Wanna Raspberry?

Demand for a cheap yet powerful computer is pretty high in geek circles. Remember those days when you could take a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or something like that and attach it to your TV to fill next few days with a great fun. Since then, PCs pushed out these tiny home computers. But today, Raspberry Pi — a little credit-card sized sweet computer — is here.

The Raspberry Pi is built on Broadcom BCM2835 system on chip which contains ARM1176 core running at 700MHz, with VideoCore 4 GPU, and has 256 MB of RAM on board. It provides two USB ports, 100Mb/s Ethernet, HDMI and composite video; audio output presented as well. Operating system loaded from SD flash.

Yet more fun is that the initial NetBSD support was just committed to the NetBSD source tree, and the Raspberry Pi can boot into multiuser now. Currently work on device drivers is in progress. USB and Ethernet are planned to be supported next.

Generally, NetBSD support for the ARM1176 core is in very good shape. The largest parts of the code I committed were the update to the plcom serial driver and the infrastructure to support the low level parts of the bcm2835 (interrupt controller, bus_space, and timer) — says Nick Hudson, who did the bringup. However, the porting has some hard nuts to crack: The graphics part is a bit of a challenge. But I hope to get dumb framebuffer support relatively soon. There is a publicly available datasheet for part of bcm2835, but certainly not the video controller.

Matt Thomas, the port-evbarm portmaster, was very knowledgeable and helpful in answering all my questions. I'd like to also thank Stephen Borrill for getting me an RPI in the first place. Stephen spoke to Eben Upton in Cambridge and soon after an RPI arrived — adds Nick.

So, there is a boot log from the very first NetBSD driven RPI board, and work on the device is in full swing. Many people exposed interest, and eventually the Raspberry Pi could became a good alternative for number of well supported, but aging single board computers.

[23 comments]

 

G-REX PCI driver updated

The G-REX bridge driver was updated and now supports all available PCI slots. Functionality of G-REX is now on a par with Mediator 1200 in the NetBSD. [0 comments]

 

Support for Mediator PCI 1200

Support for ELBOX Mediator PCI 1200 has been added. The empb(4) driver is still in development, but already does support numerous PCI cards (like NE2000-compatible network cards, SATALink 3112 controllers and 3Dfx Voodoo 3). [0 comments]

 

World IPv6 Launch

Less than a year ago the Internet Society took leadership in organizing the World IPv6 Day, which was enthusiastically supported by many companies and organizations around the world. And now the world is switching to IPv6 again. This time forever.

Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

The NetBSD Project warmly supports this initiative and is fully ready for the new and shiny IPv6 world.

KAME IPv6 code was merged into NetBSD in June 1999, and is part of NetBSD. Since then, the GENERIC kernel configuration enables IPv6 support by default for most of the architectures (ports). Userland code includes IPv6 support where possible, by default, so no rebuild of userland is necessary even if you switch between an IPv4-only kernel and an IPv4/v6 kernel. The pkgsrc packages collection is also offering IPv6 support for many packages, making it optional where applicable.

Today NetBSD is known as source for a feature-rich mature IPv6 code base, which makes it attractive for networking applications as well as development.

The major Internet resources of the NetBSD Project are directly available via IPv6 through direct names (and have been for years, thanks to our providers). Please visit us at:

http://www.NetBSD.org

http://www.pkgsrc.org

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org, also available as http://ftp.NetBSD.org

ssh://anoncvs.NetBSD.org, also available as pserver://anoncvs.NetBSD.org

http://blog.NetBSD.org

http://wiki.NetBSD.org

Please visit the World IPv6 Launch site at:

http://www.worldipv6launch.org

[2 comments]

 

Start your week with meeting NetBSD

After weekend, on Monday, I usually warming myself up. It's always good to read an interesting article or meet eminent people to set a pitch for the week. This week such a reading was from Billy Toulas of the unixmen.com, popular Unix/Linux online magazine who just interviewed Martin Husemann.

Martin is one of those people with whom the NetBSD Project is strongly associated. He's former member of the NetBSD Board, and today is acting as sparc64 Portmaster and as part of NetBSD Security and Release Engineering teams. But don't be confused with all those loud names — Martin is very friendly man who fantastically can explain complex things.

