Announcing NetBSD 1.6.1

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

About NetBSD 1.6.1

NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 which provides the following updates relative to 1.6:

A number of security issues have been fixed.
Some performance fixes have been incorporated.
Improved device support in some existing drivers.
Some new device drivers have been added.
The evbsh3 port has been added to the binary distribution.
Some minor userland fixes have been applied.

The NetBSD 1.6.1 distribution consists of the full NetBSD source, binary releases for 40 ports including the X Window System, and the NetBSD Packages Collection 1.6.1 release.

A complete list of changes are available in the CHANGES-1.6.1 file in top directory of the NetBSD 1.6.1 release tree. Also, included later in this announcement is a list of the major changes in NetBSD 1.6.1.

Complete source and binaries are available at many sites around the world. You can download NetBSD via FTP, AnonCVS, SUP and other methods from a mirror site near you.

About NetBSD

The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, UNIX-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD runs on 52 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 11 distinct CPU families, and it being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6.1 release contains complete binary releases for 40 different machine types.

NetBSD is a highly integrated system. In addition to its highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools, all accompanied by full source code. The NetBSD Packages Collection contains over 3500 packages and binary package releases for a number of platforms are currently in progress.

More information on the goals of the NetBSD Project can be procured from the NetBSD web site at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/Goals/

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services are available via our mailing lists and web site. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources; some are listed at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/consultants.html

More extensive information on NetBSD is available from the NetBSD web site:

http://www.NetBSD.org/

NetBSD is the work of a diverse group of people spread around the world. The `Net' in our name is a tribute to the Internet, which enables us to communicate and share code, and without which the project would not exist.

System families supported by NetBSD 1.6.1

Above NetBSD 1.6, the 1.6.1 release adds a binary distribution for the evbsh3 port, making a total of 40 binary ports released.

Major Changes Between 1.6 and 1.6.1

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-1.6.1 file in the top directory of the source tree. Some highlights include:

Kernel

Support for some newer Ultra/133 controllers has been added to pciide(4).
Hardware random number support for some Intel chipsets has been added.
Support for additional Adaptec RAID controllers has been added to aac(4).
A number of bugs in the VM system have been fixed.
Bug fixes to audio(4), dpt(4), eap(4), emuxki(4), iop(4), siop(4) and umass(4).
Some Linux compatibility bugs have been fixed.
A number of USB bugs have been fixed.

Networking

IPv6 fixes to various tools.
Bug fixes to the fxp(4), sip(4), tlp(4), rtk(4), wi(4) and xi(4) drivers.
Enhancements to the aue(4), fxp(4), pcn(4), wi(4) and wm(4) drivers.
A driver for Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet cards has been added, bge(4).
IP Filter has been updated to 3.4.29 and bugs fixed.
Some IPsec bugs have been fixed (from KAME).
Some ftpd(8) interoperability bugs have been fixed.
A number of pppoe(4) bugs have been fixed.

File Systems

A number of FFS and NFS bugs have been fixed.
Some NFSv3 fixes have been applied to amd(8).
Some fsck(8) bugs have been fixed.

Security

BIND has been updated to 8.3.4 and security patches applied to named(8) and the libc resolver.
Various security patches have been applied to sendmail.
OpenSSL has been updated to 0.9.6g and a number of security patches applied.
A potential buffer overflow in zlib has been fixed.
Buffer overflow bugs in file(1) have been fixed.
Some Kerberos 4 security bugs have been addressed.
A umask security problem in GNU tar(1) has been fixed.

System administration and user tools

Various bugs in user(8) have been fixed.
The pkg_* tools have been updated, adding new features and fixing a number of bugs.

Miscellaneous

Bug fixes to sysinst, the NetBSD installer.
Various fixes to the toolchain and build process.
Various fixes to the rc.d subsystem.
A large number of sparc64 fixes have been applied.
Timezone files have been updated to tz2002d.
Many new packages have been added to The NetBSD packages collection, including the latest open source desktop KDE3, OpenOffice.org, as well as a large number of bugs fixed, many addressing security issues.

And of course there have also been innumerable bug fixes and other miscellaneous enhancements.

Please note that at the moment, sysinst will not assist you in installing pre-built third-party binary packages or the pkgsrc system itself. See the NetBSD packages collection documentation.

Lastly, it should be noted that the X11 binaries shipped in NetBSD 1.6.1 for cats, i386 and macppc are based on XFree86 4.2.1, other ports are based on XFree86 3.3.6. You may at compile time pick which sources to build and install.

Acknowledgments

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and other resources over the years. More information on contributors is available at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/

We would like to especially thank the University of California at Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code that we use, and the Internet Software Consortium, Redback Networks and the Helsinki University of Technology for current colocation services.

About the NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers.

NetBSD mirror sites

Please use a mirror site close to you.

Please also note our list of CD-ROM vendors.

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