With a tiny delay allowing the NetBSD developers to update the timezone information for the Fiji Islands at the last minute, NetBSD 9.1 was released. Already with the major release NetBSD 9.0 it was noticeable that the previously somewhat sluggish development seems to be gaining momentum – and version 9.1 also comes up with a gratifying number of news and improvements.

Small “craft computers” like the Rasberry Pi, but especially SBCs (Single Board Computers) based on the Allwinner and Rockchips SoCs and the often underestimated BeagleBone Black now run better NetBSD. The audio subsystem was expanded and deficiencies in scaling the CPU clock were eliminated. Improvements to sigaltstack (2) for AArch 64 remove problems when using programming languages ​​such as Erlang and Go.

Native hypervisor and Xen The native hypervisor from NetBSD, “NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor” or NVMM for short, has been upgraded from a test project to a practical tool by developers around Maxime Villard over the past two years. NVMM currently supports a maximum of 128 virtual machines that each 256 vCPUs and 100 GByte RAM are allowed. With NetBSD 9.1, NVMM recognizes the processors it is running on better. NetBSD was one of the pioneers of the Xen hypervisor and in version 9.1 it now supports Xen 4. 13.

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Fine tuning for ThinkPads ThinkPads, the business notebooks from IBM / Lenovo, have always been popular with BSD developers . For this reason, the support for the hardware of these devices is significantly better than that for notebooks from other manufacturers. The control of TrackPoint and ClickPad has been somewhat problematic so far. Both have been revised in NetBSD 9.1 so that the notebooks now work as expected “out-of-the-box” immediately after installation.

The start for AMD 64 -based devices was indirectly accelerated because the console driver, which sends the start messages to the frame buffer (i.e. without a special graphics card driver ) outputs, optimized.

Change from TWM to CTWM NetBSD 9.1 in the standard configuration now contains the CTWM from Claude Lecommandeur instead of the one from 1987 originating TWM. CTWM is an extremely lightweight window manager, which is nevertheless enormously adaptable to the wishes and requirements of the user.

Especially on weak and older hardware, on which NetBSD 9.1 runs without problems, it works low resource requirement positively noticeable. Compared to TWM, CTWM brings some functions that are indispensable today, such as context menus in the Firefox browser. Further details are explained in a NetBSD blog entry about the change to CTWN.

ZFS matures under NetBSD Already in the last major release, NetBSD received a port of the modern ZFS file system, with version 9.1 there are many improvements in the areas of performance and stability. The latter has not yet qualified NetBSD / ZFS 64 – percent for productive use. One interesting function is that ZFS can also use “wedges” to set up VDEVs (virtual devices, the building blocks of a ZFS pool). NetBSD provides Wedges via the dk (4) driver. The dk (4) driver makes areas of a physical disk available as a stand-alone disk (and thus differs from partitions).

It is surprising that NetBSD 9.1 is still sticking to the Log-Structured File System (LFS) and is even developing it further. FreeBSD and OpenBSD removed it a long time ago due to a lack of development progress. By combining metadata and variable block sizes, LFS should deliver significantly more speed than UFS. So far, however, it is not technically mature enough to fill the gap between UFS and ZFS, for example. You will have to wait for a possible further development.

1987 More security in detail With NetBSD 9.1, the packet filter NPF receives some additional options and improved documentation; In addition, the administration tool npfctl (8) has been extended.

NetBSD 9.1 now also allows access to USB security tokens in “raw mode”, so that for example