Releases
The following table lists major NetBSD releases and their notable features in reverse chronological order. Minor and patch releases are not included.
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Green | Release still supported |
| Red | Release no longer supported |
| Major releases | Release date | Notable features and changes |
|---|---|---|
| 6.0 | 17 October 2012 | Highlights: Support for thread-local storage, Logical Volume Manager 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 the Multiprotocol Label Switching protocol.
This release also introduces NetBSD Packet Filter (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. 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. 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. Improved SMP on PowerPC port and added support for Book E Freescale MPC85xx (e500 core) processors. ARM has gained support for Cortex-A8 processors, various new SoCs, and initial support for Raspberry Pi. To address the year 2038 problem, time_t was extended to 64-bit type on all NetBSD ports. |
| 5.0 | 29 April 2009 | Rewritten threading subsystem based on a 1:1 model and rewritten scheduler implementation. Support for kernel preemption, POSIX real-time scheduling extensions, processor-sets, and dynamic CPU sets for thread affinity. Added jemalloc memory allocator. A metadata journaling for FFS, known as WAPBL (Write Ahead Physical Block Logging). Rewritten kernel modules framework, which will replace old LKMs. Use of X.Org rather than XFree86 by default for i386 and amd64 ports, and introduction of drm(4)/DRI for 3d hardware acceleration. |
| 4.0 | 19 December 2007 | Added support for slab allocator, iSCSI target, CARP, tmpfs, Xen 3, the Kernel Authorization framework, Veriexec and other security extensions, and a Bluetooth protocol suite. |
| 3.0 | 23 December 2005 | Support for Xen 2.0 was added. Support for filesystems > 2 terabytes added. Pluggable Authentication Modules added. OpenBSD Packet Filter was integrated as an alternative to IPFilter. UFS directory hash support. |
| 2.0 | 9 December 2004 | Addition of native POSIX threads and SMP support on i386 and other platforms. AMD64 architecture added. Support for UFS2 and SMBFS, addition of kqueue. |
| 1.6 | 14 September 2002 | Unified Buffer Cache (UBC) was introduced, which unifies the filesystem and virtual memory caches of file data. Zero-copy support for TCP and UDP transmit path. Ten new platforms supported. New implementation of cross-building (build.sh) infrastructure. Added support for multibyte LC_CTYPE locales. |
| 1.5 | 6 December 2000 | IPv6 and IPsec were added to the network stack. OpenSSL and OpenSSH imported. New implementation of rc.d system start-up mechanism. Start of migration to ELF-format binaries. A ktruss utility for kernel tracing was added. Six new platforms supported, including SPARC64. Added FFS soft updates and support for NTFS. |
| 1.4 | 12 May 1999 | UVM, a rewritten virtual memory subsystem, was introduced. Added RAIDframe, a software RAID implementation, and imported IPFilter. Completion of the integration of all remaining 4.4BSD Lite-2 kernel improvements. Ports to Power Macintosh and NeXTcube/station systems added. Added full USB support. |
| 1.3 | 9 March 1998 | XFree86 source tree was made a supported part of the distribution. Support for ISA Plug and Play, PCMCIA, ATAPI and APM added. ext2fs and FAT32 filesystems added. The pkgsrc packages collection system was introduced. |
| 1.2 | 4 October 1996 | Support for NFSv3, SCSI scanner and medium changer devices added. NTP phase-locked loop added in kernel. Ports for ARM and Sharp X68k systems added. |
| 1.1 | 26 November 1995 | Ports for DEC Alpha, Atari TT/Falcon030 and MVME68k systems added. Binary emulation facility added. Generic audio subsystem introduced. |
| 1.0 | 26 October 1994 | The first multi-platform release, supporting the PC, HP 9000 Series 300, Amiga, 68k Macintosh, Sun-4c series and the PC532. Also in this release, the legally encumbered Net/2-derived source code was replaced with equivalent code from 4.4BSD-lite, in accordance with the USL v BSDi lawsuit settlement. Addition of shared libraries and Kerberos 5. |
| 0.9 | 20 August 1993 | Contained many enhancements and bug fixes. This was still a PC-platform-only release, although by this time work was underway to add support for other architectures. Support for loadable kernel modules (LKM). |
| 0.8 | 20 April 1993 | The first official release, derived from 386BSD 0.1 plus the version 0.2.2 unofficial patchkit, with several programs from the Net/2 release missing from 386BSD re-integrated, and various other improvements. |
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