NetBSD 9.0 Will Have Performance & Security Improvements

The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon.

NetBSD 9.0 has yet to be branched, but it was talked about this weekend at FOSDEM 2019 by developer Benny Siegert. Enhancing the security of NetBSD 9.0 is now kernel ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), a kernel leak detector, Kernel Address Space Address Sanitizer (KASAN), Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (KUBSAN), user-space sanitizers, and other security work.

On the performance front, NetBSD 9.0 will be bringing updated ZFS file-system support, updated Intel/NVIDIA/Radeon graphics driver support, and much improved ARM/AArch64 support following their 64-bit ARM support in NetBSD 8.

There is also work on bringing NetBSD to RISC-V, though at this stage is quite early in development.

Those curious about the 2019 state of NetBSD can learn more via this slide deck from FOSDEM as well as the VP9/WebM video recording.