Re: NetBSD 9.0 release process has started

[Hisashi T Fujinaka <htodd%twofifty.com@localhost>]

Wow. So far, it's been a disaster for me. I remember saying the memory
management seemed iffy but being told to get a real machine with more
memory. My i386 machine w/1G of RAM and ~4G of swap kept crashing while
trying to compile things in pkgsrc. I think it's trying to recompile
gcc6. It's crashed eight times in the day I've had it running NetBSD-9.

My beefier x86_64 system isn't all that happy either. Trying to compile
firefox grournd everything to a halt. I couldn't even reply to this email
until I killed the build of firefox.

Oh well, I guess that's progress.

On Wed, 31 Jul 2019, Maya Rashish wrote:

> If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the
> creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items
> that we worked on:
>
> - New AArch64 architecture support:
>    Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE)
>    Support for running 32-bit binaries
>    UEFI and ACPI support
>    Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware.
> - The FDT-ization of many ARM boards:
>    the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations
>    the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations
>    All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board
>    configuration.
> - Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to
>  Kaby Lake based Intel graphics devices.
> - ZFS has been updated to a modern version and seen many bugfixes.
> - New hardware-accelerated virtualization via NVMM.
> - NPF performance improvements and bug fixes. A new lookup algorithm,
>  thmap, is now the default.
> - NVMe performance improvements
> - Optional kernel ASLR support, and partial kernel ASLR for the default
>  configuration.
> - Kernel sanitizers:
>    KLEAK, detecting memory leaks
>    KASAN, detecting memory overruns
>    KUBSAN, detecting undefined behaviour
>    These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the
>    syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
> - The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all
>  of its drivers
> - The installer is now capable of performing GPT UEFI installations.
> - Dramatically improved support for userland sanitizers, as well as the
>  option to build all of NetBSD's userland using them for bug-finding.
> - Update to graphics userland: Mesa was updated to 18.3.4, and
>  llvmpipe is now available for several architectures, providing 3D
>  graphics even in the absence of a supported GPU.
>
> We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help
> NetBSD 9.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any
> bugs you find.
>
> Binaries are available on
> https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-9/latest/
>
> Please report any bugs you find!

--
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd%twofifty.com@localhost
BSEE + BSChem + BAEnglish + MSCS + $2.50 = coffee