2025-09-27 –, Gray Hall
I'd like to give a talk about a standardized development environment for
hacking on netbsd on linux and macOS by crosscompiling.
- how the enviroment is set up
- what supporting software is used
- best pracices like logging build output etc.
- how to do netbsd development on it
- cross compiling on the host
- debugging in the vm
- testing in the vm
Background:
For my 2025 GSoC student I wanted us both to work in a standardized
development environment. So that I could more easily troubleshoot the
problems he would be having and to make it easier for him to do things the
right way. Afterall, he was in southern India and I'm in Europe and I don't
have remote access to his workstation.
Also he was running Ubuntu while my main laptop runs macOS. I do have a
machine running Debian that I can accesss over the network, however.
To that end I formalized the historically grown scripts I use for netbsd
development into something that could be shared with my student.
That worked out rather well.
This year I started to convert the instructions and documentation from last
year into documents that are to be published on the netbsd wiki.
I also updated and enhanced my tools for this year's student.
I do have a large collection of notes that I'd like to use as basis for the
talk.
I've started using Unix and Unix system programming in the mid-80s,
early on implementing a TCP/IP stack on System V R3. I've been a NetBSD
user from day one and a contributor from early on. Finally becoming a
developer in '98 participating in early pkgsrc and kernel development.
My main interests are file system, networking, performance, observability,
containerization, systems automation and system automatability.
I've worked with NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD and a lot of Linux.