Second (final) release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available!

Sixth months after the start of the release engineering process for 9.0, the second (and most likely final) release candidate is now available.

Shortly after the first release candidate had been published and feedback came it, it became clear that this was not going to be the final state of 9.0. In the end a lot of fixes were done, but we used the opportunity to also incorporate more hardware support (Pinebook Pro) and update a few components (dhcpcd, openssl).

We will be very restrictive with further changes and expect a quick and smooth release from this point on. Tentative release date is February 14, 2020.

Since the start of the release process a lot of improvements went into the branch - nearly 700 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 - hopefully later this 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_RC2 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the official release announcement.

Please help us out by testing 9.0_RC2. 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