unsigned long geek = random();

While updating my NetBSD-current source tree, I noticed that X.Org has been imported. Looks like the migration from XFree86 has begun…

After my bad experience with Mozilla Firefox 1.0 on NetBSD/sparc64, I wasn’t expecting too much when I built 1.5 from pkgsrc on a NetBSD/alpha 3.0 system this week. After several hours (ok, a few more than that) of compiling, I was shocked when it actually ran! Even better – it works and not a nasty bus error in sight.

300×485 pixels 29.9 kB

Not sure how I’ve never noticed them before, but there are some BSD-related podcasts available from bsdtalk. I don’t see anything NetBSD-specific, but there’s still a lot of interesting-looking content.

After my post a few days ago about GRUB, and a boot loader discussion on the mailing lists of our local LUG, I’m reminded of Thor Lancelot Simon’s post to the NetBSD port-xen list about GRUB. He makes quite a convincing argument that GRUB is less than ideal:

The code is revolting, the user interface is opaque and highly buggy, it exhibits the “I know better than the user” interface paradigm as much as almost any system utility I’ve ever seen (note how it’s impossible to run “grub-install” on a root-on-RAID netbsd system because it *ignores* the “impossible” values in the disk map even if the correct values were hand-entered there), it is poorly documented, it doesn’t know how to pass arguments to a modern NetBSD kernel, and, even worse, the support for booting BSD kernels *at all* relies on header files copied directly from an old version of FreeBSD with their copyrights stripped off in blatant violation of the BSD license.

For some reason, support for the SMBFS filesystem (used to mount SMB shares, as used by Samba and Windows) is not in the NetBSD/sparc64 GENERIC kernel, even though it works and mount_smbfs(8) is part of the base system. As per this mail from Martin Husemann, to add SMBFS support, the following need to be added to the kernel configuration file:
file-system SMBFS
pseudo-device nsmb


Quite straightforward. As small as the changes are, I’ve submitted a patch for review, and if that’s OK, I’ll create a problem report with the patch attached.

Update: Hubert Feyrer has committed my patch.

On Sunday I installed NetBSD 3.0 on my laptop, an HP Compaq nc6220. I didn’t have a recent copy of -current available, so my plan was to install 3.0 and then upgrade once I’d downloaded a fresh -current. As GRUB was already installed in the MBR, I decided to use it as my bootloader.

The NetBSD installation went very smoothly, and I installed into a primary partition that I’d left empty when installing Debian GNU/Linux (/dev/hda3 in Linux terminology). Once the installation was complete, I booted into Linux and edited my /boot/grub/menu.list to add NetBSD. I added the following entries:

title NetBSD 3.0
root (hd0,2,a)
rootnoverify (hd0,2,a)
chainloader +1

Once that was done, NetBSD appeared in my GRUB menu and booted like a charm. More on my NetBSD laptop experiences in a later post…

Today Cherry sent me an updated link to Chuck Cranor’s DSc thesis, which describes the UVM virtual memory system, as used by NetBSD and OpenBSD. It can be grabbed from here (both PDF and PostScript versions). I see the links to it from the NetBSD site have been fixed – when I was hunting for the dissertation a few months back, all the links were still pointing to old, non-existent locations.

As a follow-up to Hubert Feyrer’s post, I see that GPLHost (name notwithstanding) offer NetBSD/xen hosting. Prices are quite competitive when compared to the other virtual server providers and they seem quite flexbile (if you provide them with an OS image that can run under Xen, they’ll setup the domU for you).