NetBSD 11.0 release process underway

If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-11 branch! It comes with a lot of changes that we have been working on:

Install changes

Compatibility support code, like 32bit on 64bit machines, has been separated into special sets, to allow easy installation of machines that do not need to be able to run 32bit code.

Install media for some architectures has been split in small ("CD/R") images (w/o debug and compat sets), and full ("DVD-R") sets. This is also useful on hardware that came with a CD drive (instead of a DVD drive) and can not boot from a USB stick.

Manual pages come in two flavors, html and mandoc. Both have now their own sets, so one or the other can easily be left out of an installation.

All mac68k and macppc ISO images are now bootable.

Kernel changes

• x86: PVH boot is now supported on non-XEN platforms (QEMU, Firecracker)
• various new drivers for temperature (and other environmental) sensors and fan control
• the heartbeat watchdog will detect locking errors that prevent softints from running or the timecounters from making progress on one of the CPUs
• lots of enhancements for Linux emulation
• new syscall: semtimedop(2)
• new riscv port primarily targeting StarFive JH71XX-based devices
• various bug fixes

Userland changes

• libc and libm enhancements for C23 and POSIX.1-2024 support
• userland support for manipulating/querying (U)EFI variables has been added
• jemalloc has been updated to version 5.3
• various bug fixes to libpthread and making functions signal safe
• lots of miscelaneous bug fixes
• the in-tree X.org components are all (well, nearly - there are a few minor/unimportant exceptions) up-to-date

3rd party software updates included

• gcc for all architectures is now at version 12.5
• gdb for all architectures is now at version 15.1
• binutils for all architectures is now at version 2.42
• OpenSSL got updated to the latest long term support version available: 3.5.1
• OpenSSH is at version 10.0
• many others updated, including dhcpcd, openresolv, unbound, nsd, ...

And a lot more...

... that we always forget to mention. The list of changes can be found in the beta build, split into changes upto the creation of the branch and changes pulled up to the branch before the 11.0 release.

Things that did not make it in-time for the branch

A few work-in-progress items unfortunately did not make it into this branch and will not be pulled up. The most missed ones are:

• the next round of DRM/KMS updates to enhance x86 and arm graphics support
• the big WiFi renewal project

These will happen in HEAD now carefully and after stabilization might be a good reason to create the next major branch earlier.

Please help us test this BETA!

We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help to make NetBSD 11.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any bugs you find.

Binaries are available on NetBSD daily builds and for various ARM based devices (with board dependent boot setup) on arm install images.

Please test NetBSD 11.0_BETA on your hardware and report any bugs you find!

Tentative schedule

No promises, but we will try to make this one of the shortest release cycles ever...

Ideally we will be in release candidate state at EuroBSDCon late in September, and cut the final release early in October.