room.

Hey look, another open-ended post! Aren’t those great?

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-05-15.

We’re looking at an article from 2007 here, but I still think it’s valuable and interesting, especially from a historical perspective.

I first started working on the UNIX file system with Bill Joy in the late 1970s. I wrote the Fast File System, now called UFS, in the early 1980s. In this article, I have written a survey of the work that I and others have done to improve the BSD file systems. Much of this research has been incorporated into other file systems.

↫ Marshall Kirk McKusic

Variants of UFS are still the default file system in at least NetBSD and OpenBSD, and it’s one of the two default options in FreeBSD (alongside ZFS). In other words, this article, and the work described therein, is still relevant to this very day.

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2025 with 3 projects!

Here the list of the projects and contributors:

• Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD - Dennis O.I
• Asynchronous I/O Framework - Ethan Miller
• Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD - Vasyl Lanko

For the next 3 weeks mentors and contributors will get in touch for the community bonding period. Mentors will help contributors to get started with the project, introduce them to the community and get more familiar with the codebase and adjusting deliverables for the the project.

Welcome Dennis, Ethan and Vasyl!

Some BSD-specific links mixed in.

• Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos.  Scroll right.  (via)
• What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video.  (via, via)
• RDAP is replacing WHOIS.  (via)
• The Flywheel Spin Top.
• Netnews: The Origin Story.  USENET, or nntp, if you prefer.  (PDF, via)
• The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
• A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
• Hacker Laws.  (via)
• TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
• diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff.  (Thanks, Paul)
• NumFOCUS concerns.  “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title.  (also thanks, Paul)
• The History of Solaris.  “UNIX is plural.”  (PDF, via)
• The modern OpenBSD home router.  (via)
• tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod.  (via)

Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point.  Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful.  (via)

One of the few things I know about Minecraft is, some players I know and love could be playing together if someone were to run a server for them. That’s the sort of thing I’d gladly do, provided I could approximately never again pay attention to it.

Here’s what I came up with. Let’s see how it pans out.

Prerequisites

My Virtual Private Server at Panix is NetBSD/amd64 with plenty of RAM, disk, and network headroom. Marginal additional usage is therefore free.

System- and pkgsrc-provided services are controlled by the usual NetBSD-style rc.d scripts.

Site-specific services are supervised, including supervision trees controlled by each user. In the following excerpt from my running system:

• root starts sniproxy
• notqmail runs a web site and its Let’s Encrypt autorenewal,
• schmonz runs a few of each
• all these services were bounced yesterday after a regular package update

/service/sniproxy: up (pid 11133) 81141 seconds

/service/svscan-notqmail: up (pid 325) 846389 seconds
  /home/notqmail/service/renewssl.www.notqmail.org: up (pid 20951) 81141 seconds
  /home/notqmail/service/www.notqmail.org: up (pid 24539) 81141 seconds

/service/svscan-schmonz: up (pid 394) 846389 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/agilein3minut.es: up (pid 26325) 81141 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/latentagility.com: up (pid 24554) 81141 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/renewssl.agilein3minut.es: up (pid 18299) 81141 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/renewssl.latentagility.com: up (pid 14394) 81141 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/renewssl.schmonz.com: up (pid 12424) 81140 seconds
  /home/schmonz/service/schmonz.com: up (pid 21449) 81141 seconds

These packages were already installed:

• djbdns-run
• s6-portable-utils
• unzip
• curl
• py-html2text
• jq

I’ve added these:

• openjdk21
• execline

I’m installing Minecraft’s server software manually, so it’ll be my job to notice when to update. Gotta automate the noticing, at least.

Oh, and I need a sensible process-supervision run script for the Minecraft server. The script needs to solve two application-specific system-integration problems:

1. The usual supervision signals cause the server to terminate without saving the state of the world, which seems… rude
2. The usual way to configure a running server is to get on the console and type commands into it, which implies having started it inside a tmux session (which, I love tmux, but not for this)

We solve for (1) by running the server as a child process and translating supervision signals into Minecraft commands.

We solve for (2) by connecting a named pipe to the server’s standard input. Then commands can be sent to the server using nothing but echo and ordinary output redirection.

Without even really being asked, my brain instantly produced the mechanisms for (1) in Perl. Then someone on #s6 shared a run script that additionally solved (2) while being more than twice as short as mine. How? By writing it in execline, a language expressly designed to be this kind of glue.

