cmeerw

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
• On machines with no entropy source timing based entropy estimation allows unblocking of the entropy system (like it used to before NetBSD 10.0)
• lots of enhancements for Linux emulation
• new syscall: semtimedop(2)
• lots of enhancements to the riscv port
• various bug fixes

Userland changes

• libm got most (all?) missing long double and transcendental functions
• 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, ...

#NetBSD 11.0 has been branched, and the stabilization process now begins. Pre-release snapshots will be available for users to try soon(tm).

This will be the first release with RISC-V, C23, and POSIX 2024 support.

So today I wanted to talk about a very cool example that Dan put together on the flight home from Sofia, while I was unconscious a few seats over: the ability to, at compile time, ingest a JSON file and turn it into a C++ object.

Herb Sutter just announced that the verdict is in: C++26, the next version of C++, will include compile-time reflection.

Reflection in programming languages means that you have access the code’s own structure. For example, you can take a class, and enumerate its methods. For example, you could receive a class, check whether it contains a method that returns a string, call this method and get the string. Most programming languages have some form of reflection. For example, the good old Java does have complete reflection support.

Today marks a turning point in C++: A few minutes ago, the C++ committee voted the first seven (7) papers for compile-time reflection into draft C++26 to several sustained rounds of applause in the room.

Let’s take a problem that can only be solved with Reflection and compare what the solution would look like between:

• the C++26 value-based model
• the Reflection Technical Specification (TS)’s type-based model

In the agenda we will have reports from:

• board (billc)
• secteam (billc)
• releng (martin)
• core (riastradh)
• finance-exec (riastradh)
• membership-exec (martin, christos)
• pkgsrc-pmc (wiz)
• pkgsrc-security (tm, leot)
• gnats (dh)

• Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD - Dennis O.I
• Asynchronous I/O Framework - Ethan Miller
• Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD - Vasyl Lanko

Each year, the ISO C++ standards committee and the Standard C++ Foundation run this survey to stay in touch with the worldwide C++ community.