Hi all,
Love using NetBSD as my daily os at home - also in some servers at work. I have a strange problem when watching youtube videos with firefox 117.0.1 (64-bit) running NetBSD 10 RC1. I can only see them in black and white, no color at all... sound works fine, quality is also fine but no color. Videos works normal - colorful - when using seamonkey and also with firefox in other users session. Any Idea where's the probleme ? .
Thanks for your help !

/usr/bin/ld: ../bin/exiv2: hidden symbol__aarch64_ldadd4_acq_rel' in /usr/pkg/gcc10/lib/gcc/aarch64--netbsd/10.5.0/libgcc.a(ldadd_4_4.o) is referenced by DSO
/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: bad value
`
How do I find out where the problem is, and what can I do about it?

Does anyone here remember Cosmoe? Cosmoe was an attempt to combine Haiku’s API with the Linux kernel and related tools, started in the early 2000s. The project eventually fizzled out, now only an obscure footnote for BeOS diehards such as myself. It seems, though, that the idea of combining the Haiku API with a mature UNIX-like operating system refuses to die, and a few days ago, on the NetBSD Users’s Discussion List, a developer by the name of Stephan picked up the baton.

Some years ago I already started to work on a compatibility layer for NetBSD and resumed working on it recently.

[…]

I think a compatibility layer would mostly consist of kernel components and a custom libroot.so. I have created a libroot that provides functionality missing in libc and it should behave like the original one. It makes use of libc and libpthread at the moment as well as syscalls of the kernel components. The source can be found on Github.

This is clearly an experimental project, but Stephan does note he has had success running the Haiku IPC test programs, so it’s definitely more than scribbles on a napkin. The attraction of this idea is clear, too – Haiku API, but on a stable kernel with vastly superior hardware and device support. I’m not entirely sure if it’s got life in it, but even if it doesn’t – it’s amazing work, and that in an of itself makes it a success.

Just thought I'd try to finally connect to my bluetoth speaker after many years of listening to music on my crappy ThinkPad x230 sppeakers....

Following the guide here: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-bluetooth.html

This is how far I got:

~ λ btconfig ubt0 inquiry
Device Discovery from device: ubt0 ... 1 response
  1: bdaddr c0:28:8d:4b:19:25
   : name "UE BOOM 2"
   : class [0x240418] Headphones <Rendering> <Audio>
   : page scan rep mode 0x01
   : clock offset 1041
   : rssi 0

~ # echo "c0:28:8d:4b:19:25 UEBOOM" >>/etc/bluetooth/hosts

~ λ btpin -d ubt0 -a UEBOOM -p 0000

~ # btdevctl -d ubt0 -a UEBOOM -s HSET -A -v
local bdaddr: f4:b7:e2:e9:4b:6f
remote bdaddr: c0:28:8d:4b:19:25
device type: btsco
mode: connect
channel: 11

After this I opened another terminal and ran:

~ λ hcidump
HCI sniffer - Bluetooth packet analyzer ver 5.66-netbt
system: snap_len: 1500 filter: 0xffffffffffffffff
> HCI Event: Number of Completed Packets (0x13) plen 5
    handle 12 packets 1
> HCI Event: Number of Completed Packets (0x13) plen 5
    handle 12 packets 1

While running:

~ # bthset -m /dev/mixer1 -v
Headset Info:
        mixer: /dev/mixer1
        laddr: f4:b7:e2:e9:4b:6f
        raddr: c0:28:8d:4b:19:25
        channel: 11
        vgs.dev: 0, vgm.dev: 1
> AT+VGS=13
< OK
> AT+XAPL=0000-0000-0100,10
< ERROR
> AT+IPHONEACCEV=1,1,9
< ERROR
> AT+IPHONEACCEV=1,1,9
< ERROR

So it seems to recognise the speaker but I'm not sure why I'm getting this error.

Any help is appreeciated. Cheers

Is there any value in using old hardware for testing and development to collaborate with the NetBSD community?
I have a lot of old hardware, and as limited as they are, I think maybe something good can come out of them. What do you think?

When I used OpenBSD, I was a big fan of bsd.rd: a kernel that includes a root file system with an installer and a few tools. When I invariably did something bad to my root file system, I could use that to repair things. bsd.rd is also helpful for OS updates. And there is only a single file involved.

On NetBSD however, there is usually no netbsd.rd kernel installed, or even available by default. The facility is there, it’s just not standard. To be fair, there are a number of architectures that use kernels with a ramdisk for installation.

