Announcing Release Candidate 1 for NetBSD 6.0

On behalf of NetBSD developers, I'm happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of NetBSD 6.0.

Binaries of NetBSD 6.0_RC1 are available for download at:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.0_RC1/

ISO images and (for amd64 and i386) images suitable for installing from USB sticks or other hard drives, and torrent files for downloading via BitTorrent are also available, as well as Amazon EC2 machine images and .xva files for use with Citrix XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform.

Fixes since NetBSD 6.0_BETA2

Thanks to tremendous testing support from the community, we are very pleased with the state of this release candidate. A number of improvements and fixes have been made since NetBSD 6.0_BETA2. Here's a sampling:

• Fixed bugs in iscsid target handling and with large writes to iscsi devices
• Fixed some amd64 trap-handling issues
• Lots of fixes and improvements for npf(4)
• Renamed wake(8) to wakeonlan(8)
• Pass "boothowto" from the bootloader to the kernel on sparc/sparc64
• various PUFFS/libperfuse fixes in support of glusterfs on NetBSD
• Update BIND to 9.9.1-P2 to address CVE-2012-1667, CVE-2012-3817 and CVE-2012-3868
• Build SQLite with SQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_DATA to address PR/46322
• Fix bootstrapping the build system on some Linux distributions
• Enable wsfb X server on vax
• Prevent a crash when mmap()ing a block device. PR/38889
• Sort vif and vbd device IDs on Xen so attach order is consistent
• Make xf86-video-intel and i915drm driver work on some Atom + GMA3150 graphics chipsets
• Update Postfix to version 2.8.11
• Add urtw(4) and urtwn(4) wireless drivers
• Switch device database and terminfo database to cdb(5)
• Fixed the first-stage bootloader for Soekris net4801 PR/46027
• Fixed a gcc bug: setjmp vs. unchanged register values PR/45837
• Make all ttyE* entries use the wsvt25 term type PR/10127
• Fix a bad interaction between ps(1) and ptyfs(4) PR/40813
• Use HOST_SH instead of sh for MAKEDEV for cross builds PR/46537
• Add support for Intel I350 Ethernet to the wm(4) driver
• Fix several critical bugs in the x68k port
• Remove wrong claims in md5(1) PR/44160
• Support rc_directories in rc.shutdown PR/46601
• Stop routed(8) from losing kernel routes PR/44647
• Fix lack of carrier on hme(4) on some sparc64 machines PR/46424
• Fix a panic triggered by ktrace -p PR/46591
• Avoid failing upgrades due to spurious errors PR/12020
• Use 32KB/4KB for default block/fragment size on >= 128 GB partitions PR/46629
• Fix gem(4) recovery after a receiver overflow PR/46260
• Improved support for disk "wedges"
• Fix a crash that can happen transferring large blocks over a network. PR/43240
• Improve linux32 compat
• Changed root's default shell to /bin/sh
• Fixed issues booting from CD-ROM on some i386 and amd64 systems
• Update to tzdata2012e
• Avoid sending bad RA packets with rtadvd(8) PR/46580
• Fix calling setroot(9) twice PR/46732
• Add initial support for the RaspberryPI, sufficient to boot multiuser and access the gpio header pins via serial console, but no USB or network support yet
• Fix cc -fpie on sparc and sparc64 PR/46724
• Don't create BSD-style pty nodes by default, since ptyfs is mounted by default.
• Update OpenSSL to version 1.0.1c with AES-NI patch.
• Switch off DIAGNOSTIC and/or DEBUG on release kernels
• Fix problem with mmap and program exit PR/46807
• Don't panic when shutting down a bridge(4) PR/46587
• Fix locale issues in static binaries PR/46781
• Make a number of USB memory sticks and SD card readers work which were not usable before.

Please continue to report problems and to help us test!

Known Issues

There are a small number of known issues which we expect to have fixed before the release. These fixes may require a second release candidate:

• The OpenSSL update caused the major number of some libraries to be bumped; some software which uses these libraries may need to be recompiled from NetBSD 6.0_BETA2 and earlier, or binary packages may need to be reinstalled.
• The vax port has a shared library problem and is not bootable in NetBSD 6.0_RC1.
• ntpd(4) broadcast operation is not working
• A panic can happen when an nfs rename operation fails
• The i386 port may not boot correctly on a 486 system
• A kernel with options DIAGNOSTICmay panic if an isp(4) card is installed
• Xen: an amd64 DOM0 can not start X11 PR/46634

As always, please help us out by testing these changes and reporting problems either to an appropriate mailing list, via send-pr, or via the web form:

http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd

Thanks again for your help in making NetBSD 6.0 the best release yet!