Announcing NetBSD 3.0

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 3.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty seven different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more.

NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in stability, performance, networking, security, also includes support for two new platforms (iyonix and hp700), and many new peripherals.

Far reaching improvements to the network stack will not only provide better performance but also make NetBSD an excellent choice for a VPN gateway. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) framework adds more flexibility to NetBSD's user management and simplifies integration into heterogeneous networks. The kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes, and support for Xen 2.0 allows hosting many virtual servers on a single machine.

Please read below for more achievements in NetBSD 3.0!

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 3.0 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services is provided at the end of this announcement; the latest list of available download sites may also be found at: http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/

We encourage users who wish to install via a CD-ROM ISO image to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the ISO image area.

A list of hashes for the NetBSD 3.0 distribution has been signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security Officer: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-3.0_hashes.asc

The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, UNIX-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD 3.0 runs on 57 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 17 distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 3.0 release contains complete binary releases for 53 different machine types, with the platforms amigappc, bebox, pc532 and playstation2 released in source form only.

NetBSD is a highly integrated system. In addition to its highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools, all accompanied by full source code. The NetBSD Packages Collection, pkgsrc, contains over 5,700 packages. Binary package releases for a number of platforms are currently in progress.

More information on the goals of the NetBSD Project can be procured from the NetBSD website at:

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services are available via our mailing lists and website. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources; some are listed at:

More extensive information on NetBSD is available from the NetBSD website:

NetBSD is the work of a diverse group of people spread around the world. The “Net” in our name is a tribute to the Internet, which enables us to communicate and share code, and without which the project would not exist.

The NetBSD 3.0 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems:

Ports available in source form only for this release include the following:

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES and CHANGES-3.0 files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 3.0 release tree. Some highlights include:

And of course there have also been innumerable bug fixes and other miscellaneous enhancements.

Please note that at the moment, sysinst will not assist you in installing pre-built third-party binary packages or the pkgsrc system itself. See the NetBSD packages collection documentation:

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and other resources over the years. More information on the people who make NetBSD happen is available at:

We would like to especially thank the University of California at Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code that we use. We would also like to thank the Internet Systems Consortium Inc., Columbia University and Ludd (Luleå Academic Computer Society) computer society at Luleå University of Technology for current colocation services.

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers.

As a non-profit organization with no commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users, and we would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the NetBSD Foundation in support of continuing production of our fine operating system. Your generous donation would be particularly welcome assistance with ongoing upgrades and maintenance, as well as with operating expenses for The NetBSD Foundation.

Donations can be done via PayPal to <paypal@NetBSD.org> and are fully tax-deductible in the US. If you would prefer not to use PayPal, or would like to make other arrangements, please contact <finance-exec@NetBSD.org>.

Please use a mirror site close to you.

Please also note our list of CD-ROM vendors.