Due to the unfortunate situation regarding changes in administration on freenode.net, and the resulting chaos, we have decided to move the public NetBSD IRC channels from freenode to irc.libera.chat.

This includes:

• #NetBSD - general discussion
• #netbsd-code - development discussion
• #pkgsrc - pkgsrc (primarily development) discussion

You can find information on connecting to Libera at https://libera.chat/

NetBSD 9.2 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.2 "Nakatomi Socrates", the second update of the NetBSD 9 release branch.

As well as the usual bug, stability, and security fixes, this release includes: support for exporting ZFS filesystems over NFS, various updates to the bozotic HTTP daemon, improvements to ARM 32-bit and Linux compatibility, fread() performance improvements, support for the TP-Link TL-WN821N V6 wireless adapter, support for the Allwinner H5 cryptographic accelerator, Pinebook Pro display brightness fixes, new defaults for kern.maxfiles, and accessibility improvements for the default window manager configuration.

Release notes and download links for NetBSD 9.2

aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news

aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news

GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally (Final report)

This is my second and final report for the Google Summer of Code project I am working on for NetBSD.

My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.

The initial and defined goal of this project was to make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, which had been completed in June. For the second part I was given the task to replace fork+exec calls in our standard shell (sh) in one scenario. Similar to the previous goal we determine through implementation if the initial motivation, to get performance improvements, is correct otherwise we collect metrics for why posix_spawn() in this case should be avoided. This second part meant in practice that I had to add and change code in the kernel, add a new public libc function, and understand shell internals.

Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020

We nearly hit our donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000.
These donations have enabled us to fund significant paid work on NetBSD in 2020.

Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship

Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.

He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.

Allen lived in Blacksburg Virginia with his wife and twin boys and was active with various community volunteer groups. His family touched the families of many other NetBSD developers and those friendships have endured beyond his passing.

We have received the following from Allen's family and decided to share it with the NetBSD community. If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.

https://www.ncssm.edu/donate/distance-education/allen-k-briggs-88-memorial-scholarship

The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen's friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.

Two quick notes on donating: Important! When donating, you must select "Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship" under designation for the donation to be routed to the scholarship If you have the option to use employer matching (i.e., donating to NCSSM through an employer portal to secure a match from your employer), please email the NCSSM Foundation's Director of Development, April Horton (april.horton@ncssm.edu), after donating to let her know you want your gift and employer match to go to the Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship Thanks in advance for your help. I'd be happy to answer any questions you or any others have about this.

NetBSD 9.1 released

NetBSD 9.1, the first maintenance update for the NetBSD 9 branch, has been released

Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD

This post is a follow up of the first report and second report. Post summarizes the work done during the third and final coding period for the Google Summer of Code (GSoc’20) project - Enhance Syzkaller support for NetBSD

The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 5)

• One in the base-system that includes a significant set of local patches.
• Another one in pkgsrc whose patching is limited to mostly build fixes.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on local patching to work. I have set a goal to reduce the number of custom patches to bare minimum, ideally achieving the state of GDB working without any local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]

Wayland on NetBSD - trials and tribulations

After I posted about the new default window manager in NetBSD I got a few questions, including "when is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?", Wayland being X11's "new" rival. In this blog post, hopefully I can explain why we aren't yet!