The NetBSD project seems to agree with me that code generated by “AI” like Copilot is tainted, and cannot be used safely. The project’s added a new guideline banning the use of code generated by such tools from being added to NetBSD unless explicitly permitted by “core“, NetBSD’s equivalent, roughly, of “technical management”.

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

↫ NetBSD Commit Guidelines

GitHub Copilot is copyright infringement and open source license violation at an industrial scale, and as I keep reiterating – the fact Microsoft is not training Copilot on its own closed-source code tells you all you need to know about what Microsoft thinks about the legality of Copilot.

NetBSD 10 and NetBSD 9.4 were only recently released, leaving one final branch to receive what will be its last update: NetBSD 8.3. NetBSD 8.0 was originally released in 2018, so this final release marks six years of updates, which is a good track record, especially now that two newer main releases are available to choose from. With 8.3 being the final release, this means no more regular or security updates, pkgsrc no longer supports the 8.0 branch either – so yeah, time to upgrade.

NetBSD 8.3 brings various updates and bug fixes for libX11, xterm, tmux, and httpd, and the root name servers and time zone data have been updated to their latest iterations as well. There’s of course a full list of changes to peruse through if you want to know every little detail that’s changed. You can update your installation in-place, of course, or download the installation media for 8.3 from one of the many mirrors.

The big question – does all this have a future? The good news is that all new hardware has generic support in X. Someone writes either a modesetting kernel driver or a classical wsdisplay kernel driver and they will be automatically supported by the associated drivers in X. The bad news is that to have applications running we require access to a larger open source ecosystem, and that ecosystem has a lot of churn and is easily distracted by shiny new squirrels. The process of upstreaming stuff to X.Org is an ongoing process, but it’s likely we’ll run into things that will never be suitable for upstream.

↫ Nia Alarie on the NetBSD blog

I had no idea NetBSD did such heavy customisations of its X.Org implementation, many of which have never made their way upstream. The project also maintains support for several older GPUs, uses its own input driver, and more – it’s quite impressive.

Hot on the heels of NetBSD 10.0 comes NetBSD 9.4, a minor release in the previous release branch.

NetBSD 9.4 is primarily a bug and security fix release, however, there are some new features, such as support for more MegaRAID controllers, ZTE MF112 and D-Link DWM222 USB 3G modems, and improved CPU feature detection for newer AMD/Intel devices. All users of netbsd-9 should upgrade if they are not following the stable branch.

↫ NetBSD 9.4 release announcement

A very important note here is that the version of OpenSSL in NetBSD 9.4 is no longer supported unless you have a support contract with OpenSSL. They suggest upgrading to NetBSD 10.0, or to use OpenSSL from pkgsrc.

SmolBSD is a tiny BSD UNIX (NetBSD) system creation tool, primarily aimed at building modern, lightweight, fast micro VMs. SmolBSD can start a service in (way) under a second, giving it the ability to be used as a virtualized container, thus reducing attack surface and actually isolating workflows.

↫ SmolBSD website

Neat.

NetBSD 10.0 has been released, and it brings a lot of improvements, new features, and fixes compared to the previous release, 9.3. First and foremost, there are massive performance improvements when it comes to compute and filesystem-bound applications on multicore and multiprocessor systems. NetBSD 10.0 also brings WireGuard support compatible with implementations on other systems, although this is still experimental.

There’s also a lot of added support for various ARM SoCs and boards, including Apple’s M1 chip, and there’s new support for compat_linux on AArch64, for running Linux programs. Of course, there’s also a ton of new and updated drivers, notably the graphics drivers which are now synced to Linux 5.6, bringing a ton of improvements with them.

This is just a small sliver of all the changes, so be sure to read the entire release announcement for everything else.