NetBSD has announced the release of NetBSD 9.4, marking the completion of the 9.X branch. This new version consists of mainly corrective updates, addressing issues and vulnerabilities identified since the release of NetBSD 9.3 in August 2022. While NetBSD 9.4 focuses on fixes, the recent release of NetBSD 10.0 introduced new features for users to explore. Installation images for NetBSD 9.4, with a size of 507 MB, can be downloaded for 57 system architectures and 16 CPU families.
Aside from bug fixes, NetBSD 9.4 also incorporates some new features from the NetBSD 10 branch, particularly in equipment support. This includes support for new controllers like MEGARAD, Ethernet cards with the RTL8168GU chip, and 3G modems such as ZTE MF112 and D-LINK DWM222. The update also expands support for CPUs from AMD (Zen3, Zen4) and Intel (Comet Lake, Skylake-X, Cascade Lake), along with adding support for RAM disks in ZFS and CGD, and improving compatibility with Qemu builds for Aarch64.
Other enhancements in NetBSD 9.4 include discontinuing DSA host keys for SSHD, adding IEEE FP .wav support to the Audioplay utility, implementing the Date flag “-f”, and introducing relative HTTP cores in FTP. Additionally, updated versions of various software packages are included in this release, such as OpenSSL 1.1.1t, Postfix 3.8.4, OpenSSH 9.6, Bind 9.18.24, NSD 4.8.0, and Unbound 1.19.1.