Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:57:54 +0000 From: Alistair Crooks To: netbsd-announce@NetBSD.org Subject: The NetBSD project celebrates its fifteenth anniversary Message-ID: <20080320065754.GQ3580@nef.pbox.org> The NetBSD Project celebrates its 15th anniversary! The Internet, March 20 -- This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System, one of the oldest actively maintained, freely-available operating systems. NetBSD runs on everything from embedded systems to desktop workstations, from handhelds to big-iron servers, and is developed by the NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/ - one of the first Open Source projects. The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on March 21, 1993, and the first release of the NetBSD Operating System, NetBSD 0.8, was announced on USENET shortly thereafter. Throughout the past fifteen years, NetBSD has increased the portability and security of the 4.4BSD operating system on which NetBSD was based, and added support for new processor and system families, while enhancing the system's performance to such an extent that NetBSD has become known as the most portable operating system in the world. Innovations in the storage, networking and virtualization arena have been added, and much work has been done recently on performance, especially with multi-core and multi-threaded machines in mind. NetBSD 4.0, the latest release, includes support for most major current processor architectures, including x86, x86_64, SPARC, ARM, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, and SH, as well as several legacy processor architectures. It supports 13 different system architectures. The next major release, NetBSD 5.0, will continue the tradition of the last fifteen years by providing additional features and hardware support while maintaining the stability and performance that users have come to expect from NetBSD. NetBSD 5.0 will include a rewritten threading implementation based on a 1:1 threading model, support for different scheduler implementations, and support for dom0 ("host") and domU ("guest") domains for both Xen2 and Xen3 virtualization, as well as PAE domU support, a new power management framework, iSCSI target and initiator support, and file system improvements. It will support over fifty platforms, including support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) on x86, Alpha, and SPARC systems, on PowerPC-based Macintoshes, and even on VAXen. The NetBSD project and its developers are proud of its operating system, and would like to share its development plans. A number of roadmaps for future development covering storage, networking, virtualization and the system itself have been developed, and can be found in: http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/networking http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/storage http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/system http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/doc/roadmaps/virtualization Code from NetBSD has been included in countless other projects, Open Source and otherwise. It has been used in research and education as well as in commercial products. Literally thousands of third-party applications have been made available for use under NetBSD through the use of ``pkgsrc,'' the NetBSD Packages Collection. Keeping with NetBSD's goal of portability, pkgsrc also supports numerous other operating systems, thereby allowing consistent installation and management of third-party software across multiple platforms. Birthday celebrations will be listed on http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/events/index.html so if you plan to hold a NetBSD birthday party and would like to list its details on that site, please send an email to www@NetBSD.org All pictures, party reports and other feedback would be gratefully received. For more information on the NetBSD project, please visit the NetBSD Project home page at http://www.NetBSD.org/ or contact www@NetBSD.org. In addition, selected links to more information are provided below. NetBSD Project home page: http://www.NetBSD.org/ The NetBSD 4.0 release: http://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection: http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/software/packages.html http://www.pkgsrc.org/ Platforms supported by NetBSD: http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/ Products and projects using NetBSD: http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/products.html http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/research.html The first commit, and the NetBSD 0.8 release announcement: http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/Makefile ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/release/NetBSD/NetBSD-0.8 NetBSD release history and the BSD family tree: http://www.NetBSD.org/about/history.html http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree ``NetBSD'' and ``pkgsrc'' are trademarks of The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of their respective owners.