NetBSD Blog

NetBSD 11.0 RC3 available!

2026-04-06T14:13:39+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the third (and probably final) release candidate of the upcoming 11.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

The netbsd-11 release branch is nearly a year old now, so it is high time the 11.0 release makes it to the front stage.

Unfortunately the first release candidate had a few defects that we had to fix, including speed enhancements for the ftp(1) client when downloading large files, an updated tmux(1), reliability fixes for blocklistd(8) and fixes for the Mesa library. See the changes document for details.

Please note that various ISO images have been split into small ones for CD/R media and full featured DVD ones. If you are not restricted by the size limits of a CD/R medium, make sure to pick the image with "-dvd.iso" in the name.

If you want to test 11.0 RC3 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-11 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 11.0 RC2 available!

2026-03-06T20:58:23+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the second release candidate of the upcoming 11.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

The netbsd-11 release branch is nearly a year old now, so it is high time the 11.0 release makes it to the front stage.

If you want to test 11.0 RC2 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-11 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 11.0 RC1 available!

2026-02-08T17:30:05+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming 11.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

The netbsd-11 release branch is nearly a year old now, so it is high time the 11.0 release makes it to the front stage.

If you want to test 11.0 RC1 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-11 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 11.0 release process underway

2025-08-04T09:16:17+00:00

If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-11 branch! It comes with a lot of changes that we have been working on:

Install changes

Compatibility support code, like 32bit on 64bit machines, has been separated into special sets, to allow easy installation of machines that do not need to be able to run 32bit code.

Install media for some architectures has been split in small ("CD/R") images (w/o debug and compat sets), and full ("DVD-R") sets. This is also useful on hardware that came with a CD drive (instead of a DVD drive) and can not boot from a USB stick.

Manual pages come in two flavors, html and mandoc. Both have now their own sets, so one or the other can easily be left out of an installation.

All mac68k and macppc ISO images are now bootable.

Kernel changes

x86: PVH boot is now supported on non-XEN platforms (QEMU, Firecracker)
various new drivers for temperature (and other environmental) sensors and fan control
the heartbeat watchdog will detect locking errors that prevent softints from running or the timecounters from making progress on one of the CPUs
lots of enhancements for Linux emulation
new syscall: semtimedop(2)
new riscv port primarily targeting StarFive JH71XX-based devices
various bug fixes

Userland changes

libc and libm enhancements for C23 and POSIX.1-2024 support
userland support for manipulating/querying (U)EFI variables has been added
jemalloc has been updated to version 5.3
various bug fixes to libpthread and making functions signal safe
lots of miscelaneous bug fixes
the in-tree X.org components are all (well, nearly - there are a few minor/unimportant exceptions) up-to-date

3rd party software updates included

gcc for all architectures is now at version 12.5
gdb for all architectures is now at version 15.1
binutils for all architectures is now at version 2.42
OpenSSL got updated to the latest long term support version available: 3.5.1
OpenSSH is at version 10.0
many others updated, including dhcpcd, openresolv, unbound, nsd, ...

And a lot more...

... that we always forget to mention. The list of changes can be found in the beta build, split into changes upto the creation of the branch and changes pulled up to the branch before the 11.0 release.

Things that did not make it in-time for the branch

A few work-in-progress items unfortunately did not make it into this branch and will not be pulled up. The most missed ones are:

the next round of DRM/KMS updates to enhance x86 and arm graphics support
the big WiFi renewal project

These will happen in HEAD now carefully and after stabilization might be a good reason to create the next major branch earlier.

Please help us test this BETA!

We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help to make NetBSD 11.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any bugs you find.

Binaries are available on NetBSD daily builds and for various ARM based devices (with board dependent boot setup) on arm install images.

Please test NetBSD 11.0_BETA on your hardware and report any bugs you find!

Tentative schedule

No promises, but we will try to make this one of the shortest release cycles ever...

