February 02, 2020 posted by Martin Husemann

Sixth months after the start of the release engineering process for 9.0, the second (and most likely final) release candidate is now available.

Shortly after the first release candidate had been published and feedback came it, it became clear that this was not going to be the final state of 9.0. In the end a lot of fixes were done, but we used the opportunity to also incorporate more hardware support (Pinebook Pro) and update a few components (dhcpcd, openssl).

We will be very restrictive with further changes and expect a quick and smooth release from this point on. Tentative release date is February 14, 2020.

Since the start of the release process a lot of improvements went into the branch - nearly 700 pullups were processed!

This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface.

We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 - hopefully later this year).

Here are a few highlights of the new release:

You can download binaries of NetBSD 9.0_RC2 from our Fastly-provided CDN.

For more details refer to the official release announcement.

Please help us out by testing 9.0_RC2. We love any and all feedback. Report problems through the usual channels (submit a PR or write to the appropriate list). More general feedback is welcome, please mail releng. Your input will help us put the finishing touches on what promises to be a great release!

Enjoy!

Martin