Announcing NetBSD 9.1 (Oct 18, 2020)
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first update of the NetBSD 9 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
Here are some highlights of this new release.
- Parallelized disk encryption with cgd(4).
- Added the C.UTF-8 locale.
- Added support for Xen 4.13.
- Various reliability fixes and improvements for ZFS. Added support for ZFS on dk(4) wedges on ld(4).
- NVMM hypervisor updated, bringing improved emulation, performance, and stability.
- Additional settings for the NPF firewall, updated documentation, and various npfctl(8) usability improvements.
- X11 improvements, default window manager switched to ctwm(1), enabled sixel support in xterm(1), fixes for older Intel chipsets
- Stability improvements for LFS, the BSD log-structured filesystem.
- Added support for using USB security keys in raw mode, usable in Firefox and other applications.
- Added support for more hardware RNGs in the entropy subsystem, including those in Allwinner and Rockchip SoCs.
- Various audio system fixes, resolving NetBSD 7 and OSSv4 compatibility edge-cases, among other issues.
- Added aq(4), a driver for Aquantia 10 gigabit ethernet adapters.
- Added uxrcom(4), a driver for Exar single and multi-port USB serial adapters.
- Improved default input behaviour for Lenovo ThinkPads with clickpads and trackpoints.
- Built-in MIDI sequencer and CGD support in evbarm GENERIC kernels - the modules now don't need to be loaded.
- Fixes for sigaltstack(2) on AArch64, resolving issues seen with Go and Erlang.
- Fixes for evbarm AM335x (e.g. BeagleBone Black) CPU frequency scaling, and reduced idle CPU usage.
- Improved output in lastlogin(8), w(1), cal(1), and added a 'show' subcommand to hdaudioctl(8).
- Improved framebuffer console performance on amd64 early in the boot process, making amd64 boot faster.
- More built-in keyboard layouts for wscons(4): Brazilian Portugese, Estonian, Icelandic, and Latin American Spanish.
- Integrated third-party components were updated with fixes, including GCC, dhcpcd, OpenSSL, and tzdata.
- Various instances of kernel memory corruption and information leakage were fixed.
- Many other miscellaneous bug fixes, and additions to existing device drivers.
- The amd64 "uefi-installimage" for USB drives, SD cards, etc was renamed to simply "installimage" for this release, since it's misleadingly always supported both UEFI and non-UEFI systems.
- The evbarm INSTALL instructions were updated to reflect the reality of modern NetBSD support for AArch64/ARMv7 devices.
- The afterboot(8) man page was updated with new information.
- Many sysinst(8) bugs were fixed.
As usual, this release is fully compatible with packages and other binaries for NetBSD 9.0.
The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-9.1 files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 9.1 release tree.
NetBSD 9.1 can be obtained from our CDN. For your convenience, here are some direct links to binaries for several popular architectures:
A list of hashes, signed by the NetBSD Security Officer's PGP key, is available for the NetBSD 9.1 distribution in this file.
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:
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:
We would also like to thank the Tasty Lime and the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's Computer Science Department for current colocation services. Thanks to Fastly for providing the CDN services.
NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vibrant international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.
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.
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