Recently, I have been toying with NetBSD on an Orange Pi 5. This is a 64-bit ARM board, using the evbarm-aarch64 architecture. I am booting from an SD card (details in a followup post) but once booted, the kernel does not see the card any more, only the NVMe SSD. So my thoughts went back to bsd.rd and I decided that I want one!

Such a kernel seems like a very useful tool to have, so if you’re running NetBSD – this guide will help you add it to your toolbox.

Trying NetBSD again for an old Pentium 75 but I forgot this:
What is a working PKG_PATH string for NetBSD 9.3, and why isn't it set as standard in recent releases or documentation?
Just my opinion, but I have the idea the absence of this is a serious problem if they want to appeal new users... At least 50% of people trying will give up, just for a not working URL in main documentation, on a newly installed system.

I'm experimenting with podman under NetBSD and want to mount a host directory into the container.

• According to this answer I did:

  podman machine init -v ~/podman/volumes/:/mnt/podman tpvm
  podman machine start tpvm
  

• Now I would expect that

  podman machine ssh tpvm 'ls /mnt'
  

  shows me the podman directory, but it did not.
• I continue with:

  podman run -ti --rm -v ~/podman/volumes/:/mnt/podman busybox
  

  and I get:

  Error: statfs /home/thomas/podman/volumes: no such file or directory
  

• However:

  ll  /home/thomas/podman/volumes
  total 1.5K
  drwxr-xr-x  3 thomas  users  512B Nov 16 16:20 .
  drwxr-xr-x  4 thomas  users  512B Nov 16 16:20 ..
  drwxr-xr-x  2 thomas  users  512B Nov 17 15:56 posgres
  

There is a MAC related thread here, and I also tried this idea but always get the same error.

Any ideas what went wrong?

P.S.: I also checked the output of --log-level=debug of the above commands, but got nothing useful for this case.

I'm experimenting with podman under NetBSD and want to mount a host directory into the container. According to this answer I did:

podman machine init -v ~/podman/volumes/:/mnt/podman tpvm

podman machine start tpvm

Now I would expect that

podman machine ssh tpvm 'ls /mnt'

shows me the podman directory, but it did not. I continue with:

podman run -ti --rm -v ~/podman/volumes/:/mnt/podman busybox

and I get:

Error: statfs /home/thomas/podman/volumes: no such file or directory

but

ll  /home/thomas/podman/volumes
total 1.5K
drwxr-xr-x  3 thomas  users  512B Nov 16 16:20 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 thomas  users  512B Nov 16 16:20 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 thomas  users  512B Nov 17 15:56 posgres

There is a MAC related thread here, and I also tried this idea but always the same error.

Any ideas what went wrong?

Speaking of feeling old, I just saw the news over at the Inkscape blog that the world’s best open source vector graphics editor is now in its third decade. Wow!

I’ve been using Inkscape since at least 2007. Every SVG in the history of this site was either drawn, modified, optimised, or exported from Inkscape. I owe them a great deal. Thank you to all the contributers, a donation will be on its way shortly :).

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-11-20.

Introducing omake, my simple Zettlekasten format written in XML! It’s is designed to be readable by humans, and easy to present with a simple XSL transform. Yes, I know it’s 2023.

It’s named for Japanese omake, describing bonus or extra content. The silly bacronym is Outline Markup and (Zettle)Kasten Enumerator. My partner Clara is unconvinced.

Structure

Omake consists of a root omake, element one or more card elements that can be nested, and text note elements.

• The omake element can have Dublin Core elements describing the file, or whatever other namespace you wish to import.

• card elements can also have Dublin Core attributes. When rendered, dc:title attributes might be used as the heading to click on to expand the card.

• note elements are plain text by default, though they can be rendered differently based on attributes. For example, an xlink:href could be rendered as a link to click, and dc:description could be used to create key/value pairs.

Examples

This is the simplest omake, with a single note:

<omake xmlns="https://rubenerd.com/omake-xmlns/">
    <note>Hello, world</note>
</omake>

Here’s an omake with a couple of cards, notes, and a bit of metadata:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<omake xmlns="https://rubenerd.com/omake-xmlns/"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
    xml:base="https://rubenerd.com">
    
    <dc:title>Ruben’s Favourites</dc:title>
    <dc:description>A collection of nice things</dc:description>
    <dc:date>2023-10-08T15:35:00+10:00</dc:date>
    
    <card dc:title="Favourite OSs">
        <note>FreeBSD</note>
        <note>NetBSD</note>
    </card>
    
    <card dc:title="Favourite things">
        <note dc:description="City">Singapore</note>
    </card>    
    
    <note dc:type="application/rss+xml" 
	xml:lang="en-SG"
	xlink:href="rss.xml">Favourite posts, lah</note>
</omake>

Metadata

By default, omake uses standard XML attributes, Dublin Core, and XLinks to provide metadata, because they’ve done the work for us. The recommended attributes are xml:lang, dc:date, dc:description, dc:title, dc:type, and xlink:href.