Step by step: Supervising Minecraft service

1. Create dedicated Unix user with its own process supervisor

useradd -m minecraft
mkdir -p /etc/service/svscan-minecraft/log
cd /etc/service/svscan-minecraft
cat > log/run <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
exec setuidgid minecraft logger -t svscan-minecraft -p daemon.info
EOF
chmod +x log/run
cat > run <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
exec setuidgid minecraft argv0 svscan svscan-minecraft /home/minecraft/service
EOF
chmod +x run
ln -s /etc/service/svscan-minecraft /var/service/

2. Globally, map hostname to IP

echo '+minecraft.schmonz.com:my.server.ip.here' >> /etc/tinydns/data
service tinydns reload

3. Locally, map port number to service name

echo 'minecraft 25565/tcp # minecraft.schmonz.com' >> /etc/services
service sysdb services

4. Allow incoming connections

$EDITOR /etc/npf.conf # add minecraft to $services_tcp
service npf reload

5. Download software

su minecraft
cd
mkdir -p sites/schmonz.com/minecraft/service
cd sites/schmonz.com/minecraft
mkdir bin
curl -o bin/server.jar https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/e6ec2f64e6080b9b5d9b471b291c33cc7f509733/server.jar

6. Accept EULA

mkdir data
echo 'eula=true' > data/eula.txt

7. Create control socket

mkfifo -m 0600 data/control

8. Symlink service logs where I usually look

ln -s data/logs logs

9. Create run script

cat > service/run <<'EOF'
#!/opt/pkg/bin/execlineb -P
fdmove -c 2 1
cd /home/minecraft/sites/schmonz.com/minecraft/data
redirfd -w -nb 3 control
trap -x
{
    SIGINT  { fdmove 1 3 s6-echo stop }
    SIGHUP  { fdmove 1 3 s6-echo stop }
    SIGTERM { fdmove 1 3 s6-echo stop }
    SIGPIPE { fdmove 1 3 s6-echo stop }
}
fdclose 3
redirfd -r 0 control
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar ../bin/server.jar --nogui
EOF
chmod +x service/run

10. Enable service

ln -s /home/minecraft/sites/schmonz.com/minecraft/service ~/service/minecraft.schmonz.com

11. Send initial configuration

cat > data/control <<'EOF'
whitelist on
whitelist add so-and-so
save-on
EOF

Be notified of updates

As the minecraft user:

1. Create service and run script

cd ~/sites/schmonz.com/minecraft
mkdir -p update/service/log
cd update/service

cat > log/run <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh

exec multilog t ./main
EOF
chmod +x log/run

cat > run <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -x

exec 2>&1

MINECRAFT_SERVER_DOWNLOAD_PAGE='https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server'

running_version() {
   unzip -p ../bin/server.jar version.json \
       | jq -r .name
}

available_version() {
   curl \
       --silent \
       --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0" "${MINECRAFT_SERVER_DOWNLOAD_PAGE}" \
       | html2text \
       | grep -i 'minecraft_server.* nogui' \
       | sed -e 's|.*minecraft_server\.||' -e 's|\.jar.*||'
}

main() {
   cd /home/minecraft/sites/schmonz.com/minecraft/data

   while true; do
       running="$(running_version)"
       available="$(available_version)"
       if [ "${running}" != "${available}" ]; then
           echo "MINECRAFT SERVER UPDATE NEEDED: ${running} -> ${available}"
           echo "" | mail -s "Please update Minecraft server: foo -> bar" [email protected]
       fi
       sleep 250000
   done
}

main "$@"
exit $?
EOF
chmod +x run

2. Enable service

ln -s /home/minecraft/sites/schmonz.com/minecraft/update/service ~/service/update.minecraft.schmonz.com

Further improvements

If it’s desirable to have the server periodically auto-save, I’ll add one more service that writes save-all to data/control.

If pkgsrc had a minecraft-server package (FreeBSD Ports does), I could delete my ad hoc update-notification service. Maybe I’ll make it so. I do like packaging things as part of my area-under-the-curve strategy.

My host-specific supervision trees and pkgsrc’s djbware rc.d scripts (qmailsmtpd, for instance) are still using daemontools. I’ve had the intention to switch to s6 for a long time. When it happens, I’ll be happy about it.

