Beta for NetBSD 6.0 available

The NetBSD developers have released a public beta of NetBSD 6.0 – the "substantially feature-complete" release of the highly portable version of BSD brings a wide range of updates and enhancements. The beta is now ready, for example, to take on the "Unix epoch" with a 64-bit time type ensuring no overflow of time variables in 2038.

Other more immediate improvements include support for 64-bit MIPS processors, a new Logical Volume Manager (LVM), a BSD-licensed PGP implementation -netpgp, flash and nand subsystems, and a CHFS filesystem for flash devices. The NetBSD Foundation also recently completed adding SMP support for Xen kernels. Other changes include the addition of dtv, a digital TV framework, a port to the Extensible MIPS architecture, and improvements to syslog. The system uses gcc 4.5.3 as default compiler but the operating system can mostly be built with the Clang compiler now. A wide selection of new drivers have also been added, along with enhancements to existing drivers to widen the hardware supported by NetBSD.

NetBSD 6.0 beta is available to download as binaries or bootable ISO images for everything from Acorn, Amiga and AMD64 to Vax, x86k and Zaurus and more. This release is specifically for testing and any problems found should be reported to the developers.

The most recent stable version of NetBSD is 5.1.2, released in February 2012, is available for download.

See also:

• NetBSD 5.1 feature update arrives, a report from The H.
• Improved multi-processor support in NetBSD 5.0, a report from The H.
  

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