I haven’t posted any news for some time but NetBSD development is moving forward nevertheless. Just recently netbsd-8 branch have been created which marked the beginning of the NetBSD 8.0 release process.

According to official NetBSD blog there is no strict timeline for the release date but there is a believe it will be shorter than previous major releases. New release will finally support USB 3 by default, sdmmc will include UHS-I and HS200 transfer modes, audio system was overhauled as well,  ARM support was greatly improved and many other fixes and improvements were introduced for various platforms supported by the system.

You can test it by downloading latest binaries or fetching sources and building manually from netbsd-8 source branch.

GSoC should be already underway and the NetBSD project selected three  students to work on multi-packages support  to pkgsrc (Leonardo Taccari), LFS cleanup (Maya Rashish) and Anita support for multiple virtual machine systems and more architectures within them  to improve testing coverage (Utkarsh Anand).

Besides NetBSD news Hubert Feyrer released 2.6 version of his NetBSD based g4u disk cloning utility after five years of updating and testing. You can download it here.