NetBSD 6.0 Beta Arrives With Cortex-A8, MIPS64 Support

NetBSD is a compact Unix-like open source operating system. NetBSD's origins are in version 4.3 of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) that was developed as an Unix-derivative by the University of California, Berkeley until 1995.

NetBSD 6.0 Beta arrives as a substantial update with numerous new drivers, support for ARM Cortex-A8 processors, greater compatibility with Linux software, as well as Xen support for multiprocessor systems.

With support for ARM Cortex-A8 CPUs, as well as 64-bit MIPS processors, the operating system could become much more attractive for ultraportable systems that rely on a highly customized, low cost feature set. There are several interesting a feature additions that go along with a strategy that is apparently targeted at expanding the operating system's reach. These include the addition of Logical Volume Manager (LVM), which supports partitions that can be dynamically changed, as well as the replacement of the virtual machine monitor Xen2 with version 4.1, which now supports Citrix Xenserver and Xen Cloud.

NetBSD developers said that the 6.0 release is in Beta only at this time and they expect the release to include "some lurking bugs". The current stable release of NetBSD is version 5.1.2, which was introduced last month.