After nearly 3 whole years of development (work started on NetBSD 10 in late 2019), BETA snapshots have finally been published for interested users to test. More changes will be backported from the development branch over the next few months before we tag a final release, so the BETA images will keep getting updated.
What to expect
While NetBSD 10.0 is expected to be a major milestone on performance, especially on multi-core systems, currently the BETA builds have some extra kernel diagnostics enabled that may reduce performance somewhat.
Among the features you can expect to find in NetBSD 10 are reworked cryptography, including compatibility with WireGuardⓇ, automatic swap encryption, new disk encryption methods, and CPU acceleration in the kernel. In hardware support, there are updated GPU drivers from Linux 5.6, support for more ARM hardware (including Rockchip RK356X, NXP i.MX 8M, Amlogic G12, Apple M1, and Raspberry Pi 4), support for new security features found in the latest ARM CPUs, and support for Realtek 2.5 gigabit and new Intel 10/25/40 gigabit ethernet adapters. compat_linux has been ported to AArch64 and DTrace has been ported to MIPS. For retrocomputing enthusiasts, there's improved multiprocessor support on Alpha, and more iMac G5 support. The Xen hypervisor support has received a major rework. There are various new userspace programs, including blkdiscard(8) to manually TRIM a disk, aiomixer(1) to control audio volume, realpath(1), and fsck_udf(8). And loads more...
There are many little details that might be relevant to admins when upgrading from NetBSD 9, so wait and read the final release announcement before you upgrade any production systems. Please note that networking setups using tap(4) as a bridge endpoint must be modified to use vether(4) instead, and compat_linux is no longer built into the kernel for security reasons (load it as a module instead). DisplayPort and HDMI audio is now enabled in the default x86 kernel, so you might need to change the default audio device with audiocfg(1) if you're not getting any sound output. blacklistd(8) was renamed to blocklistd(8).
Downloads
- Installation / USB stick image for 64-bit x86 (hybrid UEFI/BIOS image). Use gunzip and dd to write an .img.gz file on Unix, or Rawrite32 on Windows.
- Installation / USB stick image for 64-bit x86 (legacy BIOS only)
- Installation / USB stick image for 32-bit x86
- For images for various ARM devices, see armbsd.org. All Arm boards without UFEI or Raspberry Pi firmware also require U-Boot to be written the SD card separately when using a generic image.
- Live image for Raspberry Pi 0 or 1
- Live image for Cavium Octeon (also needs U-Boot)
- CD/DVD image for 64-bit x86 (for actual CD/DVDs and virtual machines only)
- CD/DVD image for 32-bit x86
- CD/DVD image for 64-bit Arm virtual machines
- CD/DVD image for SPARC64
- CD/DVD image for Alpha
- More? (e.g. Apple PowerPC/68K, Amiga, Dreamcast, PA-RISC, SGI MIPS, SPARC32, VAX...)
Packages
Third-party software is available from pkgsrc, as ever. Binary packages are available for amd64, and I hope to publish binaries for i386 shortly.