NetBSD 9.0 available!

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