• Mateusz Kocielski
• Jeff Rizzo
• Leonardo Taccari
• Martin Husemann
• Pierre Pronchery
• Antti Kantee
• Christos Zoulas

If you feel like getting involved, run NetBSD, subscribe to our mailing lists to become part of our community, and have a look at our projects page. Particular areas that are always welcome for contributions are code and documentation, but there is much more. Have a look!

[Tags: interview, Release]

``We will be creating the netbsd-7 CVS branch on or about July 26th, just under two weeks from today. The creation of this branch will mark the start of the Beta period, which is expected to last into September. Between now and branch time, our focus is on fixing bugs, updating documentation, and ensuring that the basics (build, installation, boot) work on as many platforms as possible. ''

In case you have some spare cycles, check out riz' mail for hints on how to help contributing to the release process.

[Tags: Release]

To save you from searching, here is the list of relevant changes from the release notes:

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 6.0.1 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

P.S.: Don't miss out on the end of NetBSD 2012 fundraise!

[Tags: Release, Security]

Very well seconded!

[Tags: Release]

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.0, the fourteenth
major release of the NetBSD operating system. Changes from the
previous release include scalability improvements on multi-core
systems, many new and updated device drivers, Xen and MIPS port
improvements, and brand new features such as a new packet filter.

Some NetBSD 6.0 highlights are: support for thread-local storage
(TLS), Logical Volume Manager (LVM) functionality, rewritten disk
quota subsystem, new subsystems to handle flash devices and NAND
controllers, an experimental CHFS file system designed for flash
devices, support for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol,
and more. This release also introduces NPF - a new packet filter,
designed with multi-core systems in mind, which can do TCP/IP traffic
filtering, stateful inspection, and network address translation (NAT).

In addition to many other features, NetBSD 6.0 includes significant
developments in various ports. Some highlights:

o SMP support for Xen domU kernels, initial suspend/resume support for
  Xen domU, PCI pass-through support for Xen3, and addition of the
  balloon driver.

o Major rework of MIPS port adding support for SMP and 64-bit (O32,
  N32, N64 ABIs are supported) processors, DSP v2 ASE extension, various
  NetLogic/RMI processor models, Loongson family processors, and new SoC
  boards.

o Improved SMP on PowerPC port and added support for Book E Freescale
  MPC85xx (e500 core) processors.

o ARM has gained support for Cortex-A8 processors, various new SoCs,
  and initial support for Raspberry Pi. Full support for Raspberry Pi
  and major ARM improvements to come in a future NetBSD release.

o time_t is now a 64-bit quantity on all NetBSD ports. This means that
  the NetBSD world no longer ends in 2037.

Please read the release notes for a full list of changes in NetBSD 6.0:

http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html

The generous donations of companies and individuals to the NetBSD
Foundation in previous years has enabled TNF to sponsor some exciting
developments in NetBSD 6.0, including the Xen DOMU multiprocessor
support. See our donations page for information about how you or your
company can donate to help sponsor future projects!  Complete source
and binaries for NetBSD 6.0 are available for download at many sites
around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS,
SUP, and other services may be found at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/

We encourage users who wish to install via ISO or USB disk images to
download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the
images area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 6.0 distribution has been
signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security
Officer:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-6.0_hashes.asc

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and
may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services
are available via our mailing lists and website. Commercial support is
available from a variety of sources. More extensive information on
NetBSD is available from our website:

http://www.NetBSD.org/

Dedication 
----------

NetBSD 6.0 is dedicated to the memory of Allen Briggs, who
passed away in March of 2012.

Allen's technical contributions to NetBSD were significant, and
many. He was a NetBSD developer from the very beginning of the
project, and was the main driving force behind the initial import of
some of our hardware ports. He also served on NetBSD's core team from
2003 until 2006. More than that, however, he was a mentor to many on
the project, and always willing to help when he could. Even for those
he didn't mentor, his civilized example was often a guiding
influence. He worked with many of us on the project, and in a field
where prickly personalities are common, he was always pleasant and
kind regardless of your status or technical expertise. He will be
sorely missed.

Acknowledgments
--------------- 

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have
contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our
servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and
other resources over the years. More information on the people who
make NetBSD happen is available at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/people/

We would like to especially thank the University of California at
Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code
that we use. We would also like to thank the Internet Systems
Consortium Inc., the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's
Computer Science Department, and Ludd (Lulea Academic Computer
Society) computer society at Lulea University of Technology for
current colocation services.

• In preparation of the NetBSD 5.0 release, a lot of documentation updates were made, esp. in the release notes. Also, many manual pages were added to the system, documenting existing userland tools, library, system and internal interfaces.

