The NetBSD Project announced the second release candidate for NetBSD 9.0, sixth months after the start of the release engineering process for 9.0. This is the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. After getting feedback, the NetBSD Project plans to announce a quick and smooth release on February 14, 2020.
What’s new?
The second release candidate for NetBSD 9.0 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. It comes with hardware support, security, and quality assurance support, many improvements.
- 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
It is available to download NetBSD 9.0 RC2 from the NetBSD Project’s main CDN or use a mirror site. There are many sites that users can reach complete source and binaries for NetBSD 9.0 RC2.