Announcing NetBSD 5.0.1

Introduction

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.0.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.0.1 is the first security/critical update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for security or stability reasons.

Please note that all fixes in security/critical updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements.

Your generous donations during the 2007 fund drive allowed us to sponsor much of NetBSD 5.0's development in the areas of SMP performance and scalability. This work was highly successful, and we would like to see a repeat of this success in the future. See below to find out how you can help.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.0.1 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/. We encourage users who wish to install via ISO images to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the ISO image area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 5.0.1 distribution has been signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security Officer: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-5.0.1_hashes.asc

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services are available via our mailing lists and website. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources. More extensive information on NetBSD is available from our website:

2009 Fund Drive

Your donation to the NetBSD Foundation allows the project to make major improvements to the code base. We would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we are in the middle of a fund drive with a target of 60,000 USD by the end of the year. We would like to continue funded development in various areas, including:

  • Improving network stack concurrency and performance.
  • Development of modern file systems and improvement of existing ones.
  • Features which are useful in embedded environments, for example, high resolution timers and execute in place (XIP) support.
  • Automatic testing and quality assurance.
We have recently made some changes to the way we accept and honor your donations. For more information about donating, visit http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/

Major Changes Between 5.0 and 5.0.1

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-5.0.1 file in the top level directory of the NetBSD 5.0.1 release tree. An abbreviated list is as follows:

Security Advisory Fixes

Note: Advisories prior to NetBSD-SA2009-004 do not affect NetBSD 5.0.

Kernel

  • Fix random "filesystem full" messages on large FFS file systems.
  • Fix a regression in the 4.4BSD scheduler, improving interactive performance under load.
  • Remove a race where physio_done() may use memory already freed. Fixes PR kern/39536.
  • Fix a crash observed when trying to load a corrupted ELF kernel module.
  • Fix PR kern/41566, where writes on the controlling tty were not being awoken from blocks.
  • Various fixes for POSIX message queues.
  • Fix a possible deadlock in the VFS subsystem.
  • Fixes for POSIX advisory locks.
  • A number of other stability fixes.

Networking

  • Follow exactly the recommendation of draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure-11.txt: Don't check against the last ack received, but the expected sequence number. This makes RST handling independent of delayed ACK.
  • Fix a panic when trying to disable IPFilter before enabling it. Fixes PR kern/41364.

Drivers

  • ehci(4): Add a workaround for ATI SB600 and SB700 revisions A12 and A13 to avoid a USB subsystem hang when the system has multiple USB devices connected to it or one device is re-connected often.
  • wm(4):
    • On i82563, FreeBSD's em driver says that the ready bit in the MDIC register may be incorrectly set. Insert delay(200) like the em driver. Fixes PR kern/41014.
    • Add workaround for 82543GC. We need to force speed and duplex on the MAC equal to what the PHY speed and duplex configuration is. Fixes PR kern/36430.
    • Fix many problems and panic on TBI's cards (PR kern/32009).

Platform specific

  • x86 (amd64 and i386): Add a workaround for a bug with some Opteron revisions where locked operations sometimes do not serve as memory barriers, allowing memory references to bleed outside of critical sections.
  • amd64: Handle protection faults properly, returning SIGSEGV instead of SIGBUS.
  • hp300: Make install.md probe cd(4) devices properly.
  • pmax: Make ksyms(4) actually work.
  • sh3: Fix logic error in copyinstr() when deciding whether to return EFAULT or ENAMETOOLONG.
  • sparc64:
    • Fix long double support in 32bit libc. Fixes PR port-sparc64/41406.
    • When preparing the initial trap frame for a new forked lwp, explicitly clear condition code. Otherwise we might catch a signal before we ever return to userland. Fixes PR port-sparc64/41302.
  • vax: binutils: Allocate relocation section using bfd_zalloc() to ensure no garbage relocations when not all the entries are used. Fixes PR port-vax/39182.

Userland

  • Update pkg_install to 20090724.

    Note

    pkg_install now depends on the pkgdb cache for automatic conflict detection. It is recommended to rebuild the cache with "pkg_admin rebuild". audit-packages.conf(5) has been superseded by pkg_install.conf(5). The default configuration is the same. Support for pkg_view(1) has been retired. The functionality of audit-packages(1) and download-vulnerability-list(1) has moved into pkg_admin(1). Wrapper scripts that handle the common use cases are provided.
  • Update libfetch to 2.23.
  • racoonctl(8): Adjust ADMINPORTDIR to match that of racoon (/var/run). Fixes PR bin/41376.
  • schedctl(8): Skip LSIDL and LSZOMB threads when retrieving info.
  • postinstall(8) now knows about /etc/dhcpcd.conf.

Miscellaneous

  • The X.Org s3 driver now works.
  • Install the Xvidtune app-defaults file.
  • Fixes to Linux compat:
    • In sendmsg(2), do copy the msghdr structure before trying to use it.
    • In linux_sys_sched_getaffinity(), do not leak memory on error.
  • Various METALOG fixes, including sorting entries. Addresses PR toolchain/24457 and PR bin/41155.

