James Chacon announced the beginning of the NetBSD 2.0 release process today saying, "the current tentative schedule shows an expected final release in late May 2004. Updates to this timeframe will be announced as progress is made towards final release."

The complete list of changes between NetBSD 1.6 and the upcoming 2.0 release is quite lengthy. Among the many changes NetBSD 2.0 includes the following highlights: native threads based on scheduler activations [story]; the kqueue events notification framework which offers events for changes to sockets, files, directories, fifos, pipes, ttys and devices, as well as the monitoring of processes and signals; systrace, security-oriented system call access policies for the monitoring and control of application processes; UFS2, utilizing 64-bit block pointers and allowing filesystems larger than 1 Terabyte; verified exec, providing a mechanism to verify a cryptographic hash before allowing binaries and scripts to execute; cgd, a cryptographic disk driver for disks, partitions and even swap; and support for a non-executable stack and heap to make it more difficult to exploit buffer overflows.

From: James Chacon [email blocked]
To:  netbsd-announce
Subject: Announcing the start of the 2.0 release process
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:53:41 -0600

As of 28 Mar 2004 the 2.0 release process for NetBSD has begun.

It's expected that more than 50 ports will ship with this milestone release.

The current tentative schedule shows an expected final release in late 
May 2004. Updates to this timeframe will be announced as progress is made
towards final release.

The NetBSD Release Engineering team
(releng@netbsd.org)

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