NetBSD 1.6 has been released, with binary releases for 39 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6 release announcement and in the following blurb.Users are strongly encouraged to consider upgrading to 1.6, as the NetBSD team believes this to be the best release of NetBSD yet. Some features of this new release:
- Full support for cross-compilation of the base system, even as non-root user! src/build.sh is available for doing arbitrary cross-builds; see src/BUILDING for more information. At least
38 ports for the NetBSD 1.6 release were cross-built on a NetBSD/i386 system using this mechanism. - All platforms (except pc532) use ELF now.
- Hardware assisted IPv4 TCP and UDP checksumming and caching of
the IPv6 TCP pseudo header - Zero-Copy for TCP and UDP transmit path
- New pipe implementation with significantly higher performance
- Bridging, IrDA, VLAN, PPPoE and ISDN support
- USB 2.0 support
- Helpful new commands: sushi(8), pgrep(1), pkill(1), etcupdate(8)
- Even better security with many daemons running chroot environments
now, additional passwd(5) ciphers as well as another round of code
audits. - Numerous 3rd party applications included in the NetBSD base system
were updated. - Many new packages in The NetBSD packages collection, including the
latest open source desktop KDE3, OpenOffice.org, as well as the
Perl, Apache and many more. At the time of writing, there are over
3000 third party packages available in pkgsrc.
See the list of significant changes between 1.5 and 1.6
for a more complete list.
Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.6 distribution.
Please try to use the NetBSD
FTP Mirror Site
closest to you.
Czech,
German,
French,
Japanese,
Polish,
Portugese,
Russian,
Spanish and
Swedish
language translations of the NetBSD 1.6 release announcement are
available.
I can’t belive they have this running on this many architectures. Looking through the list i feel i missed a very differant time in computing since the majority of the achitectures or platforms, I have never heard of. Is the reason for doing this so basicly worthless computers can run a modern/in-use OS? Or is it just for the challenge and seeing how many things they can get running it? At any rate they are a bunch of ambitious people.
why not look at the netbsd.org site itself for the answers to your questions. seems as though the project maintainers might be best able to answer questions. IMHO
http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/about.html
http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/portability.html
http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/interop.html
Well, obviously, it helps make sure most of the code is completely portable. Many older ports don’t need a lot of work to be maintained; the machine-dependent layer doesn’t change that much.
Also, many “obselete” architectures have found new life in the embedded market. Some of the architectures you’ve never heard of are probably used there.
Quite funny, when Linux got initial USB 2.0 support, there were lots of fuzz about it, I remember seeing the news on lots of portals. Here its mention in a chengelog
ISO images are probably not available yet, however you can make one:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/bootcd.html
explains how to make your own bootable cdrom
Pretty easy actualy.
I did look at the site, i didn’t see that though
Kudos to the NetBSD team for their marvellous work! Supporting 39 archs isn’t easy.
Unfortunately NetBSD hasn’t gained its fair share of attention, even among BSDs. Hope this release helps end this.