Porting NetBSD Userland to MINIX 3

Porting of NetBSD userland to MINIX 3 started with libc, and since then many libraries and utilities have been added to the system. The goal is to remove the utilities in /usr/src/commands and replace them with NetBSD's, and port additional utilities at the same time. Similarly, libraries from NetBSD can replace the MINIX libraries in /usr/src/lib and additional libraries from NetBSD can be added. This page is intended to organize and coordinate the porting effort involved in bringing NetBSD userland utilities and libraries in MINIX 3.

For starters, read Porting Guide, Programming in MINIX 3 and Using NetBSD Code.

• Always remain updated to the master branch in minix repository. Refer to Tracking Current.
• If you want to start porting, first build the system with the latest source. It is worthless trying to port on earlier versions of MINIX 3, as a lot has changed since then in the base system.
• After porting an utility, always run the test suites in test/ to check nothing is broken.
• You can debug using gdb. It is available here. Refer to this message on mailing list for more information (but remember the URL has moved since then.)

There are a few things to keep a keep eye out for. General outline of procedure:

• Use a git clone of current master to base your work on.
• Add your util to the tools/nbsd_ports file.
• Run make nbsd_fetch so that the original netbsd code from the current netbsd import date gets put in /usr/src/nbsdsrc.
• Copy the original over to its new location in bin/ or usr.bin/, and add the subdir to the Makefile.
• Get it working in an as clean a way as possible, i.e. with minimal edits and hacks. If the import can be cleaner by adding a dependency elsewhere (e.g. importing a library), that is preferable to hacking the imported code.
• However: if you decide to do this, import the dependencies *first*, in an earlier commit, using this procedure (it's recursive!), then return to this util.
• Remove commands/oldutil AND corresponding manpage entries in man/ if any, and add your new util in bin/ or usr.bin/, wherever the original is.
• Satisfy yourself that the new utility works. Make sure there are no old copies of the utility lying around that are getting invoked while testing. Find invocations of the utility in the base system (hottest zone is /etc/rc and /usr/etc/rc, second-hottest is tools/release.sh and tools/chrootmake.sh, but they can be anywhere) and make sure the invocation won't break. At minimum do a make clean world and preferably also a sh release.sh -c in tools/ to see if world building and new release bootstrapping still works.
• You may find that the location of the utility changes (from /bin to /usr/bin or vice versa). Sometimes this is a problem, sometimes not. If it is, the best thing to do is keep the new location and fix the problems caused by it. Second-best solution is add a symlink.
• Such invocations can also be in pkgsrc. Clone the pkgsrc repository and look in mk/ to see if your utility is mentioned there (possibly by an absolute path). Your import should not break pkgsrc, and as pkgsrc and base system aren't tightly coupled, adding a symlink to keep that invocation working is probably the only way out.

Congratulations, you have improved the world! Submit your commit for merging with master.

This section lists the libraries and utilities which have been already integrated into the master branch of minix repository.

More often than not, there are ripple effects in case of porting foreign libraries. So, their complete port is spread across many commits. In the following table, only the initial commit is listed. Also, there are always such functions present in these libraries, porting of whose have been disabled due to missing system calls. So, you can start by porting those functions too by implementing the corresponding system call. In case of libc, refer to lib/libc/sys-minix/MISSING_SYSCALLS for the complete list.