I haven’t tried to understand why there are “Java” and “Bedrock” editions of Minecraft, but it seems like they don’t interoperate. I’m sure there are reasons for this product segmentation and that I’ll come to better understand them in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, if and when I need to add Bedrock client interop, Geyser looks like an easy option — once I’m running something other than the vanilla upstream Minecraft Java server. I’ll need to try to understand that whole situation, too.

Are you an experienced Minecraft server administrator? Please share tips and advice!

For years I ran a few different server-side RSS readers including Miniflux, FreshRSS, and a horrible pile of Perl I wrote that Did The Job™ for me. This was for one specific reason: I wanted to be able to read my feeds on the desktop and the phone, so I needed to be able to sync it somehow.

Hosting on a server does come with other benefits. You can poll feeds even if your desktop isn’t running, which reduces your chances of missing something. You can share the public endpoint with friends and family, if they also want something to read. And as mentioned, it’s independent of whatever devices you’re reading it on. I can dial our VPN, then load our RSS reader of choice from a phone, iPad, laptop, whatever. These tools aren’t exotic, so standing up FreshRSS using my standard FEMP stack in a FreeBSD jail or two isn’t much additional effort.

Still, I suppose three things happened recently for me that made me question if the additional infrastructure here is necessary:

1. Is a positive integer. Ah, devilishly witty. I tell people it is, otherwise they might forget.

2. I traded in my iPad; in our case for a classic Nintendo Wii at a second-hand store! Try as I might with a few of them, I’ve never been able to “click” with an iPad the same way I was able to for other touchscreen devices like PalmPilots.

3. I’ve transitioned to using my phone as a glorified instant messenger to cut down on distractions and screen time, so I don’t read RSS there anymore either.

This means I now catch up on my RSS feeds in the morning the same way I do email: over coffee on my laptop on the balcony. With only one endpoint remaining, I’m wondering if I really need to be running another server, FreeBSD jail, or NetBSD chroot when a desktop application would be sufficient.

I was a massive NetNewsWire fan, though I’ve also loved using Thunderbird of all things to read and archive posts. I might go back to one of these for a while and see the difference. For all the Web can do for us, I do still prefer the responsiveness and experience of a good desktop application sometimes (I suppose some of my readers will tell me that emacs fits the bill there too… maybe one step at a time))))!

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-09.

On Linux, this command

fstrim -av

I will remove all unused blocks (particularly interesting on VM disks and necessary on SSD to preserve/get a longer duration). NetBSD has a similar command called blkdiscard

This command wipes the entire disk, so it becomes unusable (correct me if I am wrong)

blkdiscard -v /dev/rwd...

I see there is a flag which starts to discard after some bytes (or MB)

blkdiscard -v -f 256m -m 128m /dev/rwd0c

Suppose my partition uses 6GB of data, to make a safe discard (my data still remains), is this the correct command?

blkdiscard -v -f 6000m -m 128m /dev/rwd0c

I’m trying something a bit different this morning. I’m going to answer the most common questions I receive from people asking “what’s the point?” of something. My experience is that people usually aren’t asking such questions in good faith, but let’s address them earnestly.

Many of these beg the question, by implying I should have been doing something else. I might address the implied question too, or not. I’m also also not going to hedge my bets by saying “in my opinion”, or “your mileage may vary”, because these were asked of me, so of course they’ll be informed by my specific opinions, use cases, constraints, tastes, and ideas.

With that out of the way, let’s begin!

What’s the point of blogging?

Or: Why not just post on social media?

Nobody was asking this in the early 2000s, because it was just something people did. Nowadays in the age of corrosive social media and silos, why not just post there instead? Wait, I think I just answered the question.

Blogging is a space you own. You can post what you want, about what you want, in whatever style you want. Your words are yours. And once you start blogging, you notice other people blogging too. You realise there’s an entire other world of people sharing their ideas and creativity and joy. It’s infectious.

I think blogging is fun. It lets me process thoughts I’m having, and have a bit of a conversation with people, albeit asynchronously. It’s great. I think more people should try it.

What’s the point of coffee shops/cafés?

Or: Why not just make coffee at home?

Writers, journalists, philosophers, and common folk have been going to coffee shops to think, discuss ideas, and plan revolutions for hundreds of years. Coffee is a wonderful drink, and there’s something so fun about having it in a cozy cafe or a place where people know your name.

