First release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available!

Since the start of the release process four months ago a lot of improvements went into the branch - more than 500 pullups were processed!

This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface.

We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 next year).

Here are a few highlights of the new release:

• Support for Arm AArch64 (64-bit Armv8-A) machines, including "Arm ServerReady" compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA)
• Enhanced hardware support for Armv7-A
• Updated GPU drivers (e.g. support for Intel Kabylake)
• Enhanced virtualization support
• Support for hardware-accelerated virtualization (NVMM)
• Support for Performance Monitoring Counters
• Support for Kernel ASLR
• Support several kernel sanitizers (KLEAK, KASAN, KUBSAN)
• Support for userland sanitizers
• Audit of the network stack
• Many improvements in NPF
• Updated ZFS
• Reworked error handling and NCQ support in the SATA subsystem
• Support a common framework for USB Ethernet drivers (usbnet)

You can download binaries of NetBSD 9.0_RC1 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the official release announcement.

Please help us out by testing 9.0_RC1. We love any and all feedback. Report problems through the usual channels (submit a PR or write to the appropriate list). More general feedback is welcome, please mail releng. Your input will help us put the finishing touches on what promises to be a great release!

Enjoy!

Martin