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Third-party software: inventory, upgrade process, display-stack decision

Status as of July 2026 (devel). This records the results of the 2026-07 external-package audit and the conventions for keeping bundled software current.

Layout

Section titled “Layout”

There is no ports tree. Upstream code is vendored NetBSD-style: pristine (or NetBSD-patched) sources in <pkg>/dist/, BSD reachover Makefiles next to them listing SRCS, and curated config headers outside dist/.

LocationContents
external/{apache2,bsd,gpl2,gpl3,historical,lgpl3,mit,mpl,public-domain}/userland packages by license
crypto/external/apache2/OpenSSL 3.5 LTS
crypto/external/bsd/Heimdal, netpgp, libsaslc
external/lgpl2/userspace-rcu/liburcu (BIND 9.20 dependency)
minix/lib/liblwip/dist/lwIP (the MINIX network stack)
sys/external/bsd/compiler_rt/LLVM runtime

Upgrade process (per package, one commit each)

Section titled “Upgrade process (per package, one commit each)”
  1. Fetch the upstream release tarball; verify its published SHA-256 (GitHub releases API exposes asset digests).
  2. Determine whether dist/ is pristine or NetBSD/MINIX-patched: grep -rl '$NetBSD\|__minix' dist/ and, when in doubt, diff dist/ against the pristine tarball of the currently bundled version.
  3. Pristine dist: replace wholesale. Patched dist: three-way merge (git merge-file) with base = pristine old version, ours = current dist, theirs = new upstream. Never silently drop a __minix guard; check first whether upstream made it obsolete.
  4. Reconcile reachover SRCS lists and curated *config*.h against the new source layout; regenerate generated files (perlasm .S, .pc). OpenSSL x86_64 perlasm regeneration needs LC_ALL=C (localized assembler banners break the GNU-as probe in x86_64-xlate.pl).
  5. Bump shlib_version minor when upstream adds public APIs. Exact shlib minors in distrib/sets/lists/base/shl.mi are not enforced by this fork’s release checks; major bumps do need set-list updates.
  6. Build test: per-package EXTERNAL_TOOLCHAIN=$OBJ/ext-tc $TOOLDIR/bin/nbmake-amd64 dependall (install the lib subdir into DESTDIR first if a bin links against a stale installed archive), then a full build.sh release per batch.

Version status (2026-07 audit)

Section titled “Version status (2026-07 audit)”

Current after the 2026-07 upgrade batch: LLVM/clang 22.1.7, OpenSSL 3.5.7 LTS, expat 2.8.2, zlib 1.3.1, sqlite 3.53.3, less 668, tmux 3.6a, libevent 2.1.13, xz 5.8.3, libarchive 3.8.8, lua 5.4.8, file 5.46, tz 2026a, libpcap 1.10.6, tcpdump 4.99.6 (both resynced from NetBSD-current; ndp vendors gmt2local.c, netstat’s bpf_dump renamed nsbpf_dump), BIND 9.20.24 + liburcu 0.15.0, dhcpcd 10.3.1, bzip2 1.0.8, lwIP 2.2.1. ISC DHCP (server/relay) retired. The batch was validated with a full amd64 release build and a QEMU boot of the ISO to login, running the upgraded binaries in-system.

Landed since the audit, with notes:

  • OpenSSL 3.5.7 LTS landed 2026-07 (resync from NetBSD-current’s crypto/external/apache2/openssl; the 3.0 tree is gone). All nine consumers build unchanged. MINIX specifics: POSIX thread backend with a __minix guard making thread-spawn report unavailable (libc pthread stubs carry the provider/RCU machinery in static binaries; see the “fix 3.5 crypto on MINIX” commit for the failure mode), RSAZ/AVX-IFMA asm excluded, QUIC safe-math macro rename for the NetBSD uint64_t macro collision. Verified in-system: provider loads, RAND/EVP work.

  • BIND 9.20.24 landed 2026-07 (resync from NetBSD-current, with the new liburcu 0.15.0 dependency imported at external/lgpl2 and ported to MINIX). Build and packaging are fully validated; the DNS client tools (dig/host/delv/nsupdate) work in-system. Runtime status (revised after investigation): the initially observed named(8) crashes had two environmental causes, both resolved — the install-CD ramdisk (128 KB /tmp) contaminated early tests, and the OpenSSL 3.5 THREADS_NONE bug (see the openssl fix commit) caused the “PRNG not seeded” aborts of both dig and named. With those fixed, multi-worker named -n 2 starts and stays up on the HD image. Dedicated pthread/TLS/urcu-mb torture tests all pass on MINIX. Root cause found (2026-07-09): the “stall” is a multi-worker issue, not a general lwIP failure. With one worker (named -g -n 1) named is flawless — an authoritative zone answers 10/10 rapid queries correctly, NXDOMAIN and REFUSED behave right, and a minimal UDP request/reply over lo0 also passes, so lwIP loopback UDP is fine. With two or more workers queries stall. BIND 9.20’s netmgr binds one UDP socket per worker on the same address and relies on SO_REUSEPORT to spread packets across them (lib/isc/netmgr/socket.c); MINIX advertises SO_REUSEPORT in its headers but lwIP does not implement it, and BIND’s load-balancing paths are Linux/FreeBSD-only, so the per-worker listeners do not receive traffic correctly. Earlier “intermittent hang” reports were compounded by querying . NS with recursion off (a correct REFUSED, not a hang) and by serial-console repaints garbling scripted output. Resolved 2026-07: SO_REUSEPORT is now implemented (see the lwIP entry below), so the -n 1 workaround is no longer needed. Note the failure was blunter than “stall”: the second worker’s bind(2) failed with EADDRINUSE, since without SO_REUSEPORT lwIP would only share a port under SO_REUSEADDR. named is not part of the default boot (named=NO).