Ideally we will be in release candidate state at EuroBSDCon late in September, and cut the final release early in October.

New build cluster speeds up daily autobuilds

2025-07-24T13:09:58+00:00

Saying goodbye

For several years our autobuild cluster at Columbia University has been providing our CI and produced many official release builds.

Over the years, with new compiler versions and more targets to build, the build times (and space requirements) grew. A lot. A few weeks ago the old cluster needed slightly more then nine and a half hours for a full build of -current.

So it was time to replace the hardware. At the same time we moved to another colocation with better network connectivity.

Preparing for the future

But not only did the hardware age, the CI system we use (a bunch of shell scripts) needed a serious overhaul.

As reported in the last AGM, riastradh@ did most of the work to make the scripts able to deal with mercurial instead of cvs.

This is a necessary step in the preparation of our upcoming move away from cvs, which is now completed. While the build cluster currently (again) runs from cvs, we completed a few full builds from mercurial in the last few weeks.

User visible changes

The cvs runs for builds were purely time driven. To deal with latency between cvs.NetBSD.org and anoncvs.NetBSD.org there was a 10-minute lag built into the system, so all timestamps (the names of the build directories) were exact to the minute only and had a trailing zero.

This does not fit well with modern distributed source control systems. For a hg or git build the cluster fetches the repository state from the master repository and updates the checkout directory to the latest state of a branch (or HEAD). So the repository state dictates the time stamp for the build, not vice versa as we did for cvs.

As a result there is a difference between the time a build is started (wall clock) and the time of the last change of the current branch in the repository (build time or reproducible ID). You can see both times in the status page. Just right now it displays:

Currently building tag HEAD-lint, build 2025-07-22 19:19:02 UTC (started at: 2025-07-22 19:26:40 UTC).
No results yet.

And, obviously, we can now easily skip builds when nothing has changed - which happens often on old branches, but also may happen when all HEAD builds are done before anything new has been committed. Hurry up, you lazy developers!

While we are still running from cvs, the process of checking if anything has changed is quite slow (in the order of five minutes). So you may notice a status display like:

Currently searching for source changes...

while the "cvs update" is crawling. When running from hg (or git) this will be lot faster.

The new hardware

The new cluster consists of four build machines, each equipped with a dual 16 core EPYC CPU and 256 GB of RAM. As a "brain" we have an additional controller node with 32 GB RAM and a (somewhat weaker) Intel CPU. The controller node creates all source sets, does repository operations, and distributes sources but does not perform any building itself.

On the build machines we run each 8 builds in parallel, and each build with low parallelism (-j 4). This tries to saturate all cpus during most of the time of the overall build. Individual builds have several phases with little/reduced possibility of parallelism, e.g., initially during configure runs, or while linking llvm components, or near the end when compressing artefacts. The goal is not to run a single (individual) build as fast as possible, but the whole set of them in as little time overall.

The build log summary

The head of the result page create for each build now tries to give all the details necessary to recreate this particular build, e.g.:

From source dated Tue Jul 22 04:45:13 UTC 2025
Reproducible builds timestamp: 1753159513
Repository: src@cvs:HEAD:20250722044513-xsrc@cvs:HEAD:20250720221743

The two timestamps are the same, one in seconds since the Unix epoch, the other human readable.

The repository ID is, for cvs, again based on timestamps. But for hg or git you will see the typical commit hash values here.

Why a custom CI system?

We considered using an off-the-shelf CI system and customizing it to our needs instead of moving the fully custom build system forward. We also talked to FreeBSD release engineering about it and asked for their experience. Overall the work for customizing an off-the-shelf solution looked roughly equivalent to the work needed now to modify the existing working solution, and we saw no huge benefit for the future picking either of them.

What does our build infrastructure provide?

First and foremost, we can quickly verify if all of our supported branches indeed compile. While developers are supposed to commit only tested changes, usually they build at most one branch and architecture. But sometimes changes have unforeseen consequences, for example an install image of an exotic architecture growing more in size than expected.

