Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:49:50 -0700 From: Soren Jacobsen To: netbsd-announce@NetBSD.org Subject: Announcing NetBSD 5.0 On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am proud to announce that NetBSD 5.0, the thirteenth release of the NetBSD operating system, is now available. NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load. This improved performance is the result of a rewritten threading subsystem based on a 1:1 threading model, new kernel synchronization primitives, kernel preemption, a rewritten scheduler implementation, real-time scheduling extensions, processor sets, and dynamic CPU sets for thread affinity. Almost all core kernel subsystems, like virtual memory, memory allocators, file system frameworks for major file systems, and others were audited and overhauled to make use of highly concurrent algorithms. In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL, Write Ahead Physical Block Logging), the 'jemalloc' memory allocator, the X.Org X11 distribution instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers. For full details, please see the release notes at: http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.html ISO images can be downloaded using BitTorrent, and we encourage users who wish to install via ISO images to take advantage of this, as the images are very well seeded. http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/torrents/ Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.0 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, and other services may be found at: http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/ We are very grateful to all of those who donated during the 2007 fund drive, which brought us many of the great advances found in 5.0. For more information on how you can help NetBSD, see http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/ 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 Systems Consortium Inc., the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's Computer Science Department, and Ludd (Luleaa Academic Computer Society) computer society at Luleaa University of Technology for current colocation services.