The NetBSD project celebrates its fifteenth anniversary

[Alistair Crooks <agc%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The NetBSD Project celebrates its 15th anniversary!

The Internet, March 20 -- This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of
the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System, one of
the oldest actively maintained, freely-available operating systems. 
NetBSD runs on everything from embedded systems to desktop
workstations, from handhelds to big-iron servers, and is developed by
the NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/ - one of the first Open
Source projects.

The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on
March 21, 1993, and the first release of the NetBSD Operating System,
NetBSD 0.8, was announced on USENET shortly thereafter.  Throughout
the past fifteen years, NetBSD has increased the portability and security
of the 4.4BSD operating system on which NetBSD was based, and added
support for new processor and system families, while enhancing the
system's performance to such an extent that NetBSD has become known as
the most portable operating system in the world. Innovations in the
storage, networking and virtualization arena have been added, and much
work has been done recently on performance, especially with multi-core
and multi-threaded machines in mind.

NetBSD 4.0, the latest release, includes support for most major
current processor architectures, including x86, x86_64, SPARC,
ARM, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, and SH, as well as several legacy processor
architectures.  It supports 13 different system architectures.

The next major release, NetBSD 5.0, will continue the tradition of the
last fifteen years by providing additional features and hardware
support while maintaining the stability and performance that users
have come to expect from NetBSD.  NetBSD 5.0 will include a rewritten
threading implementation based on a 1:1 threading model, support for
different scheduler implementations, and support for dom0 ("host") and
domU ("guest") domains for both Xen2 and Xen3 virtualization, as well
as PAE domU support, a new power management framework, iSCSI target
and initiator support, and file system improvements.  It will support
over fifty platforms, including support for symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) on x86, Alpha, and SPARC systems, on
PowerPC-based Macintoshes, and even on VAXen.

The NetBSD project and its developers are proud of its operating
system, and would like to share its development plans.  A number of
roadmaps for future development covering storage, networking,
virtualization and the system itself have been developed, and can be
found in:

    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/networking
    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/storage
    http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/system
    
http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/virtualization

Code from NetBSD has been included in countless other projects, Open
Source and otherwise.  It has been used in research and education as
well as in commercial products.  Literally thousands of third-party
applications have been made available for use under NetBSD through the
use of ``pkgsrc,'' the NetBSD Packages Collection.  Keeping with
NetBSD's goal of portability, pkgsrc also supports numerous other
operating systems, thereby allowing consistent installation and
management of third-party software across multiple platforms.

Birthday celebrations will be listed on 
 
   http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events/index.html

so if you plan to hold a NetBSD birthday party and would like to list
its details on that site, please send an email to www%NetBSD.org@localhost
All pictures, party reports and other feedback would be gratefully
received.

For more information on the NetBSD project, please visit the NetBSD
Project home page at http://www.NetBSD.org/ or contact www%NetBSD.org.@localhost
In addition, selected links to more information are provided below.

NetBSD Project home page:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/

The NetBSD 4.0 release:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html

pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/software/packages.html
    http://www.pkgsrc.org/

Platforms supported by NetBSD:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/

Products and projects using NetBSD:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/products.html 
    http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/research.html

The first commit, and the NetBSD 0.8 release announcement:
    http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/Makefile
    ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/release/NetBSD/NetBSD-0.8

NetBSD release history and the BSD family tree:
    http://www.NetBSD.org/about/history.html
    http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree

``NetBSD'' and ``pkgsrc'' are trademarks of The NetBSD Foundation,
Inc.  All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of
their respective owners.