Porting networkmgr to NetBSD

danboid

I recently tried GhostBSD and I was impressed. I liked its wifi config tool which made wifi config and its one of the main things that is missing from NetBSD that would stop me switching from Linux or Ghost/FreeBSD.

I asked the ghostbsd dev about porting networkmgr to NetBSD and he said it wouldn't work as is because it uses FreeBSDs devd:

https://github.com/ghostbsd/networkmgr/issues/80

One quick search later and I found a post recommending devpubd as a NetBSD alternative to devd. I presume this would be the closest match to devd?

https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-8.0/devpubd.8

danboid Maybe you should request this on the NetBSD mailing lists, where the amount of devs in the audience is larger.

Personally, I don't see what's the problem with wpa_supplicant, use it both on NetBSD and on Linux without issues but, to everyone its own.

JuvenalUrbino

danboid One quick search later and I found a post recommending devpubd as a NetBSD alternative to devd. I presume this would be the closest match to devd?

devpubd is really different from devd under the hood and only provides a subset of devd's functionality. That said, some devpubd hooks relying on dmesg, sysctl, ifconfig, wlanctl ....may indeed replace the devd.conf routines installed by networkmgr, while some doas rules may compensate for the absence of the devfs rules systems. Those rules however should be compiled and sourced dynamically at each networkmgr run. A bit tricky, perhaps, but probably doable

JuvenalUrbino

pin Personally, I don't see what's the problem with wpa_supplicant, use it both on NetBSD and on Linux without issues but, to everyone its own.

alas networkmgr is not a supplicant or a dhcp client per se, but a graphical frontend and wrapper for wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd. Very handy indeed.

JuvenalUrbino yes, I'm aware of it.

rgeorgia

I agree with @pin, using wpa_supplicant is super easy and well documented. That being said I am porting (well, trying to port) networkmgr to NetBSD; just as a side project. You know, one of those... "I wonder if I could do that" projects.
There will be a massive amount of change sense the current version of networkmgr uses a lot of FreeBSD commands to pull information about the network cards.
Secondly, networkmgr does use Gtk libraries to create a mate/xfce4 panel icon and configuration GUI. I personally think Eric is totally on the right path here.
Thirdly, as stated above, networkmgr does rely on devd. My (very limited) understanding is that devd monitors devices. When there is a change in device status, networkmgr can be notified. Maybe for NetBSD networkmgr can employ it's own daemon or run in the background watching for changes in networks devices. I don't know.

Jay

rgeorgia do share your repo you are working on. More eyes are better 🙂

danboid

rgeorgia

Good luck with the port and please let us know if/when it reaches a state where it needs testers.

danboid

Have you made any progress with your networkmgr port rgeorgia?

rgeorgia

danboid Have not had the time. I think I will need to take GhostBSD networkmgr and convert it to NetBSD as it's own application. There will be to much to change to make it a simple fork