Known Problems

Using block device nodes directly for I/O may cause a kernel crash when the file system containing /dev is FFS and is mounted with -o log. Workaround: use raw disk devices, or remount the file system without -o log.

Occasionally, gdb may cause a process that is being debugged to hang when "single stepped". Workaround: kill and restart the affected process.

gdb cannot debug running threaded programs correctly. Workaround: generate a core file from the program using gcore(1) and pass the core to gdb, instead of debugging the running program.

Statically linked binaries using pthreads are currently broken.

NetBSD mirror sites

Please use a mirror site close to you.

System families supported by NetBSD 5.0.1

The NetBSD 5.0.1 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems:

NetBSD/acorn26 Acorn Archimedes, A-series and R-series systems
NetBSD/acorn32 Acorn RiscPC/A7000, VLSI RC7500
NetBSD/algor Algorithmics, Ltd. MIPS evaluation boards
NetBSD/alpha Digital/Compaq Alpha (64-bit)
NetBSD/amd64 AMD family processors like Opteron, Athlon64, and Intel CPUs with EM64T extension
NetBSD/amiga Commodore Amiga and MacroSystem DraCo
NetBSD/arc MIPS-based machines following the Advanced RISC Computing spec
NetBSD/atari Atari TT030, Falcon, Hades
NetBSD/bebox Be Inc's BeBox
NetBSD/cats Chalice Technology's CATS and Intel's EBSA-285 evaluation boards
NetBSD/cesfic CES FIC8234 VME processor board
NetBSD/cobalt Cobalt Networks' MIPS-based Microservers
NetBSD/dreamcast Sega Dreamcast game console
NetBSD/evbarm Various ARM-based evaluation boards and appliances
NetBSD/evbmips Various MIPS-based evaluation boards and appliances
NetBSD/evbppc Various PowerPC-based evaluation boards and appliances
NetBSD/evbsh3 Various Hitachi Super-H SH3 and SH4-based evaluation boards and appliances
NetBSD/ews4800mips NEC's MIPS-based EWS4800 workstation
NetBSD/hp300 Hewlett-Packard 9000/300 and 400 series
NetBSD/hppa Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 700 workstations
NetBSD/hpcarm StrongARM based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/hpcmips MIPS-based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/hpcsh Hitachi Super-H based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/i386 IBM PCs and PC clones with i486-family processors and up
NetBSD/ibmnws IBM Network Station 1000
NetBSD/iyonix Castle Technology's Iyonix ARM based PCs
NetBSD/landisk SH4 processor based NAS appliances
NetBSD/luna68k OMRON Tateisi Electric's LUNA series
NetBSD/mac68k Apple Macintosh with Motorola 68k CPU
NetBSD/macppc Apple PowerPC-based Macintosh and clones
NetBSD/mipsco MIPS Computer Systems Inc. family of workstations and servers
NetBSD/mmeye Brains mmEye multimedia server
NetBSD/mvme68k Motorola MVME 68k Single Board Computers
NetBSD/mvmeppc Motorola PowerPC VME Single Board Computers
NetBSD/netwinder StrongARM based NetWinder machines
NetBSD/news68k Sony's 68k-based NET WORK STATION series
NetBSD/newsmips Sony's MIPS-based NET WORK STATION series
NetBSD/next68k NeXT 68k black hardware
NetBSD/ofppc OpenFirmware PowerPC machines
NetBSD/pmax Digital MIPS-based DECstations and DECsystems
NetBSD/prep PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform) and CHRP machines
NetBSD/sandpoint Motorola Sandpoint reference platform
NetBSD/sbmips Broadcom SiByte evaluation boards
NetBSD/sgimips Silicon Graphics' MIPS-based workstations
NetBSD/shark Digital DNARD (shark)
NetBSD/sparc Sun SPARC (32-bit) and UltraSPARC (in 32-bit mode)
NetBSD/sparc64 Sun UltraSPARC (in native 64-bit mode)
NetBSD/sun2 Sun Microsystems Sun 2 machines with Motorola 68010 CPU
NetBSD/sun3 Motorola 68020 and 030 based Sun 3 and 3x machines
NetBSD/vax Digital VAX
NetBSD/x68k Sharp X680x0 series
NetBSD/xen The Xen virtual machine monitor
NetBSD/zaurus Sharp ARM PDAs

Ports available in source form only for this release include the following:

NetBSD/amigappc PowerPC-based Amiga boards
NetBSD/ia64 Itanium family of processors
NetBSD/playstation2 SONY PlayStation2
NetBSD/rs6000 IBM RS/6000 MCA-based PowerPC machines.

Acknowledgments

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:

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 (Luleå Academic Computer Society) computer society at Luleå University of Technology for current colocation services.

About NetBSD

NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.

About the NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers.

As a non-profit organization with no commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users, and we would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the NetBSD Foundation in support of continuing production of our fine operating system. Your generous donation would be particularly welcome assistance with ongoing upgrades and maintenance, as well as with operating expenses for The NetBSD Foundation.

Donations can be done via PayPal to and are fully tax-deductible in the US. If you would prefer not to use PayPal, or would like to make other arrangements, please contact .


Back to  NetBSD 5.x formal releases