Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship

Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.

He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.

Allen lived in Blacksburg Virginia with his wife and twin boys and was active with various community volunteer groups. His family touched the families of many other NetBSD developers and those friendships have endured beyond his passing.

We have received the following from Allen's family and decided to share it with the NetBSD community. If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.

https://www.ncssm.edu/donate/distance-education/allen-k-briggs-88-memorial-scholarship

The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen's friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.

Two quick notes on donating: Important! When donating, you must select "Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship" under designation for the donation to be routed to the scholarship If you have the option to use employer matching (i.e., donating to NCSSM through an employer portal to secure a match from your employer), please email the NCSSM Foundation's Director of Development, April Horton (april.horton@ncssm.edu), after donating to let her know you want your gift and employer match to go to the Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship Thanks in advance for your help. I'd be happy to answer any questions you or any others have about this.

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Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current

For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.

In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report and GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report blogs, and describes my progress in the final phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In the third phase, I upgraded to the latest stable version Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) 9.8.0 in pkgsrc-wip, resolved the TODOs and created patches for more test-profiles to fix their installation and runtime errors on NetBSD-current.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report blog and describes my progress in the second phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In this phase, I worked on the automation of the regression suite made using Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and its integration with Anita.

The automation framework consists of two components Phoromatic server, provided by Phoronix Test Suite in pkgsrc, and Anita, a Python tool for automating NetBSD installation.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves developing an automated regression and performance test framework for NetBSD that offers reproducible benchmarking results with detailed history and logs across various hardware & architectures.

To achieve this performance testing framework, I am using the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) which is an open-source, cross-platform automated testing/benchmarking software for Linux, Windows and BSD environments. It allows the creation of new tests using simple XML files and shell scripts and integrates with revision control systems for per-commit regression testing.

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Announcing Google Summer of Code 2020 projects

We are very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:

• Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD
• Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing
• Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally
• Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD
• Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing
• Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment
• Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite

The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.

Please welcome all our students and a big good luck to students and mentors!

A big thank you to Google and The NetBSD Foundation organization mentors and administrators!

Looking forward to having another nice Google Summer of Code!

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Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, third evaluation report

This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.

This report encompasses the progress of the project during the third coding period. You can make sense of the overall progress of the project by going through the first evaluation report and second evaluation report.

Wine-4.4 (released on Mar 2019) is working fine on amd64 and i386. I have been able to use a script as a workaround for the problem of setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH. My patch for setting guard size to 0 and hence, precluding Wine from segfaulting, that got upstreamed, can be found here. I have updated the package to the latest development version of Wine which is Wine-4.13 (released on Aug 2019). I have added support to Wine pkgsrc packages to run tests using make test, and at the time of writing, they are failing. I have also noticed them fail on Linux non-pkgsrc environment and hence, will require further investigation. Initially, they were disabled owing to pkgsrc setting FORTIFY_SOURCE which is a macro that provides support for detecting buffer overflows. In pkgsrc, the wip/wine* packages honor PKGSRC_USE_FORTIFY variable passing _FORTIFY_SOURCE macro accordingly. Programs compiled with FORTIFY_SOURCE substitute wrappers for commonly used libc functions that don't do bounds checking regularly, but could in some cases. Wine unconditionally disables that via their configure script because for some platforms that triggered false positives in the past. However, in my experience, no false positive were found.

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Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, second evaluation report

This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.

This report encompasses the progress of the project during the second coding period.

As getting Wine to work with WoW64 support was of foremost importance, my focus was on compat32 dependency packages without which Wine's functionality would be limited and more importantly untestable. Initially, being unaware of what to expect, I just wanted Wine to run, at the earliest. So, with outmost support from mentors, the consensus was to install libs from 32-bit packages to ${PREFIX}/lib/32 and ignore everything else that came with the respective packages.

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Implementation of DRM ioctl Support for NetBSD kernel

This report was prepared by Surya P as a part of Google Summer of Code 2019

Enabling support of DRM ioctls in linux emulation.

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Porting NetBSD to HummingBoard Pulse, Part 1

This report was written by Saurav Prakash as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.

My venture into the first phase of The Google Summer of Code is nearing an end. The experience was enriching in every dimension, and the learning exposure I was subjected to was genuinely worthwhile. Here is a brief report on the work I have performed during this coding period.

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Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, first evaluation report

This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019.

I have been working on porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD as a GSoC 2019 project. Wine is a compatibility layer which allows running Microsoft Windows applications on POSIX-complaint operating systems. This report provides an overview of the progress of the project during the first coding period.

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LLDB from trunk is running on NetBSD once again!

Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

Originally, LLDB was ported to NetBSD by Kamil Rytarowski. However, multiple upstream changes and lack of continuous testing have resulted in decline of support. So far we haven't been able to restore the previous state.

In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. LLDB used to work on NetBSD before but the support recently regressed. Therefore, my four first goals as detailed in the previous report were:

1. Restore tracing in LLDB for NetBSD (i386/amd64/aarch64) for single-threaded applications.

2. Restore execution of LLDB regression tests, unless there is need for a significant LLDB or kernel work, mark detected bugs as failing or unsupported ones.

3. Enable execution of LLDB regression tests on the buildbot in order to catch regressions.

4. Upstream NetBSD (i386/amd64) core(5) support. Develop LLDB regression tests (and the testing framework enhancement) as requested by upstream.

Of those tasks, I consider running regression tests on the buildbot the highest priority. Bisecting regressions post-factum is hard due to long build times, and having continuous integration working is going to be very helpful to maintaining the code long-term.

In this report, I'd like to summarize what I achieved and what technical difficulties I met.

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