NetBSD 8.0 RC1 is available now

Mr Martin Husemann on behalf of NetBSD project has announced the availability of NetBSD 8.0 RC1, first release candidate for upcoming NetBSD 8.0 stable release. NetBSD is an independently developed, BSD like operating system that support a wide variety of architectures.

NetBSD 8.0 RC1 being a development release is most likely to contain bugs and stability issues, hence it is not recommended to use in production systems. The main audience of a release candidate is the community testers and curious users who are eager to see the new features. This release candidate will give a clear idea on what we can expect from the final release.

NetBSD 8.0 RC1 banner

What is new in NetBSD 8.0 RC1?

There are several changes in NetBSD 8.0 since the launch of NetBSD 7.0. These changes can be summarized as:
- USB stack rework, USB3 support added
 - In-kernel audio mixer
 - Reproducible builds
 - PaX MPROTECT (W^X) memory protection enforced by default on some
   architectures with fine-grained memory protection and suitable
   ELF formats: i386, amd64, evbarm, landisk, pmax
 - PaX ASLR enabled by default on:
   i386, amd64, evbarm, landisk, pmax, sparc64
 - MKPIE (position independent executables) by default for userland
   on: i386, amd64, arm, m68k, mips, sh3, sparc64
 - added can(4), a socket layer for CAN busses
 - added ipsecif(4) for route-based VPNs
 - made part of the network stack MP-safe
    NET_MPSAFE kernel option is required to try
 - WAPBL stability and performance improvements
 - On i386/amd64 cpus:
    Meltdown mitigation: SVS (separate virtual address spaces)
    Spectre mitigation (support in gcc, used by default for kernels)
    SMAP support
    (U)EFI bootloader
 - Various new drivers:
   nvme(4) for modern solid state disks
   iwm(4), a driver for Intel Wireless devices (AC7260, AC7265, AC3160...)
   ixg(4): X540, X550 and newer device support.
   ixv(4): Intel 10G Ethernet virtual function driver.
   bta2dpd - new Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile daemon
 - Many evbarm kernels now use FDT (flat device tree) information
   (loadable at boot time from an external file) for device configuration,
   the number of kernels has decreased but the numer of boards has vastly
   increased
 - Lots of updates to 3rd party software included:
   GCC 5.5 with support for Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer
   GDB 7.12
   GNU binutils 2.27
   Clang/LLVM 3.8.1
   OpenSSH 7.6
   OpenSSL 1.0.2k
   mdocml 1.14.1
   acpica 20170303
   ntp 4.2.8p11-o
   dhcpcd 7.0.3
   Lua 5.3.4
For more information and download links, refer NetBSD 8.0 RC1 announcement published in project's announcement mailing list. 

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