NetBSD 9.1 Released: Highly Portable, Free And Open Source BSD Distro

BySarvottam Kumar October 21, 2020October 21, 2020

After the major release of OpenBSD 6.8, here comes NetBSD 9.1, another popular and one of the oldest free and open source operating system from BSD family.

NetBSD 9.1 is the first point update for the NetBSD-9 release branch, bringing new features, bug fixes, enhancements, and stability improvements for ZFS and LFS.

What’s New In NetBSD 9.1?

Last month, we reported about the switch of the default X11 window manager from TWM to a new CTWM (Claude’s Tab Window Manager) in the NetBSD-current development branch. So now, it has landed in the stable NetBSD version 9.1 as well.

In addition, v9.1 also includes improvements to its X11 windowing system, LFS, and ZFS file system support.

If you use NetBSD on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, then with NetBSD 9.1, you’ll experience better default input behaviour with clickpads and trackpoints.

Furthermore, v9.1 has added support for the Xen 4.13 hypervisor and updated NVMM hypervisor to bring improved emulation, performance, and stability.

For security purposes, version 9.1 has brought Parallelized disk encryption support with CGD cryptographic disk driver. You can even now use USB security keys in raw mode for several applications like Firefox.

Here’s the highlight of other key changes that NetBSD 9.1 includes:

Added the C.UTF-8 locale
Support for more hardware random number generator
Fully compatible with packages and other binaries for NetBSD 9.0
Added uxrcom driver for Exar single and multi-port USB serial adapters and aq driver for Aquantia 10 gigabit ethernet adapters
Fast boot process for amd64
Updated third-party components such as GCC, dhcpcd, OpenSSL, and tzdata
More built-in keyboard layouts for wscons driver like Portuguese, Estonian
Fixes for kernel memory corruption and information leakage
Audio system and other bug fixes

For the complete list of changes from NetBSD 9.0 to NetBSD 9.1 release, you can read the CHANGES-9.1 notes.

If you want to try it on your system, v9.1 images are available to download for several popular architectures.

Sarvottam Kumar

Sarvottam Kumar is a software engineer by profession with interest and experience in Blockchain, Angular, React and Flutter. He loves to explore the nuts and bolts of Linux and share his experience and insights of Linux and open source on the web/various prestigious portals.