All attributes and data should be UTF-8.

Other infrequently-asked questions

• Do you have a DTD or schema to validate? I’m planning to.

• Why not OPML? omake is more limited in scope, and designed to address some of the interop problems I had using it for years. It uses elements to store data instead of attributes, allowing for CDATA without escaping. It uses unambiguous dates, thanks to Dublin Core. Metadata also negates the need for a type attribute.

• Why not RDF? Too complicated.

• But I don’t like XML! Then don’t use it.

Conclusion

My omake.xml file is now live, if you’d like a real example.

I doubt anyone else will use this, but it was a fun afternoon exercise.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-11-20.

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release anouncement for details.

The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the long time it took for the developement branch to get ready for branching, a lot of developement went into this new release.

This also caused the release anouncement to be one of the longest we ever did.

Especially on amd64 machines please notes that we got a new DRM/KMS subsystem version, and this may lead to fallout on some hardware. Unfortunately not all known bugs from the release engineering pre-release task list could be fixed in time for this release - we will continue to improve the current state and hope to have more of them solved for the next (10.1) release.

If you want to test 10.0 RC1 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the prefered 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.

Proycon did a post about his default applications, prompted by some others doing the same. I didn’t listen to the podcast that started it, and I technically my Omake enumarates these already, but I’ll never pass up an opportunity to post a list!

Aside from a sneay “retro emulation” item below, I’ve resisted the temptation to include retrocomputer tools. Maybe that warrants its own separate list.

• Audio editing: ffmpeg, sox, eyeD3
• Backups: OpenZFS snapshots, rsync
• Budgeting, kitchen sinking: LibreOffice Calc
• Credentials: KeePassXC
• Database prototyping: sqlite3
• Desktop: FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, Fedora KDE Spin
• Disk images: qemu-utils
• Docs: Handwritten LaTeX (!) via TeX Live
• Diagrams: LibreOffice Draw
• Gemini browser: Lagrange
• Image editor: GIMP, ImageMagick7 scripts
• Music: Elisa, musikcube
• Orchestration: Ansible
• PIM, email, newsgroups, RSS: Thunderbird
• Proposals/tenders/etc: Microsoft Word (le sigh!)
• Retro emulation: 86box, ScummVM, VICE
• Scripting: Perl
• Shell: Portable OpenBSD Korn shell
• Text editor: Kate, Vim
• Vector editor: Inkscape
• Video editing: DaVinci Resolve
• Video playing: mpv
• Web browser: Firefox

I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but those are the essentials.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-11-09.

I have installed NFS on a server in my lab, the server exports two disks, /disk1 and /disk2, i can successfully see the exported drives using:

showmount -e 192.168.1.245

I can also mount the drives:

mount 192.168.1.245:/disk1 /disk1

This gives me a mounted drive on my local machine (also NetBSD 9.3) /disk1

However, I am not able to add, delete or modify files, i get:

touch: notes.txt: Permission denied

The local folder used for the mount point is owned by the user user (non-root) the mount point on the server for /disk1 and /disk2 is also owned by a user called user (non-root), same group and uid, 1000 and 100.

This is my /etc/exports file:

/data1 -alldirs -mapall=1000:100 -network 192.168.1.245 -mask 255.255.255.0
/data2 -alldirs -mapall=1000:100 -network 192.168.1.245 -mask 255.255.255.0

I have tried mounting as root, both locally and on the server, I have also tried the same thing as user, nothing seems to help, any help is greatly appreciated!

Update I do not know what fixed it, but everything is working now, I have tried unmounting the drives and mounting again, restarting the server etc. everything still works, same /etc/exports file, no changes, same users and rights.

I’m writing this post at a coffee shop—no wait, really!?—having one of the many brews Nico has graciously bought me on Ko-fi. This is a graphical representation! ☕️

In response to my BSD history post , Nico has written his own again. He included a cheeky reference to Linux as well, given distros also depend on BSD-licenced code to operate. He also started on NetBSD like I did!

Nico is good civ. You should definitely read his blog, subscribe to his feed, and shout him a coffee too. Merci!

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-10-06.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has recently been working on further refinements to HAMMER2 for the next DragonFlyBSD operating system release.

