NetBSD 6 is out!

I pulled the trigger on the release of NetBSD 6.0 this morning, and a huge weight has lifted off my shoulders.    Here's a quick rundown on what I like about NetBSD 6:

• Multiprocessor support for Xen DomU ("guests").  This one is huge!  It puts NetBSD in a great position on various Xen hosting platforms, such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Panix and others.
• NPF, the new NetBSD Packet Filter.  It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's solid and it promises to have great performance, as it's written from scratch with multi-core CPUs in mind.
• Great support on low-power embedded platforms, such as lots of new ARM platforms and PowerPC  MPC85xx.  I just built myself a router for home out of a DreamPlug running NetBSD 6.0, with NPF as a packet filter.  It's working great, and only draws between 9 and 10 watts of power!
• NetBSD's phenomenal build infrastructure.  This isn't new, but it bears repeating:  if you're developing for NetBSD, you can build it on almost any POSIX platform!  I personally have built on NetBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Centos, and MacOS X (recently).  It's one feature I wish all other systems would adopt.

Now to catch my breath and prepare for 6.1, in which we hope to have full support for Raspberry PI and some other new platforms...

NetBSD on Amazon EC2

As some of you know, I've been maintaining Amazon EC2 AMIs running NetBSD for a little while now, and after a few requests, I'm happy to say I've finally cleaned them up to a point where I'm comfortable sharing them with others.

The original scripts these are based on were written by Jean-Yves Migeon, another NetBSD developer.  I've cleaned them up and modified them quite a bit.

To get started rolling your own NetBSD AMIs, you'll need an Amazon EC2 account, and a NetBSD system with the misc/ec2-api-tools package installed.  (Note that as of this writing, you may need to install the required openjdk7 package from source, rather than using a binary package from ftp.netbsd.org;  hopefully this will be fixed soon)  Once the package is installed, you should follow the Amazon documentation on Getting Started with the Command Line Tools for more infomation on the commands that the ec2-api-tools package provides.

The actual scripts can be downloaded here, or you can check them out with CVS from anoncvs.netbsd.org, in the othersrc module, in share/examples/ec2.  Be sure to read the README!

Microsoft, NetBSD, and extensible computing

Antti Kantee, a member of the NetBSD core group (as well as the author of the really cool rump subsystem - which, among other things, has helped fuel the explosion of automated testing which has been occurring recently) has just imported a new port to the NetBSD source tree:  eMIPS (Extensible MIPS), a dynamically extensible processor architecture from Microsoft Research.  The actual port of NetBSD to the platform was done by Alessandro Forin and Neil Pittman of Microsoft, and Microsoft has generously donated the code to The NetBSD Foundation.

I'm still just starting to look into the capabilities, but eMIPS appears to support application-specific hardware optimizations and even machine instructions.  The overview on Microsoft Research's project page for eMIPS says: "Have you ever thought of building your own processor or maybe just defining your own machine instructions? With eMIPS now you can."  Sounds like a really interesting avenue for research, and I eagerly await cool applications based on it.