Announcing NetBSD 2.1

Introduction

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 2.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

About NetBSD 2.1

NetBSD 2.1 is the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch. This release provides numerous functional enhancements, including support for many new devices, hundreds of bug fixes, patches and updates to kernel subsystems, and many enhancements to the user environment. In addition, all of the security fixes and critical bug fixes from the NetBSD 2.0.3 update are included as well.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 2.1 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services is provided at the end of this announcement; the latest list of available download sites may also be found at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/

We encourage users who wish to install via a CD-ROM ISO image to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the ISO image area. BitTorrent has recently been added to the list of distribution mechanisms and its use is strongly encouraged to help keep bandwidth available.

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 54 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 17 distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 2.1 release contains complete binary releases for 48 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 5500 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.

Major Changes Between 2.0 and 2.1

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-2.1 file in the top level directory of the NetBSD 2.1 release tree.

The following major changes were made between 2.0 and 2.1:

Kernel

Fix a bug that caused spontaneous reboot under heavy load on SH3/4 platforms.
Fixed some sparc64 and alpha pmap(9) issues.
A longstanding bug in the SYSV semaphore code has been fixed.
Eliminated hangs when large processes fork.
ata(4) and wdc(4) drives now only downgrade modes due to actual CRC errors, and UDMA modes are downgraded more slowly.
The pdcsata(4) driver was added, with support for the Promise SATA150 series of controllers, including RAID support.
The RAIDframe disk driver had various bugfixes and improvements.
Added support for various devices from the nVidia nForce3 chipset (i386, amd64).
Fixed interrupt problems on some Intel Xeon systems.
Added support for the VT642 SATA RAID Controller.
Various fixes to the esiop(4) driver.
Added support for the Dell CERC SATA RAID to the aac(4) driver.
Added support for additional Dell boards to the ahd(4) driver.
Fixed a number of issues with the ehci(4) driver.
Added ukyopon(4) : Kyocera AIR-EDGE phone driver.
The wdc(4) driver has been fixed for commands with opaque data structures. The atactl smart status command now works on big-endian hosts.

Networking

wm(4) fixed major performance issues with the i82547 Gig-E chip.
sk(4) improved chip identification and improved performance, and added support for the Belkin Gigabit Desktop Network PCI card.
Fix a bug which would crash the system when destroying vlan(4) interfaces.
Added rtk(4) and tl(4) interfaces as rnd(4) sources.
Added support for the Compaq Netelligent 10 T/2 PCI UTP/Coax Controller to the tl(4) driver.
Added support for changing the MTU of an stf(4) interface.
Added support for IPv6 over gre(4) interfaces.
The hme(4) driver now supports Sun QFE boards on non-SPARC hardware.
Fix some stge(4) big-endian issues, and some other issues. stge(4) works on sparc64 with hardware checksums.

File system

Fix a number of NFS issues.
Fixed file access problems via SMBFS when the file is already open on the server.
Various improvements to LFS, the BSD log-structured file system.

Security

Support changing passwords in a Windows 2000 (or later) domain with krb5(3).
Fixed a possible Denial of Service attack via IPSec AH packets.
NetBSD-SA2005-10 OpenSSL "man in the middle" can force weak protocol
NetBSD-SA2005-09 Insecure /tmp file usage when building using imake
NetBSD-SA2005-08 Heap memory corruption in FreeBSD compat code
NetBSD-SA2005-07 AES-XCBC-MAC always caculated with same key
NetBSD-SA2005-06 Multiple vulnerabilites in CVS
NetBSD-SA2005-05 cgd(4) key destruction on unconfigure
NetBSD-SA2005-04 Buffer overflows in MIT Kerberos 5 telnet client
NetBSD-SA2005-03 F_CLOSEM local denial of service
NetBSD-SA2005-02 Local DoS via audio device with specific drivers

System administration and user tools

ntpd(8) coredump if local system and NTP server did not have overlapping protocol family support (IPv4 vs. IPv6, for example) fixed.
pax(1) has a number of bugfixes and new features.
ifwatchd(8) has been fixed to call the CARRIER script if a link is already up during the initial interface scan.
cvs(1) has been upgraded to version 1.11.20.
Avoid crashes in grep(1) on empty or very large files.
Fixed a number of issues in gzip(1).

Miscellaneous

Added VT switching for the cats port.
Various fixes and improvements to the cross-build system.
Fixed some issues in libpthread and libpthread_dbg.
Implement a USB memory reserve to work around problems plugging in (for example) umass(4) devices after boot.
Package tools have been upgraded to version 20050530.

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:

http://www.NetBSD.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/

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 the people who make NetBSD happen is available at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/People/

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. We would also like to thank the Internet Software Consortium 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.

As a non-profit organisation with no commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users, and we would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the NetBSD Foundation in support of continuing production of our fine operating system.

Donations can be done via PayPal (<paypal@NetBSD.org>) and are fully tax-deductible in the US. If you would prefer not to use PayPal, or would like to make other arrangements, please contact <finance-exec@NetBSD.org>.

NetBSD mirror sites

Please use a mirror site close to you.

Please also note our list of CD-ROM vendors.