Then, in theory, no NetBSD user has to waste any CPU cycles in order to install (for example) NetBSD-current or the latest NetBSD 9 tree. Instead you can simply download an image and install from that — no matter if your architecture is amd64 or a slightly more exotic one (but you will of course always be able to download the source tree and build that if that suits you better).

Note that a supported architecture is not just supported at one point in time and then as time progresses might start collecting dust and not compile anymore, making it hard to merge all current changes back into that tree. Instead once an architecture is supported, our CI system will without rest build that architecture as one of the many we support. Take the rather new Wii port as an example. Now that it is supported, you can at least for the foreseeable future download the latest and greatest NetBSD release, populate an SD card with the image and boot it. Now, in half a year, and in 10 years (and even further down the line).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Two Sigma Investments, LP for providing the space and connectivity for the new build cluster.

NetBSD 10.1 available!

2024-12-19T11:55:00+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first update of the NetBSD 10 release branch NetBSD 10.1! See the release announcement for details.

This release includes 9 months of bug fixes and a few new features after the 10.0 release in March. It also gives those still using older release a good reason to finally update to the NetBSD 10 release branch, even if they avoid dot-zero releases by all means.

If you want to try NetBSD 10.1 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 8.3 released and end of support for netbsd-8

2024-05-07T18:52:08+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.3, the third and final release from the NetBSD 8 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 8.2 in March 2020, as well as some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 8.0.

This also represents the end-of-life for the netbsd-8 release branch. No further security updates will happen. Users running 8.2 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade to a newer branch, preferably the recent NetBSD 10.0 release.

Pkgsrc has already desupported the netbsd-8 branch.

See the full release announcement (including download links).

NetBSD 9.4 released

2024-04-23T05:14:21+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.4, the fourth release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.3 in August 2022, as well as some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.3 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade.

The general NetBSD community is very excited about NetBSD 10.0, the latest NetBSD release, but if for some reason you can not (or do not want to) update to 10.0, it is strongly recommended to update to 9.4. This is especially true for users still using a NetBSD 8.x release as that old release branch will be desupported by the end of April 2024.

Full release notes, including download links

NetBSD 10.0 available!

2024-03-30T19:55:38+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the eighteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system NetBSD 10.0!
See the release announcement for details.

The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the long time it took for the development branch to get ready for branching, a lot of development went into this new release.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

If you want to try NetBSD 10.0 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC6 available!

2024-03-13T23:10:11+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the sixth release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

Since RC1 there have been numerous changes, including major updates to external software included in the release: Postfix, OpenSSH, and the firmware used for Raspberry PI devices. Various issues with RC1 have been fixed, including installer (sysinst) crashes. Lots of architecture specific fixes happend, e.g. various toolchain changes for VAX (so it is now finaly self-hosting again), and kernel changes for macppc, netwinder, and alpha.

For RC3 only few (relatively) minor changes were made, including https certificate verification in libfetch (which is used by pkg_ad(1)), and also improvements to the EFI bootloader to better deal with booting from CD (or in virtual machines ISO images), plus lots of various bug fixes.

RC4 became necessary as a few very important DRM/KMS issues especially for Intel GPUs have been resolved. And as an (unexpected) bonus support for the Nintendo Wii has been added to the evbppc port.

RC5 has a few important security related updates of third party components (named, nsd, unbound, wpa_supplicant).

RC6 fixes a few issues with the new named/bind imported for RC5 plus several minor issues.

Especially on amd64 machines please notes that we got a new DRM/KMS subsystem version, and this may lead to fallout on some hardware. Unfortunately not all known bugs from the release engineering pre-release task list could be fixed in time for this release - we will continue to improve the current state and hope to have more of them solved for the next (10.1) release.

If you want to test 10.0 RC6 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC5 available!

