Wow. So far, it's been a disaster for me. I remember saying the memory
management seemed iffy but being told to get a real machine with more
memory. My i386 machine w/1G of RAM and ~4G of swap kept crashing while
trying to compile things in pkgsrc. I think it's trying to recompile
gcc6. It's crashed eight times in the day I've had it running NetBSD-9.
My beefier x86_64 system isn't all that happy either. Trying to compile
firefox grournd everything to a halt. I couldn't even reply to this email
until I killed the build of firefox.
I don’t know if that’s attributable to the scheduler or resource scarcity, or ????, but Firefox has come to be nigh unbuildable for me in the last few months, owing to the Rust build (dependency); it’s *brutal*, IME.
Oh well, I guess that's progress.
On Wed, 31 Jul 2019, Maya Rashish wrote:
> If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the
> creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items
> that we worked on:
>
> - New AArch64 architecture support:
> Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE)
> Support for running 32-bit binaries
> UEFI and ACPI support
> Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware.
> - The FDT-ization of many ARM boards:
> the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations
> the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations
> All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board
> configuration.
> - Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to
> Kaby Lake based Intel graphics devices.
> - ZFS has been updated to a modern version and seen many bugfixes.
> - New hardware-accelerated virtualization via NVMM.
> - NPF performance improvements and bug fixes. A new lookup algorithm,
> thmap, is now the default.
> - NVMe performance improvements
> - Optional kernel ASLR support, and partial kernel ASLR for the default
> configuration.
> - Kernel sanitizers:
> KLEAK, detecting memory leaks
> KASAN, detecting memory overruns
> KUBSAN, detecting undefined behaviour
> These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the
> syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
> - The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all
> of its drivers
> - The installer is now capable of performing GPT UEFI installations.
> - Dramatically improved support for userland sanitizers, as well as the
> option to build all of NetBSD's userland using them for bug-finding.
> - Update to graphics userland: Mesa was updated to 18.3.4, and
> llvmpipe is now available for several architectures, providing 3D
> graphics even in the absence of a supported GPU.
>
> We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help
> NetBSD 9.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any
> bugs you find.
>
> Binaries are available on
> https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-9/latest/
>
> Please report any bugs you find!
>
--
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd%twofifty.com@localhost
BSEE + BSChem + BAEnglish + MSCS + $2.50 = coffee