NetBSD 9.0 release process has started


July 31, 2019 posted by Maya Rashish

If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items that we worked on:
  • New AArch64 architecture support:
    • Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE)
    • Support for running 32-bit binaries
    • UEFI and ACPI support
    • Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware.
  • The FDT-ization of many ARM boards:
    • the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations
    • the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations
    • All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board configurations.
  • Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to Kaby Lake based Intel graphics devices.
  • ZFS has been updated to a modern version and seen many bugfixes.
  • New hardware-accelerated virtualization via NVMM.
  • NPF performance improvements and bug fixes. A new lookup algorithm, thmap, is now the default.
  • NVMe performance improvements
  • Optional kernel ASLR support, and partial kernel ASLR for the default configuration.
  • Kernel sanitizers:
    • KLEAK, detecting memory leaks
    • KASAN, detecting memory overruns
    • KUBSAN, detecting undefined behaviour
    • These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
  • The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all of its drivers
  • The installer is now capable of performing GPT UEFI installations.
  • Dramatically improved support for userland sanitizers, as well as the option to build all of NetBSD's userland using them for bug-finding.
  • Update to graphics userland: Mesa was updated to 18.3.4, and llvmpipe is now available for several architectures, providing 3D graphics even in the absence of a supported GPU.

We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help NetBSD 9.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any bugs you find.

You can find binaries here.

[6 comments]

 



Comments:

Congrats :) Linux 4.4, not 4.19?

Posted by BSDfan on July 31, 2019 at 01:04 PM UTC #

Congratulations team :)

Posted by Jay on July 31, 2019 at 02:46 PM UTC #

I hope Linux 4.18 gonna be in CURRENT soon...I need it :(

Posted by Bruno on July 31, 2019 at 05:21 PM UTC #

Impressive -great work, NetBSD team. :)

Posted by Random on July 31, 2019 at 07:10 PM UTC #

Could you please provide a not full size prep kernel for rs6000 machines? Since the kernel is apparently autobuilt and it is now well over 2AMB and does not fit on a floppy :(

Posted by Lvm on August 01, 2019 at 03:20 PM UTC #

FreeBSD and OpenBSD have switched default compiler from gcc to clang, at least on a few archs like x86_64, aarch64, while NetBSD lagged.Any plan for this?

Posted by lchg on October 24, 2019 at 04:06 PM UTC #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.