2024-02-28T19:37:19+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the fifth (and probably last) release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

RC4 became necessary as a few very important DRM/KMS issues especially for Intel GPUs have been resolved. And as an (unexpected) bonus support for the Nintendo Wii has been added to the evbppc port.

RC5 has a few important security related updates of third party components (named, nsd, unbound, wpa_supplicant).

If you want to test 10.0 RC5 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available!

2024-02-07T15:58:51+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the fourth (and probably last) release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

RC4 became necessary as a few very important DRM/KMS issues especially for Intel GPUs have been resolved. And as an (unexpected) bonus support for the Nintendo Wii has been added to the evbppc port.

If you want to test 10.0 RC4 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC3 available!

2024-01-17T18:11:06+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the third (and probably last) release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

If you want to test 10.0 RC3 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC2 available!

2024-01-04T08:21:36+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the second (and probably last) release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

If you want to test 10.0 RC2 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the preferred install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 10.0 RC1 available!

2023-11-11T13:56:20+00:00

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming 10.0 release, please help testing!
See the release anouncement for details.

The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the long time it took for the developement branch to get ready for branching, a lot of developement went into this new release.

This also caused the release anouncement to be one of the longest we ever did.

If you want to test 10.0 RC1 please check the installation notes for your architecture and download the prefered install image from the CDN or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from the bootable ARM images page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists or file a problem report.

NetBSD 9.3 released

2022-08-06T13:55:55+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.3, the third release from the NetBSD 9 stable branch.

It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.2 in May 2021, as well some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. Users running 9.2 or an earlier release are strongly recommended to upgrade.

Aside from many bug fixes, 9.3 includes backported improvements to suspend and resume support, various minor additions of new hardware to existing device drivers, compatibility with UDF file systems created on Windows 10, enhanced support for newer Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets, better support for new Intel and AMD Zen 3 chipsets, support for configuring connections to Wi-Fi networks using sysinst(8), support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga, and minor performance improvements for the Xen hypervisor.

The general NetBSD community is very excited about NetBSD 10.0, but it was deemed necessary to make this bug fix release available while we wait for the resolution of some compatibility problems in NetBSD-current concerning FFS Access Control Lists preventing the netbsd-10 release.

Full release notes, including download links

NetBSD 9.2 released

2021-05-17T14:06:03+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.2 "Nakatomi Socrates", the second update of the NetBSD 9 release branch.

As well as the usual bug, stability, and security fixes, this release includes: support for exporting ZFS filesystems over NFS, various updates to the bozotic HTTP daemon, improvements to ARM 32-bit and Linux compatibility, fread() performance improvements, support for the TP-Link TL-WN821N V6 wireless adapter, support for the Allwinner H5 cryptographic accelerator, Pinebook Pro display brightness fixes, new defaults for kern.maxfiles, and accessibility improvements for the default window manager configuration.

Release notes and download links for NetBSD 9.2

NetBSD 9.1 released

2020-10-21T04:19:23+00:00

After a small delay*, the NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first feature and stability maintenance release of the netbsd-9 stable branch.

The new release features (among various other changes) many bug fixes, a few performance enhancements, stability improvements for ZFS and LFS and support for USB security keys in a mode easily usable in Firefox and other applications.

For more details and instructions see the 9.1 announcement.

Get NetBSD 9.1 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 https://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

* for the delay: let us say there was a minor hickup and we took the opportunity to provide up to date timezone files for NetBSD users in Fiji.

Extending support for the NetBSD-7 branch

2020-04-02T12:42:55+00:00

Typically, some time after releasing a new NetBSD major version (such as NetBSD 9.0), we will announce the end-of-life of the N-2 branch, in this case NetBSD-7.

We've decided to hold off on doing that to ensure our users don't feel rushed to perform a major version update on any remote machines, possibly needing to reach the machine if anything goes wrong.

Security fixes will still be made to the NetBSD-7 branch.