I also have a theory that for introverts, coffee shops offer a degree of social interaction where you can be surrounded by people, but still doing your thing either with a book or laptop. They helped me tremendously with loneliness for much of my 20s.

What’s the point of running FreeBSD?

Or: Why not just run Linux?

FreeBSD is running the servers you’re reading this text on now. It’s great, you should try it. It does things similarly to Linux in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t chase the shiny to anywhere near the same extent. It’s mature, stable, predictable, and works.

FreeBSD has the best server tooling in the business, and its permissive licencing means it also integrates easily with other excellent tooling like OpenZFS. This makes things like rollbacks a cinch. I was a Solaris/SunOS admin briefly in high school and uni, and a lot of what I remember there is in modern FreeBSD too.

Linux people have recently started realising why reproducible builds are probably a good idea for security and auditability. Everything you need to get started with FreeBSD is in base, which you can build and verify yourself. Installing a system can be as simple as building a filesystem and extracting a tarball, whether on a new machine, a VM, or a jail.

As I say to everyone asking this: give it a try. Why not?

What’s the point of simulation games?

Or: Why can’t you just drive a real train, or fly a real aircraft?

Driving a train in the real world requires specialist education, and can only be operated in specific rights of way. This means no open-ended exploring on your train, or aircraft, or space ship. You need licences, flight plans, approvals, timetables, uniforms, and undergo evaluations for competency and hiring.

It’s also much cheaper to do these things in a simulator at home.

What’s the point of being an introvert/bi/etc?

Or: Why can’t you just be normal?

The question here implies that I decided to be these things. I did not, as you’ll find if you talk to people of many different persuasions. That seems especially hard for populist far right reactionaries, so the fact you’re even asking me is a positive first step.

Introversion and sexuality are both scales. I wouldn’t say I’m entirely introverted; occasionally I do feel recharged being among a group of friends who mean a lot to me. I’ve also tended to skew towards women much of the time, though my interests and fancies still vary considerably.

I am these things because it’s who I am. The good news is, I don’t need your approval.

What’s the point of running NetBSD?

Or: Why not just run FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

NetBSD was my first BSD, and it remains near and dear to me. Much of what I said about FreeBSD applies here too.

NetBSD is a great OS to work with. It’s small, predictable, and runs similarly on anything I throw it at. I love that I can run it on several of my retrocomputers regardless of architecture, and the skills I learn are transferable. I got a giddy thrill communicating between my SPARCStation and my childhood Pentium 1 once I got that network going.

Even if you never stray from amd64 though, NetBSD makes a great server and laptop OS. It’s easy to debug; NetBSD doesn’t bury things under multiple layers of complicated abstractions, or change the syntax of something just because it’s not the current hotness. It’s *nix like you remember it… the good bits, I mean.

Also, pkgsrc is usable almost everywhere.

What’s the point of running Linux for gaming?

Or: Why not just run Windows?

I maintain enough Windows at work, and I don’t want to bring it into the home. Thanks to the efforts of Valve, Wine, and too many other projects to mention, gaming on Linux is not only viable in 2025, but fantastic. It’s not without its challenges; desktop Linux never is. But I’d rather be dealing with those problems than Windows.

What’s the point of travel?

Or: Why not just … I dunno, not?

Travel is an itch. It’s the ultimate novelty. You’re going out to see the world, witnessing how different people live and do things. You get to explore a new train system. You get to try new food. It forces you out of your groove, rut, comfort zone, whatever cliché you can think of. It’s stimulating and fun in a way nothing else is. No matter how much you prepare, there will always be surprises.

Clara and I deliberately chose the apartment we’re in now, and save most of our incomes, precisely to let us do this. It’s what we first bonded over, and it remains our favourite thing in the world to do.

What’s the point of anything?

Or: Why not just do nothing?

Honestly, at that stage I’m not qualified to answer you in a complete way. I’ve been where you are, and understand how being in such a state affects everything from your mood, appetite, motivation, self-worth, and outlook on life. Mine was triggered by family trauma when I was in my early 20s that I’m still only just recovering from now. You need to seek out help, because you deserve it.

But hand to heart, I’d say as an immediate first step: go outside. No, really. Go for a walk if you can. Leave the electronics behind, and wander. The medical literature is clear on this point: moving makes you feel better. Tackle the small things first, then you’ll be in a better mental state to address the bigger things.

What’s the point of retrocomputing?

