14 DAY TRIAL // NetBSD, a free, fast, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like open source OS that is able to run on a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices, has been upgraded to version 7.0 RC3.
The new NetBSD 7.0 branch seems to be a very big step forward and developers have implemented a huge number of changes so far, and they are not stopping either. It's not clear whether more Release Candidates are on their way, but judging by the size of the changelog, more things are still coming.
"On behalf of the NetBSD release engineering team, it is my distinct pleasure to announce that the third release candidate of NetBSD 7.0 is now available for download. As the old Schoolhouse Rock song tells us, three is a magic number. We're hoping that RC3 will be the magic/last release candidate of 7.0," said Soren Jacobsen.
What's new in NetBSD 7.0 RC3
The changelog states that a resize_root boot operation has been added, SMP has been enabled on Raspberry Pi 2, some DRMKMS stability improvements have been implemented, a kernel panic when starting X on Intel 855GM machines has been fixed, hanging on some machines after attaching ehci has been repaired, and a number of packages have been upgraded to newer versions.
Also, SCCS support has been dropped, the correct pid is now written to the pidfile, libperfuse can now handle the resource limits properly, and an IPFilter panic has been fixed.
A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download NetBSD 7.0 RC3 right now from Softpedia, but you have to keep in mind that this is not a regular image. You can't just plug it in VirtualBox and hope that it works. The NetBSD devs provide dedicated images for various platforms and they also offer a long list of supported devices.