  • lwIP 2.0.2 → 2.2.1 landed 2026-07, together with an implementation of SO_REUSEPORT. lwIP is the network stack and parses packets off the wire; what we shipped predated the fix for CVE-2020-22283 / CVE-2020-22284 (ICMPv6 / 6LoWPAN overflows, fixed in 2.1.3) and we build with IPv6, including reassembly and forwarding, enabled. What the tree actually carried was not release 2.0.2 but a git-master snapshot just after it (upstream 7ffe5bfb); against that true base the local delta was only the patches in minix/lib/liblwip/patches/, so the upgrade was a re-vendor with those rebased. Two traps worth knowing for the next upgrade: upstream now clones a multi-PCB UDP datagram with pbuf_clone(..., PBUF_POOL, ...), which can never succeed here (we set PBUF_POOL_SIZE to 0) and would have silently dropped such datagrams — patch 4 exists for exactly this; and the pbuf_layer enum values are now header offsets rather than ordinals, so PBUF_RAW_TX equals PBUF_RAW without an encapsulation header.

Known-stale, deliberately deferred (each needs its own effort):

  • Bootstrap-entangled and left alone: gmake 3.81, texinfo 4.8, binutils 2.34, flex, nvi, elftoolchain, heimdal 7.8.0 (which is upstream’s newest release anyway), netpgp.
  • netpgp is unmaintained upstream and is a removal candidate rather than an upgrade one, like ISC DHCP before it: its maintained successor is RNP (BSD-3, descends from netpgp, used by Thunderbird), but RNP is C++17/CMake with a Botan-or-OpenSSL backend, which is a poor fit for base — pkgsrc already packages it.

Removed 2026-07 with owner sign-off: GCC 4.8.5 and its gmp/mpfr/mpc dependencies (~312 MB; the trees were never even tracked by git — untracked files on disk plus MKGCC-gated build hooks). The toolchain is clang/LLVM-only; MKGCC=yes is no longer supported.

Display stack decision (2026-07)

Section titled “Display stack decision (2026-07)”

X11 was removed from the tree (commit external/mit/xorg: remove unbuildable X11 reachover scaffolding): what the tree carried was reachover glue for a NetBSD xsrc snapshot (~xorg-server 1.10) that was never part of this repository; MKX11 defaulted to off and could not build. X clients, if ever wanted, come from pkgsrc.

Wayland was evaluated and rejected for now. MINIX lacks the substrate Wayland compositors assume: no DRM/KMS (Linux kernel infrastructure), no evdev/libinput input layer, no epoll/kqueue for libwayland’s event loop, and wl_shm needs stronger shared-mmap semantics than MINIX guarantees. The protocol itself (unix sockets + SCM_RIGHTS fd passing) is within reach if those gaps close.

Chosen direction: modernize the framebuffer path, which already works (UEFI GOP linear-framebuffer console on amd64, rendered by the userspace TTY driver from kinfo.fb_*; VGA text on legacy BIOS; OMAP fb driver on ARM). Roadmap:

  1. DONE 2026-07: x86_64 backend for minix/drivers/video/fb exposing the GOP framebuffer as /dev/fb0 (userspace driver, no new kernel surface); validated under OVMF with a gradient-write test and screendump pixel verification. See the fb backend commit for the coexistence model with the TTY console and noted follow-ups.
  2. DONE 2026-07 (validated, no code needed): the full input stack already exists on amd64 — pckbd handles the PS/2 aux port (IRQ 12, packet assembly) and the input server multiplexes to /dev/mouse0-3//dev/mousemux; verified with QEMU-injected motion/button events and a keyboard regression check. Note for a future GUI: /dev/mousemux is root-only 0600.
  3. Minimal graphics userland on /dev/fb0 — graphics without a display server. In progress 2026-07:
    • DONE: pixman 0.46.4 vendored (external/mit/pixman) — 2D pixel compositing; validated rendering to the GOP framebuffer via /dev/fb0 (screendump: real alpha compositing).
    • DONE: FreeType 2.14.3 vendored (external/mit/freetype) — text; validated anti-aliased glyph rendering composited through pixman onto /dev/fb0.
    • With pixman + freetype + /dev/fb0 + /dev/mouse, the amd64 graphics stack has every core piece for a windowed GUI; an interactive desktop PoC (composite + drag with mouse input) demonstrates it.
    • Follow-ups: pixman SSE2 fast paths; freetype system-zlib/HarfBuzz; a font package (base ships no TTF); a reusable fb toolkit lib.
  4. Optional research milestone once shm-mmap and a poll-based event shim exist: minimal libwayland + custom fb-backend compositor.