Or: Why not just use modern machines?

I still get this asked on a regular basis, believe it or not.

Retrocomputing is a puzzle. It’s so much fun getting something working again. It’s like a living history lesson. It’s taught me more about electronics and computer fundamentals than years of lectures and seminars.

It’s also nostalgic, which as a nostalgic fool speaks to me. I love that I can power up the first childhood PC I built myself, or check out the PalmPilot I used in primary school for some reason. Like travel, I love seeing how writers, gamers, educators, engineers, and accountants must have used their Apple IIs, or the Commodore 64.

It’s a half-baked idea at the moment, but I’m also working on a theory that so many people are into retrocomputing now given the depressing state of modern IT. When it’s not peddling snakeoil and lies it’s selling our privacy and trashing our democracies. There’s still so much good in modern computing, but retrocomputing gives you an opportunity to pare back the bullshit and engage with technology again in a fun—and dare I say, more wholesome—way.

It’s also worth mentioning that retrocomputing today is great precicely because of modern IT. We have fabs that can print indie circuit boards for us. We can collaborate on code, designs, and projects for new and fun addons and storage replacements for old machines. This is something that simply wasn’t possible at the time.

It’s fun, I guess is my point. Which actually applies to most of the questions on this post, so maybe we’ll wrap it up here.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-06.

Done early!

• Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook.  For pre-order, and excerpts are available.  I think this is a unique book; catch the limited print while you can.  (via)
• Vim Spellcheck Cheat Sheet.
• NetBSD on Raspberry Pi!
• State of virtualizing the BSDs on Apple Silicon.
• From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer.
• Walter Bright’s Classic Empire, Empire Deluxe, and original author Walter Bright.  (incidentally, original available as a port/pkg/port)
• Standalone Digital Scratch Instrument.
• Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD].  For reference.
• Free MWL excerpts/books.  (via)
• If you’re going to GDC, there’s a Roguelike Celebration meetup on the 18th.
• UNIX advertisements.  (via)  From that page:

For decades, Linux and BSD have stood as two dominant yet fundamentally different branches of the Unix-like operating system world. While Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, have grown to dominate the open-source ecosystem, BSD-based systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have remained the preferred choice for those seeking security, performance, and licensing flexibility. But what if you could combine the best of both worlds—Debian’s vast package ecosystem with FreeBSD’s robust and efficient kernel?

Enter Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, a unique experiment that merges Debian’s familiar userland with the FreeBSD kernel, offering a hybrid system that takes advantage of FreeBSD’s technical prowess while maintaining the ease of use associated with Debian. This article dives into the world of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, exploring its architecture, installation, benefits, challenges, and real-world applications.

↫ George Whittaker

More of a list of upsides and downsides than an actual in-depth article, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. There’s a variety of attempts out there to somehow marry the Linux and BSD worlds, and each of them takes a unique approach. I’m not sure the Debian userland with a FreeBSD kernel is the way to go, though, and it seems I’m not alone – Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was officially dropped from Debian in 2015 or so, and after a flurry of unofficial activity in 2019, it was discontinued completely in 2023 due to a lack of activity and developer interest. Odd that the source article doesn’t mention that.

If you’re still interested in a combination of Linux and BSD, I’d keep an eye on Chimera Linux instead. It’s very actively developed, focuses on portable code by supporting many architectures, and its developers are veterans in this space. I have my eye on Chimera Linux as my future distribution of choice.

I stopped developing pkgsrc with CVS.

Quick bit of background: NetBSD is still using CVS as its version control system. The decision to move to something else has been taken long ago, but the switch has not happened as of today.

Working with CVS is painful for many reasons. For instance, there is no way to see your local changes without waiting several minutes for a cvs up -n. A full tree update (cvs up) churns for quite a while before it even starts updating any files.

Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from flash memory.

Since JavaOS is, of course, long gone, what can you do with JavaStation today? Well, you apparently can run NetBSD on it, but it’s quite an ordeal. The JavaStation needs to boot from the network using a combination of RARP, NFS, and more, and surprisingly, this entire setup, including the computer acting as the ‘server’ for the JavaStation, is well-documented and supported by NetBSD. Once you’ve gone through all the steps, you’ll end up with a JavaStation running the latest release of NetBSD, which is pretty cool.

