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 will replace the MINIX libraries in /usr/src/lib and additional libraries from NetBSD will 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. Those who are new to MINIX may also want to read the Step by Step porting Guide for NetBSD userland page which contains a step-by-step guide for importing and cross-compiling NetBSD userland utilities.

• 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.
• After porting an utility, always run the test suites in test/ to check nothing is broken.
• You can debug using gdb. It is available as a package aptly named gdb.

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. See Tracking Current for details on how to do this.
• Clone the current NetBSD reference version source repo, outside the minix source tree, like so:

% git clone git://git.minix3.org/netbsd

• Copy the original over from the netbsd location to its new location in bin/ or usr.bin/, and add the subdir to the Makefile.
• Add the subtree to releasetools/nbsd_ports with the date that you can tell from the netbsd git repo commit log.
• Remove any CVS directories; we don't import those into our git repository.
• 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.
• If you are replacing an existing command, check the command's Makefile to ensure it doesn't implement any other commands. Minix's commands/env for example provided env and printenv which are two different NetBSD commands (usr.bin/env and usr.bin/printenv).
• Remove commands/oldutil AND corresponding manual page entries in man/ if any.
• 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 releasetools/release.sh, third-hottest is command/setup/setup.sh, but they can be anywhere) and make sure the invocation won't break. At minimum do a make clean build and preferably also a cd releasetools && sh release.sh -c, then install from the created ISO, to see if world building and new release bootstrapping still works.
• Add all the new binaries and manual pages of your util to the distrib/sets/lists/minix/m* file(s), and mark the removed ones as obsolete.
• 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. Do not forget to add a comment to docs/UPDATING if there are caveats.
• Such invocations can also be in pkgsrc. Your import should not break pkgsrc. Clone the pkgsrc repository and look in mk/ to see if your utility is mentioned there (possibly by an absolute path). The most likely places are tools.Minix.mk and Minix.mk. Patch those files as needed. pkgsrc is highly configurable and well suited to the locations of NetBSD userland utilities; no symlinking should be required.

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.

Important: some entries have a comment indicating why that entry can not (yet) be ported. While those comments were definitely true at the time they were written, some of them may now be outdated due to improvements made to MINIX 3 since then. Therefore, sometimes it makes sense to take another look at such entries anyway.

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 minix/lib/libc/sys/MISSING_SYSCALLS for the complete list.

• bin/

• usr.bin/

• usr.sbin/

• sbin/

• libexec/

• dist/

• external/

• games/

• gnu/usr.bin/