NetBSD 9.0 RC1 Released With 64-Bit Arm Support, Updated ZFS + Other Improvements

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics.

NetBSD 9.0 is a big step-up for this BSD operating system with better support for modern Arm and x86_64 Intel/AMD hardware. There is also updated ZFS file-system support, the kernel finally supports kernel address space layout randomization, and other kernel features added. Out today is NetBSD 9.0 RC1 as what is expected to be the only release candidate.

More details on NetBSD 9.0 RC1 via the release announcement while the new feature list is embedded below.

- Support for Arm AArch64 (64-bit Armv8-A) machines, including "Arm ServerReady" compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA)
- Enhanced hardware support for Armv7-A
- Updated GPU drivers (e.g. support for Intel Kabylake)
- Enhanced virtualization support
- Support for hardware-accelerated virtualization (NVMM)
- Support for Performance Monitoring Counters
- Support for Kernel ASLR
- Support several kernel sanitizers (KLEAK, KASAN, KUBSAN)
- Support for userland sanitizers
- Audit of the network stack
- Many improvements in NPF
- Updated ZFS
- Reworked error handling and NCQ support in the SATA subsystem
- Support a common framework for USB Ethernet drivers (usbnet)