Hi, it looks like the opencrypto framework has been ported to NetBSD Thanks to Johathan Stone. It looks like a merge between the OpenBSD code and the FreeBSD code.

For more info check out the email here:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2003/07/25/0000.html

Todd Vierling has created kernel diffs and an installer wrapper script that makes it possible to run CrossOver Office (the commercial version of Wine supported by CodeWeavers) on NetBSD/i386, under Linux binary emulation.

These fixes are definitely a work-in-progress, and most applications still do _not_ run well in this configuration, thanks to an as yet unknown Linux emulation bug that trips up the MS Installer. However, a small handful of apps have been tested to work.

Quentin Garnier has made a loadable kernel module (LKM) version of the NVidia drivers on NetBSD. This release is very preliminary, rough and mostly meant to test the installation procedure. You will need a NetBSD-current system but the code itself should be quite backward compatible with some caveats. For example, you need 'options KVM86' in your kernel config. Known working hardware includes RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (PCI), GeForce2 MX/MX 400, Vanta(AGP) and more!

Joel Wilsson recently announced his updated port of PF for NetBSD 1.6.1. Based on the PF code found in the recently released OpenBSD 3.3 [story], Joel's port is loaded into NetBSD as a kernel module and currently lacks support for ALTQ or IPv6. However, looking forward he says, "I know some of you want support for IPv6, and don't worry, it's coming. Some time next week I hope to have a set of patches against NetBSD-current that will give us a fully featured pf for NetBSD." Joel's goal is to eventually have PF integrated into the NetBSD -current tree.

The OpenBSD packet filter was also recently ported to FreeBSD by Pyun YongHyeon [story]. Pyun's port continues to evolve, having reached version 1.0 and now begining to support ALTQ.

The NetBSD Project
is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 and earlier, with binary releases for 40 ports,
and of course also including NetBSD's Packages Collection. A complete list of changes can be found in CHANGES-1.6.1. Please use a mirror close to you.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System. The very first
commit to the NetBSD source tree (src/Makefile) was
by Chris Demetriou on Friday 21 March, 1993. Parties are being held in
various cities around the world...

David Laight implemented a new algorithm for pid allocation and proc/pgrp lookups. Main benefits include that searches aren't required when doing pid and pgrp lookups by id, smaller footprint, better scalability, and cleaner locking.

As he explained in his announcement mail:

"The basic idea is to ensure that you allocate a pid number which
references an empty slot in the lookup table. To do this a FIFO freelist
is linked through the free slots of the lookup table."

Andrew Brown has committed changes to -current implementing a new ``topdown'' uvm. With these changes, the areas for heap growth and mmap(2)'ed allocations, which used to be separate, are now one and the same, allowing either one to grow much larger than before. As an example, on i386 it is now possible to mmap(2) over 2GB of memory! Furthermore, the work leading up to this has already dramatically reduced the number of entries in the kernel's map.

At the moment, this option is available for the i386, macppc, prep and the PowerPC OEA based ports, but particularly ports with small amounts of virtual memory such as the acorn26 benefit from these changes.

Alistair Crooks has created the pkgsrc-1-6-1 branch from current to correspond with the upcoming release of NetBSD 1.6.1. Like the previous pkgsrc-1-6 branch, this branch provides a stable, known working set of packages which will have only security and build fixes applied. It is intended for systems where stability is preferred over bleeding-edge packages, and also for slower systems which can find it difficult to keep up with the flux of pkgsrc-current.

The NetBSD Project recently announced that it is working towards a 1.6.1 patch release. This maintenance release will include all security fixes and patches that have been applied since the release of NetBSD 1.6 [story] in mid-September of 2002. Follow the 1.6.1 release process here. Jan Schaumann's announcement follows.

Following last October's merge for SMP support [story], NetBSD has now merged support for native pthreads. The implementation by Nathan Williams and Jason Thorpe is a two-level thread system known as Scheduler Activations, as described in this very interesting and informative usenix paper by Nathan Williams. In a recent posting to the NetBSD-announce mailing list, Jan Schaumann explained:

"With the Scheduler Activations based work that Jason and Nathan made, this is a very efficient implementation that can map N userland threads to M kernel threads, and there is no need to have one kernel thread for each userland thread, like some other systems (used to?) have, and which kills performance for many threads."

For a complete explanation of the recent merge, read on for Jan's full email.

Emmanuel Dreyfus recently noted that progress has been made with NetBSD's Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer. Specifically, "WindowServer is able to talk with mach_init and it runs for quite a long time before crashing. Next steps are to fix the emulation bugs that cause WindowServer to crash, and then to re-implement enough of Darwin's IOKit to get WindowServer actually displaying something." (WindowServer being MacOS X's equivalent of an X server.)

According to the project's home page, "Once we will have a fully functionnal Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc (if that happens some day), we will just have to grab MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes." Learn more about binary emulation with NetBSD here.

Jaromir Dolecek announced today that kqueue has been merged into the -current NetBSD kernel tree. kqueue has been ported from Jonathan Lemon's FreeBSD code by Luke Mewburn, Jason Thorpe and Jaromir.

kqueue is a kernel event notification mechanism, providing "a generic method of notifying the user when an event happens or a condition holds, based on the results of small pieces of kernel code termed filters." Jaromir explains that the mechanism would be most beneficial to applications watching large sets of of infrequently changing descriptors currently utilizing poll() or select(), such as web servers, proxies or irc daemons. He also points out that using kqueue would make file managers that frequently stat directories and files to detect changes much more efficient. Read on for Jaromir's full explanation.

Based on an anonymous submission: The i386 -current branch of NetBSD now has support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). According to the NetBSD news page, "Frank van der Linden has merged Bill Sommerfeld's i386mp branch into i386/-current. i386 SMP support should work fine on 1-CPU systems and quite well on a lot of multiprocessor systems." Read on for Frank's announcement of the i386mp merge.

Luke Mewburn recently announced that the -current branch of NetBSD has recently switched to being a fully dynamically linked system. That is to say, even binaries in /bin and /sbin are dynamically linked to libraries in /lib. The end result is a smaller / (root) directory, saving about 11.5 MB on an i386 system. A new /rescue directory adds around 2.5 MB of statically linked "rescue" binaries, so the net space savings is still around 9 MB.

Work is actively being done to speed the start-up times of dynamically linked binaries, which is typically slower then that of statically linked binaries. Read on for the full explanation, and links to much discussion on the change.