News from the 5.0 front

Today, on the 16th birthday of NetBSD, I have the pleasure of announcing the availability of NetBSD 5.0_RC3.

Below are some highlighted changes since RC2:

• Considerable improvements to WAPBL.
• Further X.Org refinements, including switching sgimips to X.Org.
• Scheduler Activations support is now disabled by default in sysctl.conf.
• ddb.onpanic is now set to 1 in the kernel by default, but 0 in sysctl.conf. This avoids trying to dump if a crash occurs during the install phase.
• puffs is now enabled by default on amd64, i386, macppc, and sparc64.
• SSP kernels should work again.
• A handful of assorted stability improvements.

Those who are curious can find the full details in src/doc/CHANGES-5.0.

Binaries of 5.0_RC3 are available for download at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-5-0-RC3/.

Users tracking the upcoming 5.0 release by source can either continue following the netbsd-5 branch or use the netbsd-5-0-RC3 tag.