The reading is interesting and long, and contains a number of amusing little know facts, so take a big popcorn pack, or start build.sh over NetBSD 6.0 BETA2 (just as I did) and enjoy the interview. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD 6.0_BETA2 binaries available for testing

On behalf of NetBSD developers, I'm happy to announce the availability of the second (and final) public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for testing.

Binaries of NetBSD 6.0_BETA2 are available for download at:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.0_BETA2/

ISO images and (for amd64 and i386) images suitable for installing from USB sticks or other hard drives, and torrent files for downloading via BitTorrent are also available, as well as Amazon EC2 machine images and .xva files for use with Citrix XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform.

We are very pleased with the state of NetBSD 6.0_BETA2. With your help, we have made improvements since NetBSD 6.0_BETA. A sampling:

• Fixed PR/39444
• fixes to hdaudio
• fixes to LFS
• fixed detaching ehci(4)
• PR/41673
• PR/44097
• Added the ability to configure RAIDframe components on raw disks.
• Fixed iwi(4) firmware decoding on bigendian platforms.
• more variants supported by mfi(4)
• PR/46217
• Prevent sshd from consuming all available entropy.
• Update pcc to pcc-20120325.
• Power management for bthub(4).
• PR/45829
• PR/46232
• PR/46120
• PR/46284
• Work around some AMD processor errata
• Fixed x86k boot problem
• PR/45131
• PR/46286
• PR/46221
• PR/46282
• PR/46146
• Added mpii(4) driver for LSI Logic Fusion-MPT Message Passing Interface II SAS controllers.
• Many PUFFS fixes
• Several OpenSSL fixes
• PR/46325
• PR/46121
• PR/46391
• PR/41267
• PR/46360
• PR/46408
• PR/46419
• Added tgamma() and tgammaf() to libm
• Avoid a tools build error on Cygwin hosts
• many fixes for building with clang
• switched vax back to gcc 4.1
• Added new sysinst post-install config menu
• PR/46041
• PR/44092
• PR/46101
• PR/46457
• PR/43903

Please continue to report problems and to help us test! We anticipate the first Release Candidate of NetBSD 6.0 in late June/early July.

As always, please help us out by testing these changes and reporting problems either to an appropriate mailing list, via send-pr, or via the web form:

http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd Thanks again for your help in making NetBSD 6.0 the best release yet! [2 comments]

 

Updated X-Surf driver

The new, reworked xsurf(4) driver features support for two clockports present on X-Surf card (in addition to already supported NE2000 ethernet). [0 comments]

 

XM6i ver 0.35

XM6i version 0.35 has been released. Added Mac OS X 10.7 support. [0 comments]

 

PSX16550 now uses MI com driver

PSX16550 fast serial board driver has been switched to using MI com(4) driver. See announcement on port-x68k mailing list for details. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD's Google Summer of Code™ Projects 2012

The following projects have been chosen for Google Summer of Code™ this year (sorted by student's last name):

• Socket option to timestamp UDP packets in the kernel
• Student: Vlad Balan

• TLS (HTTPS) support in net/tnftp
• Student: Miklós HOMOLYA

• Port ASan to NetBSD
• Student: steve

• Sysinst enhancements
• Student: Eugene Lozovoy

• HTree directory indexing for Ext3
• Student: Vyacheslav Matyushin

• NAT-PMP and/or UPnP IGD support for NPF; MiniUPnP integration
• Student: Zoltan Arnold Nagy

• NAT64/46 and NPTv6 integration with NPF
• Student: mpp

Students: thanks for your quality proposals. We're looking forward to quality projects. :) We hope you'll have an interesting, successful, and also fun summer working with us. [1 comment]

 

KuroBox/T4 and TS-TGL support

The KuroBox/T4 and the TeraStation Pro TS-TGL with their special miconV2 power management controller are now supported. [0 comments]

 

Clockport support

The NetBSD finally includes support for clockport-based expansions, thanks to the new clockport(4) layer and a1k2cp(4) backend driver. Also, as a proof of concept, SilverSurfer clockport-based serial port card is now supported by the MI com(4) driver. [0 comments]