NetBSD 6.1 and 6.0.2 released

The NetBSD Foundation has announced the first feature update of NetBSD 6 in the form of NetBSD 6.1. The changes in 6.1 include fixes in the kernel for processes with attributes. Networking gets fixes for "atomic fragments" in IPv6, fixes for locking issues in the ipf packet filter, many changes to the npf packet filter library and a correction to the VirtIO NIC driver which had been crashing recent QEMU versions. Filesystem changes include various fixes and working big-endian support for smbfs and an ability to mount ext2fs and msdosfs in 32-bit compat mode.

In terms of drivers, the LSI Thunderbolt (SAS2208) in now supported by the LSI/Dell SAS RAID controller driver and it now works with the MegaCLI command line driver. There is also new support for Apple's Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter and more boards are supported by the puc (PCI "universal" communications) driver.

Among the various platform enhancements, the ARM platform now has "greatly improved" support for the Raspberry Pi, with both USB and on-board Ethernet networking functioning, and on x86 platforms, the AMD64 port now supports dtrace, but it is not compiled in by default. Other changes in NetBSD 6.1 include fixes for pthreads, graphics corruption in recent versions of Cairo, an update of Postfix, and support added to wsconsctl for calibrating touchscreens.

The update also includes all the bug fixes and security updates from NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2, the latter of which was released at the same time, and NetBSD 6.1. Versions 6.1 and 6.0.2 therefore both have security fixes for issues with related advisories: a userland kernel panic, an RNG bug that could induce weak cryptographic keys, and an integer overflow in GNU Grep when processing 2GB lines. These are issues which have arisen and been fixed this year. A full detailed list of all of the changes and file modifications are available in the CHANGES file.

NetBSD 6.1 can be downloaded from any of the project's mirror sites and is available as a binary build for 56 different platforms, such as MIPS, ARM, StrongARM, Amiga, Alpha, SPARC, UltraSPARC, PowerPC, 680x0, Xen virtual machines, and even Sharp PDAs and the Sega Dreamcast. The NetBSD Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organisation is also seeking donations to help it make major improvements to the code base; specifically enhancing the network stack's concurrency and performance, adding modern filesystems, including features such as high resolution timers and execute in place for embedded developers and creating an automatic test and QA framework for the platform.

(djwm)