Several new ARM single-board computers are supported

Oct 9, 2015 01:00 GMT  ·  By

The developers of the open source, BSD-based NetBSD operating system have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability of the project's fifteenth major release.

Prominent features of NetBSD 7.0 include support for the Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) and DRM drivers, bringing accelerated graphics to 32-bit (x86) systems that include the latest models of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics cards, support for multiprocessor ARM-based systems, as well as Lua kernel scripting support.

There's now support for numerous new ARM single-board computers (SBC), among which the popular Raspberry Pi 2 device, but also ODROID-C1, MiraBox, BeagleBoard, BeagleBone Black, BeagleBone, Banana Pi, Cubietruck, Cubieboard2, Kobo Touch, Netwalker, ZedBoard, and Parallella.

Many other ARM boards powered by the Freescale i.MX50, Freescale i.MX51, Allwinner A20, and Allwinner A31 processors are supported as well by the new NetBSD 7.0 computer operating system, which also adds multiprocessor support in the USB subsystem.

"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0, the fifteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features," reads the official announcement of the NetBSD 7.0 operating system.

The NPF firewall has received many improvements

On the software side of things, NetBSD 7.0 comes with numerous improvements to the NPF firewall, such as support for dynamic rules, the enablement of BPF with JIT (Just-in-Time) compilation by default, support for static (stateless) NAT, support for CDB based tables, and support for IPv6-to-IPv6 NPTv6 (Network Prefix Translation).

There's now a new daemon, blacklistd, which has been integrated with the packet filters and designed to keep other network daemons safe, including ssh, ftpd, and named, the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) software has been updated to version 4.8.4 with support for C++11, and sysinst has received GPT support.

NetBSD 7.0 comes with lots of under-the-hood improvements and a lot of updated software, so we recommend that you read the official release notes for details. In the meantime, you can download NetBSD 7.0 right now from Softpedia for 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures.