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NetBSD

NetBSD

NetBSD was originally derived from the 4.3BSD release from the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, via the Networking/2 and 386BSD releases.
The project began as a result of frustration within the 386BSD developer community with the pace and direction of the operating system's development. The four founders of the NetBSD project, Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles Hannum, felt that a more open development model would be beneficial to the project; one which was centered on portable, clean, correct code.
Their aim was to produce a unified, multi-platform, production-quality, BSD-based operating system. The name "NetBSD" was suggested by de Raadt, based on the importance and growth of networks such as the Internet at that time, and distributed, collaborative nature of its development.

NetBSD 5.0


The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth major 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, benefiting, for example, server, scientific, and software development workloads.

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.

Announcement | Changelog | Download

Release Date: 
Wed, 2009-04-29

NetBSD to participate again in Google's Summer of Code

Fri, 2009-04-03 20:03

For the fifth year in a row, the NetBSD Project has been selected as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code. As in previous years, this provides a great opportunity for students to get paid to hack on NetBSD, learn about contributing to a major open source project and to become part of an exciting community.

Project suggestions | NetBSD Project Application/Proposal HowTo

Release: 
NetBSD
Author: CoolGoose

NetBSD 4: A Force to Be Reckoned With?

Thu, 2009-04-02 23:12

NetBSD 4 is finally out, boasting a long list of feature and speed improvements in the open source operating system. The NetBSD 4.0 comes nearly two years after NetBSD 3.0 was released. As with earlier versions, NetBSD 4 continues to competitively position its BSD variant against its BSD, Linux and Unix peers.

"It's hard to point out a single aspect -- there have been so many improvements," NetBSD developer Geert Hendrickx told InternetNews.com.

Among the improvements in NetBSD 4 is a switch to the latest GCC compiler which is faster and more efficient than its predecessors.

From a user point of view Hendrickx noted that NetBSD 4 now supports the Xen3 open source virtualization hypervisor. He also noted that there is a lot more support for recent consumer hardware including ACPI (define) improvements, a native driver for SATA disks and Bluetooth support.

NetBSD is a derivative of the UC Berkeley's 386BSD Unix with the first NetBSD release appearing back in April of 1993. It competes in the BSD variant space with FreeBSD and OpenBSD and is also considered to be a competitive alternative to Linux as well.

Full Review

Release: 
NetBSD
Author: CoolGoose

Desktop NetBSD project

Tue, 2009-02-17 01:58

An interesting discussion was started by Andrew Doran on the NetBSD mailing list regarding the ease of install of a "modern" desktop for users.

The primary goal for the Desktop NetBSD project is:
Given a NetBSD CD and a reasonably modern x86 computer, make it possible to install a useful desktop system in under 15 minutes, responding to only a few prompts in the process.

All seems to be neatly centralized on a wiki page.

Mailing list post | Wiki entry

Author: CoolGoose

Plans for NetBSD 5.0

Wed, 2008-11-05 00:11

Alistair Crooks posted on the NetBSD announce mailing list the plans for the 5.0 branch.

Some highlights from the 4.0 branch changes:

+ during the development of NetBSD 5.0, the kernel version was bumped
73 times. The previous record was 29
+ there is a new kernel threading model which has better performance
than the previous implementation
+ we have introduced the file system journalling (WAPBL)
functionality, kindly donated by Wasabi Systems
+ much work has been done in the file system arena
+ the Xen port has updated to Xen 3.3, and has support for PAE domains
and amd64 domains (both dom0 and domU)
+ Xorg is now a part of our base system
+ providing multilib functionality (64bit platforms such as amd64 and
sparc64 can now compile and run 32bit binaries seamlessly)
+ almost every subsystem has been improved.
+ our contributed external software has moved to a new framework, so
as to make license issues clearer
+ many more device drivers are present in tree
+ all security-critical software is now compiled by default with stack
protection; this makes stack overflow and stack smashing attacks
more difficult to exploit
+ address space layout randomization is now supported on selected
platforms
+ NetBSD now supports creating position independent executables (PIE)
that can completely randomize the layout of stack, code, data, shared
library layout per executable invocation

Read the announcement.

Author: CoolGoose

NetBSD 4.0.1

Wed, 2008-10-15 11:57

Have no fear NetBSD 4.0.1 is here.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that update 4.0.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 4.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 4.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons, no new features have been added.

Release announcement / Ftp Download / Torrent Download

Author: CoolGoose
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