BSDSec

deadsimple BSD Security Advisories and Announcements

NetBSD 9.0 release process has started

31 July, 2019 by maya@NetBSD.org | netbsd 

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
    All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board
    configuration.
- 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
    These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the
    syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
- The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all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.

Binaries are available on
https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-9/latest/

Please report any bugs you find!