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NetBSD is one of those many OSes in the Unix family that is not very common to hear or read about it. But this does not leave aside the fact that it is distinguished by its exceptional portability, being able to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms and above all its focus on cleanliness and simplicity in design.
It is because of that I consider it appropriate to share the news of the launch of NetBSD 10, which comes after a year and a half since its last update. The new version features significant improvements, such as support for access control lists in the FFS file system, notable performance optimizations, disk encryption using the Adiantum algorithm, and the inclusion of the WireGuard VPN driver in the kernel.
What's new in NetBSD 10?
In the new version of NetBSD 10, sSignificant improvements have been made to Linux compatibility, and the inclusion of support for several key mechanisms stands out at the Linux compatibility layer (compat_linux). This includes the adding support for eventfd, timerfd, POSIX timers, preadv and pwritev, which improves the interoperability and operation of applications designed for Linux environments on NetBSD. In addition, there has been aMajor update to graphics drivers for Intel, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs on x86 systems, as well as subsystem timing DRM/KMS with Linux kernel 5.6.
Another new feature that NetBSD 10 presents is the expanded hardware support for new Intel and AMD processors, ARM boards like the Raspberry Pi 4, and improved support for architectures like MIPS. Added support for security extensions such as PAN (Privileged Access Never), PA (Pointer Authentication) and BTI (Branch Target Identification) on Armv8-A processors.
They have also been updated numerous third-party components such as the window manager gcc, OpenSSL, postfix, tmux, OpenSSH, X.org Server, among others, to their most recent versions. In addition to that 17 new device drivers have been added, including Wacom tablets, Gigabit Ethernet of various brands, among others.
The efficiency of the file path cache in the kernel has been improved, as well as the task scheduler performance tailored for big.LITTLE Arm systems. The performance of the select and poll system calls of the tmpfs file system has also been optimized, and specific optimizations have been added for x86 and AArch64 architectures, improving I/O and network performance on AArch64 systems.
On the other hand, it has been implemented a faster tree-base algorithm for searching memory pages, Tracking of clean and dirty memory pages has been sped up, and fsync for large files has been significantly improved. In addition, lock handling has been improved and the efficiency of parallel execution of operations has been increased.
On NetBSD 10 Added support for disk encryption using the Adiantum algorithm, achieving high efficiency in systems without hardware acceleration for AES encryption. Automatic encryption of swap partitions has been enabled and support for hardware encryption acceleration mechanisms has been added on x86 and Arm processors.
In addition, support for POSIX.1e ACLs has been added to the FFS file system, implemented through extended file attributes ported from FreeBSD. To use ACL, a new type of file system called FFSv2ea has been introduced, to which existing file systems can be converted using the fsck_ffs utility.
Of the others changes that stand out:
- Added a WireGuard-compatible wg network interface to support VPN on NetBSD 10.
- The default password hashing algorithm has been changed to Argon2id, and the software implementation of AES provided by the kernel has been improved to provide consistent execution times across architectures.
- Universal Disk Format (UDF) support has been improved and ZFS support has been added to the fstat utility.
- Support for FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) has been expanded and swapped endian configurations have been added to software RAID implementations.
- Linux-friendly eventfd and timerfd system calls have been implemented, fexecve has been added to execute files in a file descriptor, and overall system functionality has been improved.
- Obsolete technologies and drivers such as HIPPI, FDDI, TokenRing, drivers for SMBFS, among others have been removed, while IPv6 router advertising has been moved to userspace and libraries and drivers for legacy devices have been removed.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link. As for those interested in this new version, you should know that Installation images of 630 MB size are offered, which are compiled for more than 50 system architectures and 16 different CPU families.