NetBSD Archive

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that Release 1.5.3 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 1.5.3 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5 and earlier releases, which provides the following updates relative to 1.5.2: A number of security problems have been fixed, some performance fixes have been incorporated, improved device support in some existing drivers, some new device drivers have been added.

"Even though the BSD/OS and NetBSD operating systems have been mostly developed by different developers with some different goals over the past nine years, they share many similarities due to their near identical open source origins and the open source software that complements the systems." Read the article at BSDNewsLetter.

At USENIX 2002, the NetBSD project held an introduction of the NetBSD operating system. You can read in the slides presented about its structure, its release schedule (version 1.6 comes out in 1-2 months), its goals, its future and a lot more.

Found this interesting link regarding NetBSD's kernel scheduler over at BSDForums: "This paper presents the design and implementation of a two-level thread scheduling system on NetBSD. This system provides a foundation for efficient and flexible threads on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. The work is based on the scheduler activations kernel interface proposed by Anderson et al. for user-level control of parallelism in the presence of multiprogramming and multiprocessing."

As if the Desktop Linux Revolution weren't enough, Wasabi Systems, Inc. will unveil what is being described as the "first commercial NetBSD boxed set" at LinuxWorld next week. Wasabi's new product is called the "NetBSD 1.5.2 Package Release for Desktops", and "comes ready to install, in a nice friendly box complete with CDs and a manual," said Wasabi founder and CEO Perry Metzger.

"I have been a Linux user since 1995. It has been my desktop and server of choice since about 1997. But there is more in the Open Source operating system world than just Linux. So, I decided to play with the Wasabi Systems' distribution of NetBSD. The basic distribution comes on two CDs with a small instruction booklet." Read the rest of the NetBSD review at NewsForge.