NetBSD LLVM sanitizers and GDB regression test suite, Ada—The Language of Cost Savings, Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD, FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transition to Git, OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged, Project Trident 12-U5 update now available, and more.

As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay.

I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite.

I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current NetBSD sources state. I have also merged another chunk of the fruits of the GSoC-2018 project with fuzzing the userland (by plusun@).

Inspired by lutris (a Linux gaming platform), we would like to provide a game launcher to play windows games on FreeBSD.

Many myths surround the Ada programming language, but it continues to be used and evolve at the same time. And while the increased adoption of Ada and SPARK, its provable subset, is slow, it’s noticeable. Ada already addresses more of the features found in found in heavily used embedded languages like C+ and C#. It also tackles problems addressed by upcoming languages like Rust.

Chris concludes, “Development technologies have a profound impact on one of the largest and most variable costs associated with embedded-system engineering—labor. At a time when on-time system deployment can not only impact customer satisfaction, but access to services revenue streams, engineering team efficiency is at a premium. Our research showed that programming language choices can have significant influence in this area, leading to shorter projects, better schedules and, ultimately, lower development costs. While a variety of factors can influence and dictate language choice, our research showed that Ada’s evolution has made it an increasingly compelling option for engineering organizations, providing both technically and financially sound solution.”

In general, Ada already makes embedded “programming in the large” much easier by handling issues that aren’t even addressed in other languages. Though these features are often provided by third-party software, it results in inconsistent practices among developers. Ada also supports the gamut of embedded platforms from systems like Arm’s Cortex-M through supercomputers. Learning Ada isn’t as hard as one might think and the benefits can be significant.

Core approved source commit bits for Doug Moore (dougm), Chuck Silvers (chs), Brandon Bergren (bdragon), and a vendor commit bit for Scott Phillips (scottph).

The annual developer survey closed on 2019-04-02. Of the 397 developers, 243 took the survey with an average completion time of 12 minutes. The public survey closed on 2019-05-13. It was taken by 3637 users and had a 79% completion rate. A presentation of the survey results took place at BSDCan 2019.

The core team voted to appoint a working group to explore transitioning our source code 'source of truth' from Subversion to Git. Core asked Ed Maste to chair the group as Ed has been researching this topic for some time. For example, Ed gave a MeetBSD 2018 talk on the topic.

There is a variety of viewpoints within core regarding where and how to host a Git repository, however core feels that Git is the prudent path forward.

Preliminary release notes

Improved hardware support, including:

This is the fifth general package update to the STABLE release repository based upon TrueOS 12-Stable.

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