• Following some re-organization of binary packages on ftp.NetBSD.org some time ago, the official URLs are now:
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  • ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/current-packages/NetBSD/{MACHINE}/{VERSION}/All
  Both should have the same results, the latter is more safe on mirrors that don't carry /pub/pkgsrc. Adjust your PKG_PATHs!

• Syntax for /etc/rc.conf's ifconfig_xxN variables and /etc/ifconfig.xxN was changed to also allow line breaks via ';'s. This allows something like ifconfig_wi0="ssid 'my network'; dhcp"

• Martin Schuette's work on syslogNG from Google Summer of Code 2008 is now available in NetBSD's syslog

• X.org integration is advancing in big steps. It's on by default on a number of platforms (including alpha, i386, macppc, shark, sparc and sparc64), and instead of using the (now obsolete) MKXORG build variable it can be build with "build.sh -x".

• Old-style LKMs are dead, welcome to the new module framework! (XXX Documentation???) In the process, more and more kernel subsystems are being changed to be loadable as a module, e.g. POSIX AIO and semaphores, File System Snapshots, emulations, exec formats, coredump, NFS client and server, http and data accept filters, ppp compressors, and others.

  Hooks into UVM have been added to unload unused kernel modules if memory is scarce.

• MAKEVERBOSE now has two new levels, 3 and 4. The complete list is now:
  • 0 Minimal output ("quiet")
  • 1 Describe what is occurring
  • 2 Describe what is occurring and echo the actual command
  • 3 Ignore the effect of the "@" prefix in make commands
  • 4 Trace shell commands using the shell's -x flag
  The default remains MAKEVERBOSE=2, you can also set this via build.sh's -N switch.

• A POSIX conformant tabs(1) utility was added

• The haad-dm branch was merged to NetBSD-current. This adds Logical Volumen Management (LVM) functionality to the base NetBSD system. It uses Linux LVM2 tools and our BSD licensed device-mapper driver.

• The wrstuden-revivesa branch was merged into NetBSD-current, bringing Scheduler Activation based threading back to NetBSD, and giving NetBSD 5.0 and up both SA and 1:1 threads.

• Support for the ARM-based Cortina Systems SL3516 eval board was added to NetBSD/evbarm

• patch(1) got a major overhaul, based on DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD. There's better detection of double applied patches, rejected diffs remain in unified diff format, and and less limitation e.g. on line length.

• pxeboot now understands boot.cfg

• Boot CD ISO creation has been greatly overhauled, accomodating changes in boot.cfg, and moving away from a ramdisk-based system to using a file system on the cd-rom, which helps reduce RAM usage. Also, the GENERIC kernel can be used there.

• makefs(8)'s ISO-9660 (cdrom) support was enhanced to write RISC OS data. This allows to make bootable CDs for acorn{26,32} directly, without copying the bootloader to a native file system.

• The christos-time_t branch has been merged into NetBSD-current. This gives 64bit time_t and dev_t types (no more year 2038-problem!!!).

  Many related places like timeval and timespec were adjusted, kernel and userland APIs were touched, and shared library major versions (including libc) were bumped for this fairly exhaustive change.

  See src/UPDATING's entry on 20090110 for the full update path!

• New/updated drivers:
  • jme(4) for JMicron Technologies JME250 Gigabit Ethernet and JME260 Fast Ethernet PCI Express controllers
  • u3g(4) provides better support for 3G datacards than ugensa
  • dbcool(4) for dbCool(tm) family of Thermal Monitor and Fan Controller
  • ataraid(4) now supports Intel MatrixRAID and JMicron RAID
  • bwi(4) for Broadcom BCM4302 wlan controllers, otherwise known as Airport Extreme
  • alipm(4) for the Acer Labs M7101 Power Manage- ment controller
  • admtemp(4) for the Analog Devices ADM1021, Analog Devices ADM1023, Analog Devices ADM1032, Genesys Logic GL523SM, Global Mixed-mode Technology G781, Maxim 1617, and Xeon embedded temperature sensors
  • ipw(4),iwi(4),wpi(4),iwn(4): We ship the firmware now, but users have to accept the Intel license manually by setting sysctls like hw.ipw.accept_eula=1. The latter is also offered by sysinst.
  • nsp(4) adds support for the NSP2000 cryptographic processor which does crypto, hashing and arbitrary precision arithmetics in hardware, and which hooks into the opencrypto(9) interface.
  • pseye(4) makes the Sony Playstation Eye USB webcam usable with the new video(4) framework
  • ath(4) now uses the recently-released source-based version of the Atheros HAL, no more binary blob!

• Introduction
• Release engineering, Sendmail, and kauth
• PaX, fileassoc, and Veriexec
• Linux compat, XFree86, pkgsrc, proplib, and Xen
• Filesystems
• iSCSI and optical disc support
• Bluetooth, mobile devices, agr
• Google Summer of Code
• Hackathons and funding