NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Released With MDS Mitigations, Option To Turn Off SMT/HT, Driver Updates

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 20 May 2019 at 10:00 AM EDT. 5 Comments
BSD
The first and only anticipated release candidate for NetBSD 8.1 is now available for testing.

The NetBSD 8.1 release candidate adds the necessary mitigations for the Microarchitectural Data Sampling / Zombieload vulnerabilities. With Hyper Threading looking increasingly insecure with these new CPU vulnerabilities, NetBSD has joined other operating systems in offering a new setting to disable HT/SMT support: the smtoff rc.conf option.

NetBSD 8.1 RC1 is also packing fixes for kernel data leaks, fixing TLS in PIE, addressing some reproducible builds issues, and other kernel enhancements.

On the driver front there are DRM/KMS graphics driver updates, a performance regression fix for Tmpfs, adding the BWFM driver for Broadcom/Cypress wireless hardware, the new MFII SAS driver, and various other updates.

More details on the NetBSD 8.1 RC1 release over on NetBSD.org.
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