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.

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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]

 

NetBSD 7.0.1 released

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0.1, the first 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 7.0.1.

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, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[1 comment]

 

End of life for NetBSD 5.x on November 9

In keeping with NetBSD's policy of supporting only the current (7.x) and next most recent (6.x) release majors, the release of NetBSD 7.0 marks the end of life for the 5.x branches. As in the past, a month of overlapping support is being provided in order to ease the migration to newer releases.

On November 9, the following branches will no longer be maintained:

• netbsd-5-2
• netbsd-5-1
• netbsd-5

Furthermore:

• There will be no more pullups to the branches (even for security issues)
• There will be no security advisories made for any of the 5.x releases
• The existing 5.x releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive/

We hope 7.0 serves you well!

[0 comments]

 

Announcing NetBSD 7.0

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0, the fifteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features. Some highlights of the NetBSD 7.0 release are:

• DRM/KMS support brings accelerated graphics to x86 systems using modern Intel and Radeon devices.
• Multiprocessor ARM support.
• Support for many new ARM boards:
  • Raspberry Pi 2
  • ODROID-C1
  • BeagleBoard, BeagleBone, BeagleBone Black
  • MiraBox
  • Allwinner A20, A31: Cubieboard2, Cubietruck, Banana Pi, etc.
  • Freescale i.MX50, i.MX51: Kobo Touch, Netwalker
  • Xilinx Zynq: Parallella, ZedBoard
• Major NPF improvements:
  • BPF with just-in-time (JIT) compilation by default.
  • Support for dynamic rules.
  • Support for static (stateless) NAT.
  • Support for IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Prefix Translation (NPTv6) as per RFC 6296.
  • Support for CDB based tables (uses perfect hashing and guarantees lock-free O(1) lookups).
• Multiprocessor support in the USB subsystem.
• blacklistd(8), a new daemon that integrates with packet filters to dynamically protect other network daemons such as ssh, named, and ftpd from network break-in attempts.
• Numerous improvements in the handling of disk wedges (see dkctl(8) for information about wedges).
• GPT support in sysinst via the extended partitioning menu.
• Lua kernel scripting.
• epoc32, a new port which supports Psion EPOC PDAs.
• GCC 4.8.4, which brings support for C++11.
• Optional fully BSD-licensed C/C++ runtime env: compiler_rt, libc++, libcxxrt.

For a more complete list of changes in NetBSD 7.0, see the release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 7.0 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/.

If NetBSD makes your life better, please consider making a donation to The NetBSD Foundation in order to support the continued development of this fine operating system. As a non-profit organization with no commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users. Your donation helps us fund large development projects, cover operating expenses, and keep the servers alive. For information about donating, visit http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/

[10 comments]