NetBSD has announced the release of its latest operating system, NetBSD 10, one and a half years after the formation of the last update. The release includes a number of significant improvements and is now available for download as installation images sized at 630 MB. These images are available for 57 system architectures and 16 different CPU families. Some of the key features of the new branch include support for access control lists in the FFS file system, performance optimization, the implementation of the Adiantum algorithm for discs, and the addition of a driver for VPN Wireguard.
The project focuses on supporting 8 primary ports that are crucial to NETBSD development strategy, such as AMD64, i386, EVBARM, EVBMIPS, EVBPPC, HPCARM, SPARC64, and Xen. Additionally, there are 49 secondary ports associated with various CPU types like HPPA, M68010, M68K, SH3, SPARC, and VAX. While secondary ports are still supported, some have lost relevance or do not have enough developers interested in their development. The port Acorn26 falls into the category of potentially inoperative ports that may be removed if there is no interest from developers.
Some of the main improvements in NetBSD 10 include the addition of support for access lists (Posix.1e ACL) in the FFS file system, implementation of the Wireguard-compatible WG network interface for VPN, and various performance optimizations. These optimizations include increased efficiency of file cache in the core, improved performance for the problem planner on Big.little ARM systems, enhanced productivity of SELECT and POLL system calls, and optimizations specific to X86 and AARCH64 architectures. The virtual memory system has also been optimized with a faster Radix Tree algorithm for memory page searches, increased speed for tracking clean and dirty memory pages, and improved efficiency for parallel operations.