Obviously there is still a lot to do; as you can see postfix isn’t happy, and the swapfile security needs tightening up for a start. But we do now have a functional NetBSD system running on a vintage network computer!

↫ Old Fart’s Almanac

NetBSD’s continued support for the most arcane of hardware will never cease to amaze me.

We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2025!

Would you like to contribute to NetBSD and/or pkgsrc in the next months? Google Summer of Code is a great chance for that!

You can find a list of possible projects at Google Summer of Code project page. Of course, you can also propose your own!

Please reach us via #netbsd-code IRC channel on Libera.Chat and/or via mailing lists.

If you are more interested about Google Summer of Code please also check official homepage at g.co/gsoc.

Looking forward to a great Summer!

As you might be aware of, I am working on a minimal BSD/UNIX system called smolBSD. It is based on the NetBSD operating system, and its main target is virtual machines, more specifically microvms. This system is capable of fully booting the OS in less than one second using a specially trimmed kernel along with small, specialized root systems.
I was stunned to learn (but am I wrong?) that this work does not seem to have an equivalent, not even in the Linux world. FreeBSD Firecracker support sure permits to boot a kernel is about the same time my NetBSD hacked kernel does, but there’s no work around s slim and task dedicated root filesystem.

Quirky, just like I want it.

• Why is editing PDFs so prevalent?
• A Suitably Bizarre Start of the Year 2025.
• Naming Quarters.  I think fortnights and sennights are underutilized timeframes, incidentally.
• pkgsrc-2024Q4 is out.
• Tellico, collection management software.  (via)
• Some of the original BeOS icons reimagined in Blender.  (via)
• Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets. (via)
• The next leap second is at least a year away.
• Copyright-free images.  A vast amount of images available.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Where to Start With Tempa, The Label That Invented Dubstep.

Make, as arcane as a build tool can be, may still be a good first fit for certain scenarios. “Heresy!”, you say, as you hear a so-called “Bazel expert” utter these words.

The specific problem I’m facing is that I need to glue together the NetBSD build system, a quilt patch set, EndBASIC’s Cargo-based Rust build, and a couple of QEMU invocations to produce a Frankenstein disk image for a Raspberry Pi. And the thing is: Make allows doing this sort of stitching with relative ease. Sure, Make is not the best option because the overall build performance is “meh” and because incremental builds are almost-impossible to get right… but adopting Bazel for this project would be an almost-infinite time sink.

Anyway. When using Make in this manner, you often end up with what’s essentially a “command dispatcher” and, over time, the number of commands grows and it’s hard to make sense of which one to use for what. Sure, you can write a README.md with instructions, but I guarantee you that the text will get out of sync faster than you can read this article. There is a better way, though.

This report was written by Diviyam Pat as part of Google Summer of Code 2024.

This summer I worked on NetBSD's kernel test framework to cover root device discovery and root file system selection. This area of the kernel is not very well documented and program flow has to be determined by reading the code.

I would also like to tell you about my early interactions with the project, let me start with project findings.

Why NetBSD?

Google Summer of Code 2024 is not my first time applying to GSoC. My first time was in 2022, in my first year of college. I have been fascinated with newer Windows versions since my Intel Core Duo i3 days as every new Windows version used to bring new changes and features, from Windows XP to Vista to 8.1 and then to 10 (cosmetic only) but was very heavy on my PC's memory usage that was upwards of 60% leaving very little room for applications and games.

My Intel i3 would be enough for it. This experience made me decide I wanted my project to be in the operating system space. I ventured into all OS projects on the Google Summer of Code website. Gentoo, Debian but that didn't turn out well. I then decided to explore BSDs. The community seemed friendlier, more responsive, and active in helping beginners. I started mailing all the mentors about my interests (I realized I should have done a lot more work before mailing them, it shows more dedication towards the project.)

Christoph explained the project in great detail to me, helped me with getting started and guided me through the hard parts of the project.

Project Details

Root device and file-system selection is made during the later stages of the boot process by the kernel. The kernel config file defines candidates for the root device and the kernel selects one after validating those options. If no options are defined, the auto config subroutines handle configuration. Head over to my docs for more details here. This functionality is handled primarily by the function setroot in file kern_subr.c. It also calls specialized functions for a number of cases. Our task was to add ATF tests for this function and some other functions that assist setroot. This part of the kernel works, and it has worked for over 30 years but the code is rather complex to read and there is no documentation. The only way to understand it is to read the code.

