End of life for NetBSD 6.x

In keeping with NetBSD's policy of supporting only the latest (8.x) and next most recent (7.x) major branches, the recent release of NetBSD 8.0 marks the end of life for NetBSD 6.x. As in the past, a month of overlapping support has been provided in order to ease the migration to newer releases.

As of now, the following branches are no longer maintained:

• netbsd-6-1
• netbsd-6-0
• netbsd-6

This means:

• There will be no more pullups to those branches (even for security issues)
• There will be no security advisories made for any those branches
• The existing 6.x releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive/

May NetBSD 8.0 serve you well! (And if it doesn't, please submit a PR!)

[0 comments]

 

Changes to NetBSD release support policy

The NetBSD release engineering team is announcing a new support policy for our release branches. This affects NetBSD 8.0 and subsequent major releases (9.0, 10.0, etc.). All currently supported releases (6.x and 7.x) will keep their existing support policies.

Beginning with NetBSD 8.0, there will be no more teeny branches (e.g., netbsd-8-0).

This means that netbsd-8 will be the only branch for 8.x and there will be only one category of releases derived from 8.0: update releases. The first update release after 8.0 will be 8.1, the next will be 8.2, and so on. Update releases will contain security and bug fixes, and may contain new features and enhancements that are deemed safe for the release branch.

With this simplification of our support policy, users can expect:

• More frequent releases
• Better long-term support (example: quicker fixes for security issues, since there is only one branch to fix per major release)
• New features and enhancements to make their way to binary releases faster (under our current scheme, no major release has received more than two feature updates in its life)

We understand that users of teeny branches may be concerned about the increased number of changes that update releases will bring. Historically, NetBSD stable branches (e.g., netbsd-7) have been managed very conservatively. Under this new scheme, the release engineering team will be even more strict in what changes we allow on the stable branch. Changes that would create issues with backwards compatibility are not allowed, and any changes made that prove to be problematic will be promptly reverted.

The support policy we've had until now was nice in theory, but it has not worked out in practice. We believe that this change will benefit the situation for vast majority of NetBSD users.

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NetBSD 8.0 released

The NetBSD 8.0 release is available now.

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NetBSD 8.0 Release Candidate 2

The second (and hopefully final) release candidate for NetBSD 8.0 is available now.

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NetBSD 8.0 Release Candidate 1

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0 RC 1, the first release candidate for the upcoming NetBSD 8.0 release.

25 years and a few days after the first official NetBSD release (NetBSD 0.8 on April 19, 1993) we are now quickly approaching the first final release from the netbsd-8 branch that has been in the work for more most of a year now.

The official RC1 announcement list these major changes compared to older releases:

• USB stack rework, USB3 support added
• In-kernel audio mixer
• Reproducible builds
• PaX MPROTECT (W^X) memory protection enforced by default on some architectures with fine-grained memory protection and suitable ELF formats: i386, amd64, evbarm, landisk, pmax
• PaX ASLR enabled by default on:
  i386, amd64, evbarm, landisk, pmax, sparc64
• MKPIE (position independent executables) by default for userland on: i386, amd64, arm, m68k, mips, sh3, sparc64
• added can(4), a socket layer for CAN busses
• added ipsecif(4) for route-based VPNs
• made part of the network stack MP-safe
NET_MPSAFE kernel option is required to try
• WAPBL stability and performance improvements

Specific to i386 and amd64 CPUs:

• Meltdown mitigation: SVS (separate virtual address spaces)
• Spectre mitigation (support in gcc, used by default for kernels)
• SMAP support
• (U)EFI bootloader

Various new drivers:

• nvme(4) for modern solid state disks
• iwm(4), a driver for Intel Wireless devices (AC7260, AC7265, AC3160...)
• ixg(4): X540, X550 and newer device support.
• ixv(4): Intel 10G Ethernet virtual function driver.
• bta2dpd - new Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile daemon

Many evbarm kernels now use FDT (flat device tree) information (loadable at boot time from an external file) for device configuration, the number of kernels has decreased but the numer of boards has vastly increased.

Lots of updates to 3rd party software included:

• GCC 5.5 with support for Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer
• GDB 7.12
• GNU binutils 2.27
• Clang/LLVM 3.8.1
• OpenSSH 7.6
• OpenSSL 1.0.2k
• mdocml 1.14.1
• acpica 20170303
• ntp 4.2.8p11-o
• dhcpcd 7.0.3
• Lua 5.3.4

The NetBSD developers and the release engineering team have spent a lot of effort to make sure NetBSD 8.0 will be a superb release, but we have not yet fixed most of the accompanying documentation. So the included release notes and install documents will be updated before the final release, and also the above list of major items may lack important things.

Get NetBSD 8.0 RC1 from our CDN (provided by fastly) or one of the ftp mirrors.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

Please test RC1, so we can make the final release the best one ever so far. We are looking forward to your feedback. Please send-pr any bugs or mail us at releng at NetBSD.org for more general comments.

[0 comments]

 

Boosting the NetBSD release handling

Trying to make the NetBSD release process quicker and smoother...
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NetBSD 7.1.2 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.1.2, the second security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 7.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 7.1.2.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[1 comment]

 

NetBSD 7.1.1 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.1.1, the first security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 7.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 7.1.1.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[1 comment]

 

NetBSD 8.0 release process underway

If you've been reading source-changes@, you likely noticed the recent creation of the netbsd-8 branch. If you haven't been reading source-changes@, here's some news: the netbsd-8 branch has been created, signaling the beginning of the release process for NetBSD 8.0.

We don't have a strict timeline for the 8.0 release, but things are looking pretty good at the moment, and we expect this release to happen in a shorter amount of time than the last couple major releases did.

At this point, we would love for folks to test out netbsd-8 and let us know how it goes. A couple of major improvements since 7.0 are the addition of USB 3 support and an overhaul of the audio subsystem, including an in-kernel mixer. Feedback about these areas is particularly desired.

To download the latest binaries built from the netbsd-8 branch, head to http://daily-builds.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-8/

Thanks in advance for helping make NetBSD 8.0 a stellar release!

[7 comments]

 

NetBSD 7.1 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

Some highlights of NetBSD 7.1 are:

• Support for Raspberry Pi Zero.
• Initial DRM/KMS support for NVIDIA graphics cards via nouveau (Disabled by default. Uncomment nouveau and nouveaufb in your kernel config to test).
• The addition of vioscsi, a driver for the Google Compute Engine disk.
• Linux compatibility improvements, allowing, e.g., the use of Adobe Flash Player 24.
• wm(4):
  • C2000 KX and 2.5G support.
  • Wake On Lan support.
  • 82575 and newer SERDES based systems now work.
• ODROID-C1 Ethernet now works.
• Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[2 comments]

 

NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available

7.1_RC1 is out! Help us by testing it![Read More] [1 comment]

 

NetBSD 7.0.2 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0.2, the second security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 7.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 7.0.2.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[2 comments]