End of life for 3.x

In keeping with NetBSD's policy of supporting only the current (5.x) and next most recent (4.x) release branches, the release of 5.0 marks the end of life for the 3.x branches. We have provided an extra month of support for 3.x in order to give people time to migrate their machines to a newer release, and this one month period will be part of our support policy in the future.

The following branches will no longer be maintained:

• netbsd-3-0
• netbsd-3-1
• netbsd-3

This means:

• There will be no more pullups to the branches (even for security issues)
• There will be no security advisories made for any of the 3.x releases
• The existing 3.x releases on ftp.NetBSD.org will be moved into /pub/NetBSD-archive/

Here's hoping 5.0 serves you all as well (but preferably much better) as 3.0 did!

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Announcing NetBSD 5.0

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am proud to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system, is now available.

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

This improved performance is the result of a rewritten threading subsystem based on a 1:1 threading model, new kernel synchronization primitives, kernel preemption, a rewritten scheduler implementation, real-time scheduling extensions, processor sets, and dynamic CPU sets for thread affinity. Almost all core kernel subsystems, like virtual memory, memory allocators, file system frameworks for major file systems, and others were audited and overhauled to make use of highly concurrent algorithms.

In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL, Write Ahead Physical Block Logging), the 'jemalloc' memory allocator, the X.Org X11 distribution instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers.

For full details, please see the 5.0 release notes.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.0 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/

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News from the 5.0 front

Today, on the 16th birthday of NetBSD, I have the pleasure of announcing the availability of NetBSD 5.0_RC3.

Below are some highlighted changes since RC2:

• Considerable improvements to WAPBL.
• Further X.Org refinements, including switching sgimips to X.Org.
• Scheduler Activations support is now disabled by default in sysctl.conf.
• ddb.onpanic is now set to 1 in the kernel by default, but 0 in sysctl.conf. This avoids trying to dump if a crash occurs during the install phase.
• puffs is now enabled by default on amd64, i386, macppc, and sparc64.
• SSP kernels should work again.
• A handful of assorted stability improvements.

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BSDtalk interview with Andrew Doran

Will Backman (BSDtalk) interviews Andrew Doran about the upcoming 5.0 release and highlights some of the major features of the new release.

You can listen to the interview here.

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NetBSD 5.0 release engineering news

Some news from the 5.0 release engineering team - we're currently in the final stages of the release process for what will be NetBSD 5.0. Binaries are available for Release Candidate 2, and we'd appreciate feedback from everyone on those binaries.

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