At any given stage when any condition fails the fallback option is to ask the user manually for the device. Thus this part of the kernel rarely needs attention. There are some global functions used in conditions inside setroot: rootspec, bootspec, etc. These variables are either set through the config file or through other machine-dependent kernel functions like findroot etc. We need to manually set them in our test cases and also need to stub kernel functions used by setroot and other functions. We wanted to make these test cases use 'vnd' devices, but we ran into bugs, and Christoph was trying to fix them. Therefore we had to resort to stubbing. We validate the global variables. We also test the tftproot_dhcpboot function that loads the contents of a memory disk device from a TFTP server and uses that as root device. Devices are represented by the device_t struct which is populated by the kernel. We mock this behavior through the create_device function and use this in the test programs. User input is handled by stubbing the cngetsn function. Global variables and arguments are set to test values in the body of the test cases and the function being tested is called. The test file is divided into 3 parts: 1) setroot_root, 2) setroot_ask, and 3) tftproot_dhcp. In the file kern_subr.c setroot() calls these functions but here we test them independently

Conclusion

I have worked on enhancing NetBSD's ATF tests to test the root device and file system selection process, testing the setroot function and its dependencies. These tests shall improve coverage of the ATF tests to the setroot function and in general, to root device selection. In the future, contributors can rely on these tests for kern_subr.c's functionality.

I am C++ developer and unfamiliar with script technologies like nodejs etc. I tried to build VS Codium on NetBSD 10.0 from sources 1.96.2 on github, by how-to manual. After running build/build.sh it outputs:

...
+++ ../update_settings.sh
300s/'default': true/'default': false/
sed: -E: No such file or directory
219s/'default': TelemetryConfiguration.ON/'default': TelemetryConfiguration.OFF/
sed: -E: No such file or directory
114s/'default': true/'default': false/
sed: -E: No such file or directory
#

When I look into target directory vscode I am seeing there something like result: vscode/cli/src/bin/code/main.rs How to continue with build to reach binary executable "bin/codium" ? What to do with that main.rs ? I read that it has something with rust ? Can anyone put more light on this to understand what to do ? I don't need to create installation package, it should be sufficient to run VSCodium from target build directory.

I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times. As I explored my options, I came to the conclusion that NetBSD, the often-forgotten BSD variant, was the best viable choice for my project.

One reason for this choice is NetBSD’s build system. Once you look and get past the fact that it feels frozen in time since 2002, you realize it is still one of the most advanced build systems you can find for an OS. And it shows: the NetBSD build system allows you to build the full OS from scratch, on pretty much any host POSIX platform, while targeting any hardware architecture supported by NetBSD. All without root privileges.

Another reason for this choice is that NetBSD was my daily workhorse for many years and I’m quite familiar with its internals, which is useful knowledge to quickly achieve the goals I have in mind. In fact, I was a NetBSD Developer with capital D: I had commit access to the project from about 2002 through 2012 or so, and I have just revived my account in service of this project. jmmv@ is back!

So, strap onto your seats and let’s see how today’s NetBSD build system looks like and what makes it special. I’ll add my own critique at the end, because it ain’t perfect, but overall it continues to deliver on its design goals set in the late 1990s.

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first update of the NetBSD 10 release branch NetBSD 10.1! See the release announcement for details.

This release includes 9 months of bug fixes and a few new features after the 10.0 release in March. It also gives those still using older release a good reason to finally update to the NetBSD 10 release branch, even if they avoid dot-zero releases by all means.

If you want to try NetBSD 10.1 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

This is my makefile:

CC = gcc
TARGET = target

CFLAGS = -O3 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic

SRCS = $(shell find . -type f -name '*.c')
OBJS = $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(SRCS))

.PHONY: all clean

all: $(TARGET)

$(OBJS): $(SRCS)
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

.PRECIOUS: $(TARGET) $(OBJS)

$(TARGET): $(OBJS)
    $(CC) $(OBJS) -o $@

clean:
    -rm -f *.o
    -rm -f $(TARGET)

this is the output message:

gcc  -o target
gcc: fatal error: no input files
compilation terminated.
*** Error code 1

I'm trying to get this to work on NetBSD. What am I doing wrong? Also, I've found that $(SRCS) is just empty, but if I run find . -type f -name '*.c' in the shell on it's own, I do get the desired files. Please help !