NetBSD 8.0 RC1 Available, Bringing Initial USB 3.0 Support & Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 20 April 2018 at 08:31 AM EDT. 5 Comments
BSD
It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update.

NetBSD 7.0 arrived back in October 2015 while the NetBSD 8.0 release should not be too much further out. Arguably most interesting with NetBSD 8.0 is its finally bring initial USB 3.0 support though the change-log currently just describes it as "some USB 3 support."

NetBSD 8.0 is also bringing major changes to its audio system, updates to its ZFS and DTrace support, SCS for Meltdown mitigation on AMD64, Intel SMAP support, Retpoline support for Spectre Variant Two mitigation, a number of multi-processing improvements throughout, and a great deal of other updated packages.

An extended look at the NetBSD 8.0 changes can be found via the changes page.

NetBSD 8.0-RC1 can be found via NetBSD.org.
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