Announcing NetBSD 1.5

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.5 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports thirty-one different system families and twelve different CPU families, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more.

NetBSD 1.5 continues our long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements (including integration of IPsec, SSH and Kerberos 5), and support for many new platforms and peripherals.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 1.5 are available for download at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.5/ and many of our mirror sites. A list of mirror sites is provided at the end of this announcement.

About NetBSD

The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD runs on thirty-one different system architectures featuring twelve distinct families of CPUs, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.5 release contains complete binary releases for twenty different machine types.

NetBSD is a highly integrated system. In addition to its highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools, all accompanied by full source code. We also support third party software (including the KDE and GNOME desktops) through our package system.

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 web site. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources; some are listed at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/consultants.html

More extensive information on NetBSD is available from our web site at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/

NetBSD is the work of a diverse group of people spread around the world. The `Net' in our name is a tribute to the Internet, which enables us to communicate and share code, and without which the project would not exist.

System families supported by NetBSD 1.5

The NetBSD 1.5 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems:

Ports available in source form only for this release include the following:

Major changes between 1.4 and 1.5

It is difficult to completely summarize the extensive development between the 1.4 and 1.5 releases. Some highlights include:

Kernel

Ports to new platforms including: arc, cobalt, hpcmips, news68k, sgimips, and sparc64.
Improved performance and stability of the UVM virtual memory subsystem.
Implementation of generic kernel locking code, as well as a restructure and re-tuning of the scheduler, to be used by the future symmetric multi-processing (SMP) implementation.
Improved compatibility support for Linux, OSF1, and SVR4 programs.
New compatibility support for Win32 programs.
Support for dynamically loaded ELF kernel modules.
Kernel process tracing using ktruss(1).
Deletion of swap devices using swapctl(8).
Easier hot-swapping of keyboards and mice using a new wscons multiplexing device - wsmux.
Improved PCMCIA and CardBus support, including support for detaching of devices and cards, resulting in better support for notebooks and PDA devices.
Numerous hardware improvements, including areas such as: audio, UDMA/66 support for ATA drives, USB, and wireless networking.

Networking

Addition of IP version 6 (IPv6) and IPsec to the networking stack, from the KAME project. This includes addition of kernel code for IPv6/IPsec and conversion of most clients and daemons to support both IPv4 and IPv6 (including RPC and NFS over IPv6).
Integration of TI-RPC, and a more `secure' rpcbind(8) (supporting communication over an authenticated Unix-domain socket, and by default only allowing set and unset requests over that channel).
Integration of OpenSSL, SSH and Heimdal. (More on this under `Security'.)

File Systems

Significant performance enhancements to the Berkeley Fast File System, primarily due to integration of Kirk McKusick's soft updates and `trickle sync' code. Several reliability issues were also fixed separately.
Support for the Windows NT `NTFS' file system (read-only at this stage).
Support for revision 1 of the Linux `ext2fs' file system.
Enhanced stability and usability of LFS (the BSD log-structured file system).
Various RAIDframe enhancements including: auto-detection of RAID components and auto-configuration of RAID sets, and the ability to configure the root file system (/) on a RAID set.
Support for Microsoft Joliet extensions to the ISO 9660 CD file system.
Improved file system vnode locking mechanisms, thus resolving a source of several panics in the past.
Support for RPC and NFS over IPv6.
Server part of NFS locking (implemented by rpc.lockd(8)) now works.

Security

Strong cryptographic libraries and applications integrated, including the AES cipher Rijndael, the OpenSSL library, more complete Kerberos IV and Kerberos V support (from the Heimdal project), and an SSH server and client (based on OpenSSH).
sysctl(3) interfaces to various elements of process and system information, allowing programs such as ps(1), dmesg(1) and the like to operate without recompilation after kernel upgrades, and removing the necessity to run setgid kmem (thus improving system security).
Disable various services by default, and set the default options for disabled daemons to a higher level of logging.
Several code audits were performed. One audit replaced string routines that were used without bound checking, and another one to identify and disable places where format strings were used in an unsafe way, allowing arbitrary data entered by (possibly) malicious users to overwrite application code, and leading from Denial of Service attacks to compromised system.

System administration and user tools

Conversion of the rc(8) system startup and shutdown scripts to an `rc.d' mechanism, with separate control scripts for each service, and appropriate dependency ordering provided by rcorder(8).
postfix(1) provided as alternative mail transport agent to sendmail(8).
User management tools useradd(8), usermod(8), userdel(8), groupadd(8), groupmod(8), and groupdel(8) added to the system.
Incorporation of a login class capability database (/etc/login.conf) from BSD/OS.
Improved support for usernames longer than eight characters in programs such as at(1) and w(1).
Many enhancements to ftpd(8) providing features found in larger and less secure FTP daemons, such as user classes, connection limits, improved support for virtual hosting, transfer statistics, transfer rate throttling, and support for various IETF ftpext working group extensions.
The ftp(1) client has been improved even further, including transfer rate throttling, improved URL support, command line uploads. See the man page for details.

Miscellaneous

Transition of i386 and sparc platforms from a.out to the SVR4 ELF executable format. (Other platforms using a.out will be converted in future releases.)
Addition of many SUSv2 features to the curses(3) library, including support for color.
Updates of most third party packages that are shipped in the base system, including file(1), ipfilter(4), ppp(4), sendmail(8), named(8) and dhcpd(8) to the latest stable releases.
Many new packages in the pkgsrc system, including the open source desktops KDE and GNOME, as well as the latest Tcl/Tk, perl and many of the components of the Java Enterprise platform. The package framework itself now has full wildcard dependency support.
Updates to the NetBSD source code style guide (located in /usr/share/misc/style) to use ANSI C only (instead of K&R) and reflect current best practice, and begin migrating the NetBSD source code to follow it.

And of course there have also been innumerable bug fixes and other miscellaneous enhancements. Kernel interfaces have continued to be refined, and more subsystems and device drivers are shared among the different ports. You can look for this trend to continue.

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 contributors is available at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/

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, and the Internet Software Consortium, Redback Networks and the Helsinki University of Technology for current colocation services.

Finally, we honor the passing of great pioneers in the fields of networking, operating systems and compression, including W. Richard Stevens, Phil Katz and Mike Muuss. Their contributions have greatly enhanced our lives and made our work possible.

About the NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers.

NetBSD mirror sites

[This section omitted. See our main mirror site list for online sites, and our list of CD-ROM vendors.]

Charles M. Hannum
President, The NetBSD Foundation

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