The latest HAMMER2 activity in the past few days has included improving its CPU performance and adding a new “hammer2 recover” directive. The HAMMER2 recover support allows for recovering/undoing single files as well as preliminary support to recover entire directory structures.

DragonFlyBSD always feels like the one nobody talks about or uses, with FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD taking the spotlight instead. Are any of you folks using it? How has it been?

I am trying to setup NFS, i have run into some problems with regards to /etc/exports

When the content of my /etc/exports file is this:

/data1 192.168.1.213(rw)

I get this from showmount -e 192.168.1.245

client$ showmount -e 192.168.1.245
Exports list on 192.168.1.245:
client$

But when i have this in my /etc/exports file:

/data1 -alldirs -network 192.168.1.245 -mask 255.255.255.0
/data2 -alldirs -network 192.168.1.245 -mask 255.255.255.0

from here: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-net-services.html

I get this from showmount -e 192.168.1.245

client$ showmount -e 192.168.1.245
Exports list on 192.168.1.245:
/data2                             192.168.1.245 
/data1                             192.168.1.245

I can mount data1 and data2 on my client machine (also NetBSD 9.3) but I get permission denied when I try to copy files, mkdir etc

Reading this: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_file_systems/exporting-nfs-shares_managing-file-systems i understand that this is the general format of /etc/exports:

export host(options)

What i would like to achieve is the following: every machine on the network (192.168.1.*) regardless of what user connects can mount whatever mount point NFS on my server (192.168.1.245) offers with read and write privileges

Reading the RedHat documentation I understand that it´s something like:

/data1 host(rw,all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=100)

gid and uid is set to match my user named user (non-root)

But I am not sure what to do from here.

Update The accepted answer solved the problem, I am now facing permission issues: NetBSD 9.3 - NFS Permissions

I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD.

Let’s be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn’t much things in common between the two nowadays.

While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code changes in one being imported to another, but this is really a very small amount of the daily code changes though.

Just like OSNews (more information about the OSNews Gemini capsule), this article is also available on Gemini.

This is the eighth post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey. There was no Q2 2023 report as there wasn't really anything worthwhile to write about.

In Pkgsrc land, I updated binutils to the 2.41 version, and mold to the 2.0.0, 2.1.0, and 2.2.0 versions. It's worth noting that Mold transitioned its license from AGPL to MIT starting with the 2.0.0 release.

I also updated the NetBSD system call table in GDB to add the memfd_create(2) and epoll(2) syscalls which were added in July.

Regarding OpenBSD, I updated binutils to version 2.41, allowing us to remove patches for ARM support as they had been pushed upstream.

During this release cycle, OpenBSD enabled mandatory enforcement of indirect branch targets using Intel's IBT on OpenBSD/amd64 and ARM's BTI on OpenBSD/arm64. I added support upstream for the PT_OPENBSD_NOBTCFI segment type to readelf in GNU Binutils, as well as in LLVM versions of objdump and readobj.

As usual, I’ve also been busy reading different material, and adding new resources to toolchains.net.

binutils and GDB commits:

LLVM commits

Keen-eyed readers among you might have noticed my tribute to Bram Moolenaar was wrapped in GNOME window dressing. I haven’t made the switch, but it was fun experimenting again with what people on the other side of the fence use.

Goodbye, Bram Moolenaar ♡

By way of context, is a phrase with four words. Much of my blog from the early-2000s was spent chronicling my adventures with various desktop environments and window managers on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and a smattering of Linux distros. I ended up sticking with the delightful Xfce for the longest time, before recently switching back to KDE Plasma.

My current Ryzen desktop is dual-booted with FreeBSD and Linux, so I thought I’d try installing Fedora Workstation with GNOME during a system rebuild. This is what you see below, with an open Nautilus file manager, Firefox, GNOME Terminal, and Minecraft.

GNOME and KDE are the two biggest desktop environments for *nix, and have very different philosophies. GNOME is arguably the more Mac like, with its minimal interface, dock, task switcher, and system bar along the top where it belongs. While I appreciate the customisation KDE offers, I will admit GNOME mostly looked great for me from the start.

2011: Ruben’s review of GNOME 3

I’m actually surprised how little the interface seems to have changed since GNOME 3 controversially entered the scene last decade. The desktops and dock are aligned horizontally, and elements of the UI have been flattened, but otherwise it was very familiar. I suppose KDE 4+ has remained similar as well, albeit with its new Breeze theme.

GNOME Tweaks on GitLab

I found myself changing little about the desktop, though GNOME Tweaks should still be considered mandatory so you can replace that ugly Cantarell font that’s still everywhere in the UI. Swapping to Nimbus Sans (my personal favourite) or Liberation Sans makes a huge difference to legibility, especially in smaller sizes.

