NetBSD 4.0 RC3 Has Released

NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from 64-bit AlphaServers and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.

Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and it is user-supported with complete source. Many applications are easily available through The NetBSD Packages Collection.

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 4.0 Release Candidate 3. This release candidate has several bug fixes and other changes since the previous release candidate - RC2. The most important ones are: build of the 32-bit sparc64 kernel is fixed, allowing the sparc release to be built; many fixes to nfe(4) and bge(4) drivers; fixed PR 37037 - kernel memory corruption due to ipnat; support for the HP ML110 G2 / Adaptec 2610SA SATA RAID added to aac(4); fix of an off-by-one error in OpenSSL; avoid kernel crashes in signal handling (PR 37004) and Linux emulation (PR 36920); fix ACPI related interrupt storms due to differences between IOAPIC and classic interrupt routing."

NetBSD focuses on clean design and well architected solutions. Because of this NetBSD may support certain 'exciting' features later than other systems, but as time progresses the NetBSD codebase is getting even stronger and easier to manage, while other systems that value features over code quality are finding increasing problems with code management and conflicts.

NetBSD was the first free OS to provide USB support, and was using USB on Apple Power Macintosh machines before Apple had Mac OS X even booting. The USB support is available on all appropriate platforms, including alpha, i386, and macppc. Supported devices include mice, keyboards, modems, and mass storage devices (ZIP), with more drivers becoming available as the USB standard develops.




With it's wide range of supported hardware platforms, NetBSD runs fine on many embedded systems, including ARM, XScale, MIPS and PowerPC CPUs. The image shows a (real) toaster that was modified to include a TS-7200 board equipped with an ARM cpu to control the toaster's heating coil, toasting time, and to also play MP3s and run Apache all at the same time.

You can download it here.