14 DAY TRIAL // The NetBSD team has just launched version 4.0 of its free, secure and highly portable Unix-like operating system.
This release comes with support for Xen version 3 virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. It is also packed with new network services, like iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol.
The system security is now even more enhanced with restrictions of mprotect to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks.
NetBSD 4.0 can be run on 54 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 17 distinct CPU families, and the porting continues. This new version contains complete binary releases for 51 different machine types, with the platforms amigappc, bebox and ews4800mips released in source form only.
Here are some of the major changes between NetBSD 3.0 and 4.0:
Networking
￭ agr(4): new pseudo-device driver for link level aggregation; ￭ IPv6 support was extended with an RFC 3542-compliant API and added for gre(4) tunnels and the tun(4) device; ￭ An NDIS-wrapper was added to use Windows binary drivers on the i386 platform.
File systems
￭ scan_ffs(8), scan_lfs(8): utilities to find FFSv1/v2 and LFS partitions to recover lost disklabels on disks and image files; ￭ tmpfs: added a new memory-based file system aimed at replacing mfs. Contrary to mfs, it is not based on a disk file system, so it is more efficient both in overall memory consumption and speed; ￭ Added UDF support for optical media and block devices. Read only for now.
Audio drivers:
￭ Support for new models on drivers, such as Intel ICH8/6300ESB, NVIDIA nForce 3/4, etc.; ￭ Added support for AC'97 modems; ￭ auich(4): added support to handle the AC'97 modem as audio device, enabled with the kernel option "AUICH_ATTACH_MODEM"; ￭ azalia(4): added support for S/PDIF.
Hardware Monitors: ￭ amdpm(4): added support for the i2c bus on the AMD-8111 used on many Opteron motherboards and for the Analog Devices ADT7464 hardware monitor chip.
You can download NetBSD 4.0 right now from Softpedia!