Unfortunately, I’m also disappointed to see Nautilus and other GNOME bundled software use the hamburger icon, with no option to enable a menubar like you can on KDE or Xfce. This is where the drive for minimalism crosses the line into being an accessibility issue.

Other than that, there wasn’t much more to report. It mostly got out of the way and worked, which I could appreciate. The UI is simple, and I got into the habit of throwing the cursor into the corner to see all my open windows. The main things I missed were my memorised KDE shortcuts, Dolphin file manager layout, and those aforementioned menus. My daily Qt applications like Kate also integrated well, despite coming from KDE land.

I should do a post about why I love Plasma so much, and why I still lean towards Xfce for a GTK desktop. But in the meantime I’d rate the current version of GNOME (as ships in Fedora 38) three feet out of a possible five, which last time I checked is just shy of a metre.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-09-27.

I've been involved with the OpenBSD ports collection since 2015, and have accumulated some notes on the topic over the years. This is an attempt at doing a redacted version, mostly for my personal use. While some of these notes are specific to the OpenBSD Ports Collection, most of them will also apply to the others BSDs and Linux distributions.

It will come at no surprise that distfiles are at the core of the problem domain. The ports system fetches distribution files, most often tarballs, verifies their checksum and starts building programs. In order to be able to reliably build packages from the source tarballs, we need both availability and integrity.

Because MASTER_SITES can be down, either temporarily or permanently, each of the BSD maintains their own distfiles mirrors, or caches.

As a rule of thumb though, MASTER_SITES (or nowadays simply SITES) should not be set to point to ftp.openbsd.org, mostly because there is sometimes no guarantee that the files will be cached there forever, and also to avoid putting unnecessary load on the server. To remedy this, some porters maintain their own distfiles hosting sites.

For checking distfiles integrity, each BSD uses a different combination of cryptographic hashes:

OpenBSD and FreeBSD both use SHA256, while NetBSD uses BLAKE2s and SHA512. The hashes are stored in a file called distinfo.

Here is an example from OpenBSD's distinfo for binutils:

SHA256 (binutils-2.41.tar.bz2) = pMS+wFL3uDcAJOYDieGUN38/SLVmGEGOpRBn9nqqsws=
SIZE (binutils-2.41.tar.bz2) = 37132937

And another excerpt from NetBSD's Pkgsrc distinfo for binutils:

BLAKE2s (binutils-2.41.tar.bz2) = bd20a803c6f86632b62e27fce2cb07eb0ee4aa06fb374d80c8ba235568466dd2
SHA512 (binutils-2.41.tar.bz2) = 8c4303145262e84598d828e1a6465ddbf5a8ff757efe3fd981948854f32b311afe5b154be3966e50d85cf5d25217564c1f519d197165aac8e82efcadc9e1e47c
Size (binutils-2.41.tar.bz2) = 37132937 bytes

Checksums can fail because there was a network failure while downloading the source file, or because the file itself changed.

If the distfile changed, there can be several causes:

• The source archive has been replaced by a malicious one
• Upstream re-rolled the tarball
• Automatically generated tarballs are not immutable

Re-rolling tarballs can happen for software which is not versioned, or when upstream try to fix minor issues not long after a release, without issuing a new one in order not to have to bump version numbers.

For the last possible cause, this has been a problem with GitHub auto generated tarballs in the past. More information can be found in sthen@'s "Porters, please read re GitHub auto-generated tarballs vs releases" post on the ports mailing list back in 2018.

In January 2023, GitHub updated the Git version they are using on their platform. Because Git switched to use their internal gzip implementation for generating tarballs, this resulted in the generated tarballs having different checksums. The change has quickly been reverted.

Each durable checksum failure will require maintainers to spend time analyzing changes to ensure there has not been any malicious changes happening.

Ideally, distfiles should be as small as possible to prevent wasting bandwidth when fetching and CPU cycles when unpacking content. Unfortunately, that's not always the case because some projects do vendor dependencies, and everyone has to pay the cost.

I've done a "Minimal" installation of NetBSD 9.3 from the ISO image, just to examine the behavior of one particular command (mktemp) as it differs from Linux.

I'm not seeing man pages for… really anything; not even man man works. Cursory searches of the Guide, r/NetBSD on Reddit, and the netbsd-users mailing list archives have not turned up anything helpful.

I also ran pkgin search man thinking there might be a man-pages or manpages binary package, but all I saw was a package for Linux man pages.

How do I get the man pages for the basic, built-in stuff after finishing a "Minimal" installation of NetBSD?