NetBSD 10.0 beta releases, open source UNIX operating system
The NetBSD Project is an international collaborative effort of a large group of people, to produce a freely available and redistributable UNIX-like operating system, NetBSD. In addition to our own work, it contains a variety of other free software, including 4.4BSD Lite2 from the University of California, Berkeley.
One of the primary focuses of the NetBSD project has been to make the base OS highly portable. This has resulted in NetBSD being ported to a large number of hardware platforms. It is also interoperable, implementing many standard APIs and network protocols, and emulating many other systems’ ABIs.
It is distributed in three forms: formal releases, maintenance branches, and NetBSD-current. Formal releases are done periodically and include well-tested binaries, source code, and installation tools. Maintenance branches usually provide bug and security fixes and minor enhancements. NetBSD-current is a nightly distribution of the latest development sources, meant for people who want the absolute latest software, and don’t mind an occasional bug.
It is largely supported by users, via Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and direct contributions. If you’re having a problem, it’s likely that someone will have seen it before and will be able to help you.
Changelog v10.0 beta
While NetBSD 10.0 is expected to be a major milestone on performance, especially on multi-core systems, currently the BETA builds have some extra kernel diagnostics enabled that may reduce performance somewhat.
Among the features you can expect to find in NetBSD 10 are reworked cryptography, including compatibility with WireGuardⓇ, automatic swap encryption, new disk encryption methods, and CPU acceleration in the kernel. In hardware support, there are updated GPU drivers from Linux 5.6, support for more ARM hardware (including Rockchip RK356X, NXP i.MX 8M, Amlogic G12¸ Apple M1, and Raspberry Pi 4), support for new security features found in the latest ARM CPUs, and support for Realtek 2.5 gigabit and new Intel 10/25/40 gigabit ethernet adapters. compat_linux has been ported to AArch64 and DTrace has been ported to MIPS. For retrocomputing enthusiasts, there’s improved multiprocessor support on Alpha, and more iMac G5 support. The Xen hypervisor support has received a major rework. There are various new userspace programs, including blkdiscard(8) to manually TRIM a disk, aiomixer(1) to control audio volume, realpath(1), and fsck_udf(8). And loads more…
