Today the NetBSD Project announced 8.1 release. It already follows the new release cycle without teeny releases and represents selected changes to improve stability and security plus some new enhancements and features. Main highlights include INTEL-SA-00233 (MDS) mitigation, various kernel data leak fixes, smtoff property to disable SMT explicitly in rc.conf(5), addition of mfii(4) and bwfm(4) drivers, DRM/KMS improvements, performance regression fix in tmpfs, updated dhcpcd(8) and httpd(8), fixes for sh(1), reproducible builds, network drivers, thread local storage (TLS) in position independent executables (PIE). All changes can be found here. Source and binaries can be downloaded from the project CDN or any other mirrors.

The NetBSD project released the first and possibly the only release candidate for 8.1 release. As usual this release represents a subset of selected security and stability fixes, additionally with some selected new drivers and enhancements. It has workarounds for the latest CPU vulnerabilities, rc.conf(5) has a new property to disable smt (Simultaneous Multi-Threading). dhcpcd(8) was updated to 7.2.2, along with httpd(8). Full list of changes can be found here. You can download it from NetBSD project CDN or any of the project mirrors.

Since I didn’t write any news update for a while, lately some interesting developments were happening in few NetBSD areas which I would like to share.

Virtualization is one of these areas, it received few interesting updates recently. The first one is Intel HAXM hardware-accelerated support. You can also read an independently written how-to here. It works with Intel CPUs with VTx only. Another one is NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor or NVVM. Initially it supported AMD CPUs only, but recently it was updated to support Intel CPUs too. You can read It is a good time to start testing them. Update: the developer recently added the detailed NVVM presentation article to the official NetBSD blog.

Another area was LLVM sanitizers and improved LLVM support (reports can be found in NetBSD blog here, here, here and here).

One more hot topic is RISC-V architecture recently. Especially, once WD released their SweRW core on GitHub. The NetBSD project developers started work on RISC-V support as well:

* port-riscv is alive. (hunting for development boards for devs in a possible group buy)
* pkgsrcCon is July 13th (details forthcoming)#netbsd #pkgsrc

— CRYO💫🥃🛸 // FIX: need tech employment, DMs open (@Cryo) February 13, 2019

Finally, you can watch an interesting FOSDEM’19 video by Benny Siegert who provided more info on various updates.

The NetBSD team released the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch on 29 of August, 2018. It contains security and bug fixes as well as new features and enhancements. Release notes can be found here, full is of changes here. Main highlights of the release are USB 3.0 support, enhancements to Linux emulation subsystem, Raspberry PI 3 support, iwm(4) driver for Intel Wireless 726x, 316x, 826x and 416x series added, various USB stability enhancements, bug fixes and stability improvements. You can download it from any of NetBSD mirrors. In case you can’t upgrade to NetBSD 8.0,  it is recommended to update to 7.2.