NetBSD

NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multi-core systems. Threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load. Other highlights include WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS file systems, the jemalloc memory allocator, the power management framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, the automated testing framework, the runnable userspace meta program framework, Xen 3.3 support for i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers.

Major achievements include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers, and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks.

This release adds contains major improvements in filesystem and memory
management performance, major security enhancements, and support for
many new platforms and peripherals. SMP support has been added for i386,
SPARC, and PowerPC, the SMP support on Alpha and VAX has been improved,
and the new port to the 64-bit AMD/Opteron also supports SMP.

A number of security issues have been fixed. Some
performance fixes have been incorporated. The device support
has been improved in some existing drivers. Some new device
drivers have been
added. Some minor userland fixes have been applied. The
stability of the sparc64 port has been greatly enhanced.

In this version, some new features were added, and
some bugs were fixed.