I didn’t post for a while, but world is moving on as usual in between. pkgsrc-2021Q2 was released on 28 of June. It was 71s quarterly release and brought big number of updates as usual. You can read release notes here.
NetBSD IRC channels officially moved to irc.libera.chat network back in the end of May.
Unfortunately, the only proposed GSoC project was not selected by Google, but work is still supported by the NetBSD project itself: Support for chdir(2) in posix_spawn(3).
NetBSD 10 still is not branched as of today and no specific plans yet announced about it, but hopefully there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it will happen soon.
There is a lot of progress on NetBSD alpha support from Jason Thorpe. It runs on qemu-system-alpha now, there are lots of improvements for actual hardware as well. If you still have some Alpha system around, give it a try and join port-alpha mailing list. Actually I do have two systems as well untouched for many years, unfortunately one seems to be dead already. May give a try with second one though.
There was one security advisory announced: “NetBSD-SA2021-002 Incorrect permissions in kernfs”, affecting netbsd-current between March 3, 2020 and July 6, 2021 and NetBSD 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 releases. It is advisable to update your kernel with the code after 6 of July to fix the issue.
Many other things are happening behind the scenes as well, including improved support for various ARM based devices like PineBook/PinePhone, but I didn’t keep the right links to share that right now.
Finally, the big moment for me, I became a NetBSD developer myself, thus I can contribute the code directly. And I already started doing that. My current focus is mainly non functional changes, but I will be contributing to some bug fixes and documentation as well on the way forward.