Sleeping Beauty - NetBSD on Modern Laptops, Jörg Sonnenberger

Modern laptops don't have APM support, just ACPI.  One way to handle suspending is to suspend-to-RAM of the live system.  The more long term suspend requires suspending to disk.

PMF is the new power management system for NetBSD.  It does device power management in layers.   This allows the system and hardware devices to be shutdown in a logical order and properly bail out if a problem is encountered.

It also powers down optional hardware that supports power save or turning off.

It polls devices like audio devices, network devices, etc to capture their state and restore the state on resume.

It implements an event interface that allows you to send event notifications to specific devices or the whole system.  Events that are already implemented include things like lid close/open, etc.

Much of the ACPI code in NetBSD was rewritten to support PMF.  The ACPI Embedded Controller code was rewritten to use a dedicated kernel thread for handling SCIs.

You can see all the slides here:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/joerg/asiabsdcon2008/powermanagement.html

GraceTech builds human-friendly computer with wood and NetBSD

I found this news item over at Hubert's blog.  A wooden computer is just awesome.

Google News pointed me at Austrian company Gracetech today, founded by a long-time visionaire and NetBSD user Raphael Langerhorst. The website is currently only available in German language, but the product in focus here is announced under the label "Unified Computing". It unifies hardware, operating system and the user environment in a unique experience. This is implemented with a hardware that's built of a wooden(!) case around an ARM CPU running the NetBSD operating system. The user environment is built by GraceTech's own G Universe system. See the flyer for more information. 

Lourival Vieira Neto, Lunatik for NetBSD

Lourival Vieira Neto has just completed his Google Summer of Code project -- NetBSD kernel scripting with Lua.    He describes this as "port of the Lua interpreter to the kernel" which means that NetBSD now has a scripting language embedded directly in the kernel.

Lunatik allows regular scripts to run and execute directly in the kernel.  It even includes an interactive command line.

He seemed to have quite a bit of fun with naming.  From the documentation: "This instance is called Lunatik State."

I'm not entirely sure what I'd do with an interactive command line into the kernel, but it sure sounds fun.

Process Isolation for NetBSD and OpenBSD, Kristaps Dzonsons