Information about NetBSD 1.4.x
NetBSD 1.4 is the seventh release of the NetBSD operating system, and was
initially released on May 12, 1999.
The latest patch release,
NetBSD 1.4.3,
was released on November 25th, 2000.
-
This fixed bugs and added new hardware support. It is recommended
that users upgrade where possible. A list of the changes
for 1.4.3 is available. There is also a list of important last
minute changes that didn't make it into the main documentation.
NetBSD 1.4.x includes binaries for the following architectures:
Binaries and sources can be obtained from:
The NetBSD 1.4 release engineering team would like to thank the
literally hundreds of contributors who made this release a reality. We
would also like to thank our users, who have supported NetBSD with
their enthusiasm, evangelism, and contributions.
Major Changes Between 1.4.2 and 1.4.3
- A driver for the Lucent Wavelan (Orinoco) 802.11B wireless
Ethernet PCMCIA card has been added, see
wi(4).
- The PCI Cyclom-4Y and -8Y multiport serial cards are now supported.
- The Macintosh LC Ethernet Adapter is now supported.
- The on-board video on Macintosh Quadra 605 is now supported.
- Bugfixes to the Alteon Gigabit Ethernet driver,
ti(4).
- Support for several new PCI IDE controllers have been added, see
pciide(4).
- The i386 port may now be installed on wd2 or wd3.
- A possible CPU hog problem related to large I/Os has been fixed.
Fixes SA#2000-005.
- A denial-of-service problem related to handling of IP options
has been fixed. Fixes SA#2000-002.
- A problem with /etc/ftpchroot has been fixed. Fixes SA#2000-006.
- A minor problem related to locking of semaphore resources has
been fixed. Fixes SA#2000-004.
- The DHCP software has been updated to ISC 2.0pl3. This also fixes
SA#2000-008 -- a security problem in the dhcp client code.
- A problem with use of user-supplied data as a format string in
ftpd has been fixed. Fixes SA#2000-009.
- The sparc c++rt0.o code is now compiled with -fPIC. This means
that libraries with global constructors (which must link in
c++rt0.o on sparc/a.out) must also be compiled -fPIC.
- Most countries can now import the full release without restriction,
including the previously restricted domestic portion.
The only "problem spots" are US-embargoed countries. See
http://www.NetBSD.org/about/crypto-export.html
for the full details.
- An extensive audit of the code (and corresponding fixes) has
been done to eliminate possible buffer overruns caused by
possible user-specified format strings.
The CHANGES-1.4.3
file contains the complete list of changes applied in NetBSD 1.4.3.
Major changes between 1.4.1 and 1.4.2
- A driver for the Alteon Gigabit Ethernet cards has been added,
see ti(4).
- A driver for the Realtek 8129/8239 Fast Ethernet PCI cards have
been added, see rl(4).
- A driver for the DPT SmartCache and SmartRAID III or IV SCSI
adapters has been added, see dpt(4).
- A driver for the BOCA IOAT66 6-port ISA serial adapter has been
added, see ioat(4).
- Support for the X-surf Amiga board has been added.
- Support for ext2fs revision 1, with read-only support for the
``sparse super'' and the ``filetype'' options has been added.
See Hubert
Feyrer's page on these extensions for more information.
- BIND has been upgraded to version 8.2.2-P5.
- The IPF packet filtering software has been upgraded to version
3.3.5.
- Tcpdump now can do hex/ascii dumps of packet contents. See
tcpdump(8).
- An implementation of the System V user management utilities has
been added.
- The name ``errno'' is now always a macro which expands to a
function call. This is done to ease the integration of thread
libraries with the code in both system and third-party
libraries. Please include <errno.h> to access
the correct definition of ``errno''.
- A utility for making temporary files for shell scripts has been
added, see mktemp(1).
- The automounter utility amd(8) has been updated to fix a
security problem.
- A security problem in procfs has been fixed. Procfs is not used
by default in NetBSD.
- The floating point emulation on the ports using the m68k CPU has
been reverted to the version in NetBSD 1.4, because the version
in NetBSD 1.4.1 had problems.
- Several subsystems has received substantial work, such as
RAIDframe, LFS and the package tools.
The CHANGES-1.4.2
file contains the complete list of changes applied in NetBSD 1.4.2.
Major changes between 1.4 and 1.4.1
- The NetBSD/alpha port's compatibility for Digital UNIX / Tru64
has been greatly improved.
- Many bug fixes and improvements of the installation tools and
utilities.
- Support for more PCI serial/parallel cards has been added.
- The floating point emulation on the ports using the m68k CPU has
been upgraded.
- A fatal problem with /dev/random has been found and
fixed.
- Support for Alpha 21264 ev6 based systems has been added to
NetBSD/alpha.
The CHANGES-1.4.1
file contains the complete list of changes applied in NetBSD 1.4.1.
Major changes between 1.3 and 1.4
It is impossible to completely summarize the nearly two years of
development that went into the NetBSD 1.4 release. Some
highlights include:
- Substantial improvements in the TCP/IP implementation, including
numerous performance enhancements and bug fixes by Jason
Thorpe and others.
- A new, high efficiency kernel memory pool allocator by Paul
Kranenburg. This has been integrated into most kernel
subsystems.
- A new, totally rewritten virtual memory subsystem, UVM, created by
Chuck Cranor, which is substantially cleaner and better performing
than the old Mach derived VM subsystem.
- Improved POSIX and XPG standards compliance.
- Completion of the integration of all remaining 4.4BSD Lite-2 kernel
improvements and bug fixes that had not been previously integrated.
(Integration of all userland components was completed before
NetBSD 1.3)
- Several new ports, including macppc, bebox, sparc64, next68k, and
others, have been integrated into the source tree.
- The system compilers have been upgraded to egcs 1.1.1, and the
system compiler toolchain now (mostly) uses the latest
versions of GNU binutils instead of the obsolete versions left
over from 4.4BSD Lite.
- Everyone's favorite ftp(1) client has been improved even further. See
the man page for details.
- A new architecture independent console driver, wscons(4), has been
integrated into many ports.
- Numerous improvements have been made to the audio subsystem support,
including support for MIDI device drivers.
- Linux compatibility support has been improved.
- A number of scheduler enhancements have yielded dramatic improvements
in interactive performance and better control of background tasks.
- Several network tunneling protocols, including GRE and IP in IP, have
been implemented.
- Kernel support for the CODA distributed file system has been added.
- Manuel Bouyer completed major changes to the IDE support. It is now
architecture independent. Major changes have been made to the IDE
code for better error handling, improved ATAPI support, 32 bit data
I/O support and bus-master DMA support on PCI IDE controllers.
- Lennart Augustsson has added full USB support, permitting the use of
a wide variety of Universal Serial Bus peripherals. The drivers
should easily port to any future platforms that support the PCI bus.
See usb(4) for an overview.
- RAIDframe, version 1.1, from the Parallel Data Laboratory at Carnegie
Mellon University, has been integrated. Supports RAID levels 0, 1,
4, 5, and more.
- Luke Mewburn added nsswitch.conf(5) functionality to the system to
specify the search order for system databases.
- syslogd(8) now supports listening on multiple sockets, to make the
chrooting of servers easier.
- Most third party packages have been updated to the latest stable release.
As has been noted, there have also been innumerable bug fixes.
Kernel interfaces have continued to be refined, and more subsystems and
device drivers are shared among the different ports. You can look for
this trend to continue.
(Contact us)
$NetBSD: index.list,v 1.2 2007/07/13 17:41:26 kano Exp $
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