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NetBSD's 1.4 branch has reached its scheduled end-of-life and thus is no longer supported. From the recent announcement:
"In keeping with NetBSD's policy of maintaining only the current and most recent release, the releast of NetBSD 1.6 marks the end-of-life for NetBSD 1.4. This means that the netbsd-1-4 branch will no longer be maintained."
James Chamberlain announced that HP's NetBSD Test Drive systems have been upgraded to NetBSD 1.6, the latest release [earlier story]. After filling out a page of personal contact information, you get to choose any of a number of different operating systems/hardware that you feel like testing. That done, your password will be emailed to you along with instructions on how to access your new shell accounts.
Based on an anonymous submission: The NetBSD Project has officially released version 1.6 of their freely-available "fully functional Open Source UNIX-like operating system". Widely recognized as the most portable operating system in the world, it now supports fifty-two different hardware architectures featuring seventeen machine architectures across eleven distinct CPU families. NetBSD 1.6 adds full support for cross-compilation of its base system.
Read more about it this release at BSD Newsletter and find the official release announcement here translated into ten different languages.
NetBSD (the most widely-ported OS in the world) 1.5.3 is finally out! From the Recent Changes page:
Juergen Hannken-Illjes recently pointed out that, "the current device driver buffer queue management is not very flexible. It assumes all requests are sorted on entry and consumed from the head of a list." In an attempt that could allow for better i/o scheduling and more efficient queue maintenance, he proposed a new buffer queue interface.
Jason R. Thorpe, the old code's author, looked at Juergen's changes and after making a couple small suggestions declared, "This looks fine to me. Thanks for looking into this problem!". Much of the discussion follows.
Jorg Braun recently released "NetBSD Live!", a CD that boots NetBSD 1.5.2/i386 directly from CD-ROM. Without any hard drive installation, you can now boot NetBSD 1.5.2, complete with your choice of desktops between KDE2, WindowMaker and tvm. Several useful applications are also installed on the CD, including all KDE 2.2.2 applications (such as KOffice), Gimp, Mozilla and AbiWord. Available for download are the CD image and some cover art. Find more details here. The full release announcement follows.
Darrin Jewell posted a lengthy review of the differences between NetBSD's FFS and Apple Darwin's UFS. He has worked to provide support for UFS in NetBSD.
He lists three main differences between the two filesystems. Most significantly, DIRBLKSIZ has been changed from 512 to 1024 "most likely for performance." The second difference he mentions is "that they shift the cylinder group cluster summary count array forward by 4 bytes." Finally, the third difference Darrin mentions is that UFS forces MAXSYMLINKLEN to 60, modifying "the maximum length of symlinks that can be stored directly in the inode."
The email goes on to explain how his patches manage to detect Apple's UFS, and what modifications they make to NetBSD. Darren says, "Since this is a substantial change to our file system code, I would like some guidance before committing it to our tree." His full email follows and makes for an interesting read.
NetBSD has been ported to the pmppc platform
NetBSD 1.6 has been branched and the 1.6 release process has begun! Todd Vierlings posted the recent announcement to the currrent-users mailing list. With the recent -current CVS branch for 1.6, daily snaphots will be made available.
Changes from NetBSD 1.5 to 1.6 make up a lengthy list. The planned release timetable can be found here. Todd's full email follows.