We hope you're all safe. Stay home.

NetBSD 8.2 is available!

2020-04-02T12:42:51+00:00

The third release in the NetBSD-8 is now available.

This release includes all the security fixes in NetBSD-8 up until this point, and other fixes deemed important for stability.

Some highlights include:

x86: fixed regression in booting old CPUs
x86: Hyper-V Gen.2 VM framebuffer support
httpd(8): fixed various security issues
ixg(4): various fixes / improvements
x86 efiboot: add tftp support, fix issues on machines with many memory segments, improve graphics mode logic to work on more machines.
Various kernel memory info leaks fixes
Update expat to 2.2.8
Fix ryzen USB issues and support xHCI version 3.10.
Accept root device specification as NAME=label.
Add multiboot 2 support to x86 bootloaders.
Fix for CVE-2019-9506: 'Key Negotiation of Bluetooth' attack.
nouveau: limit the supported devices and fix firmware loading.
radeon: fix loading of the TAHITI VCE firmware.
named(8): stop using obsolete dnssec-lookaside.

You can download binaries of NetBSD 8.2 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the CHANGES-8.2 file.

Please note that we are looking for donations again, see Fundraising 2020.

Enjoy!

Maya

NetBSD 9.0 available!

2020-02-15T14:56:08+00:00

Sixth months after the start of the release engineering process, NetBSD 9.0 is now available.

Since the start of the release process a lot of improvements went into the branch - over 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 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the official release announcement.

Please note that we are looking for donations again, see Fundraising 2020.

Enjoy!

Martin

Second (final) release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available!

2020-02-02T21:35:33+00:00

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!

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

First release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 available!

2019-12-02T15:54:09+00:00

Since the start of the release process four months ago a lot of improvements went into the branch - more than 500 pullups were processed!

We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 next 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_RC1 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the official release announcement.

Please help us out by testing 9.0_RC1. 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

NetBSD 9.0 release process has started

2019-07-31T07:46:57+00:00

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
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
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.

NetBSD 8.1 available

2019-06-05T12:08:44+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.1, the first feature and stability maintenance release of the netbsd-8 stable branch.

Besides the workarounds for the latest CPU specific vulnerabilities, this also includes many bug fixes and a few selected new drivers. For more details and instructions see the 8.1 announcement.

Get NetBSD 8.1 from our CDN (provided by fastly) or one of the ftp mirrors.

NetBSD 8.1 Release Candidate 1

2019-05-20T13:30:42+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.1 RC1, the first (and hopefully final) release candidate for the upcoming NetBSD 8.1 release.

Over the last year, many changes have been made to the NetBSD 8 stable branch. As a stable branch the release engineering team and the NetBSD developers are conservative with changes to this branch and many users rely on the binaries from our regular auto-builds for production use. Now it is high time to cut a formal release, right before we go into the next release cycle with the upcoming branch for NetBSD 9.

Besides the workarounds for the latest CPU specific vulnerabilities, this also includes many bug fixes and a few selected new drivers. For more details and instructions see the 8.1 RC1 announcement.

Get NetBSD 8.1 RC1 from our CDN (provided by fastly) or one of the ftp mirrors.

Please test RC1, we are looking forward to your feedback. Please send-pr any bugs or mail us at releng at NetBSD.org for more general comments.

NetBSD 7.2 released

2018-09-03T13:30:02+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.2, the second 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.

If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD and are (for whatever reasons) not able to update to the latest major release, NetBSD 8.0, we suggest updating to 7.2.

For more details, please see the release notes.

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

End of life for NetBSD 6.x

2018-08-23T06:20:38+00:00

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!)

Changes to NetBSD release support policy

2018-07-25T16:36:15+00:00

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.

NetBSD 8.0 released

2018-07-22T09:00:00+00:00

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0, the sixteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. It represents many bug fixes, additional hardware support and new security features. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 8.0.

For more details, please see the release notes.