Announcing NetBSD 5.0

[Soren Jacobsen <snj%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am proud to announce that
NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system,
is now available.

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on
modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems.  Multi-threaded
applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core,
and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

This improved performance is the result of a rewritten threading
subsystem based on a 1:1 threading model, new kernel synchronization
primitives, kernel preemption, a rewritten scheduler implementation,
real-time scheduling extensions, processor sets, and dynamic CPU sets
for thread affinity.  Almost all core kernel subsystems, like virtual
memory, memory allocators, file system frameworks for major file
systems, and others were audited and overhauled to make use of highly
concurrent algorithms.

In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant
number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview
of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL, Write
Ahead Physical Block Logging), the 'jemalloc' memory allocator, the
X.Org X11 distribution instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the
Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many
laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing
Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3
support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and
asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers.

For full details, please see the release notes at:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.html

ISO images can be downloaded using BitTorrent, and we encourage users
who wish to install via ISO images to take advantage of this, as the
images are very well seeded.

    http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/torrents/

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.0 are available for download
at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP,
AnonCVS, and other services may be found at:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/

We are very grateful to all of those who donated during the 2007 fund
drive, which brought us many of the great advances found in 5.0.  For
more information on how you can help NetBSD, see

    http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have
contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our
servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and
other resources over the years. More information on the people who
make NetBSD happen is available at:

    http://www.NetBSD.org/people/

We would like to especially thank the University of California at
Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code
that we use. We would also like to thank the Internet Systems
Consortium Inc., the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's
Computer Science Department, and Ludd (Luleaa Academic Computer
Society) computer society at Luleaa University of Technology for
current colocation services.