The final release in the netbsd-9 branch is out. NetBSD 9.5 includes various stability and security fixes, driver improvements and new versions of several userspace applications. It marks the end of support for the 9.x branch, no more updates or security fixes will be applied to it. Thus, it is recommended to upgrade to the newer releases, preferably the latest NetBSD 11.0 release.

The release announcement is available on this page. A complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-9.5 file.

The last release was over two years ago, so list of changes is quite long.

It includes a few improvements I have been working on and posting about, including improvements to VIA IDE/SATA controllers support (viaide(4)), a fix for the ALTINST issue when probing VIA CPUs (which makes temperature sensor work for C7 CPUs again), fixes boot issue on HP 2133 Mini-Note laptop, Biostar Viotech 3100+, and potentially a few other HP and AMD systems, a boot fix for newer revisions of Intel Apollo Lake CPUs.

The release highlights include support for additional hardware in the urtwn(4) Wi-Fi and uftdi(4) USB to Serial adapters, fixes for the MSI/MSI-X configuration on certain machines, aarch64 thread-local storage support, display brightness control fixes for certain acpiout(4) devices, and restoration of full set of hardware-supported encodings from netbsd-7 in the eap(4) AudioPCI audio device driver.

There is a long list of security fixes and reliability fixes, including upstream security fixes for the Xorg(1), openssl(1), sshd(8) and unbound(8). tzdata was updated to tzdata2026b, and xkbcomp to 1.5.0.

Please upgrade if NetBSD 9 is still required in your environment. Otherwise, please move to a newer release.

Download links are available in the release announcement above or on the usual mirrors.