NetBSD Formal Releases

Formal releases of NetBSD are intended to provide a stable, supported platform on which people can base their work. They provide a balance between features and stability. They are also typically easier to install than NetBSD-current.

A release is done by creating a branch of the source tree. The branch is known as e.g. 1.6_BETAn, and binary snapshots for all ports are autobuilt daily for test purposes. After a first test of the release building tools has been done, it is frozen; that is, no more features may be added, and bug fixes may only be added by—or on consent of—the release engineer. The branch is known as RCn when it is stable enough to be considered a release candidate, and the final release will be eg. NetBSD-1.6.

During this time, many developers concentrate on testing the release branch. Problems found on the release branch are fixed and tested on the development branch, and fixes pulled up to the release branch. The Release engineering status page has information about the status of upcoming releases.

Because they are well-tested and made relatively infrequently, formal releases are useful for people who don't want to be on the “bleeding edge” of development, or who just want to run applications. Since formal releases are effectively unchanging (there are typically very few official patches made to them), they are relatively easy to support, both by NetBSD's developers and the developers of applications. The biggest problem with running the latest formal release of NetBSD is that you don't have access to the latest features and bug fixes in the development tree.

Formal releases are relatively easy to install. All of the platforms supported by a formal release come with a detailed set of installation instructions, and most also include some sort of bootstrapping media. (For example, the i386 port typically uses floppy disk images to bootstrap, while the amiga and hp300 ports use a miniroot filesystem image.) There is also typically an upgrade procedure to bring a system from the previous formal release to the current one.

In short, if you're not the type of person who'd be willing to upgrade your operating system on a semi-daily basis, or if you want a system that is relatively easy to install and upgrade, a formal release of NetBSD is for you.

For those who do not wish to wait for the next release, we have daily updated snapshots of the release branches available via both FTP and SUP.

The directories /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-2-0 and /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-3-0 contain the extracted sources plus weekly updated tar files of both the 2.0 and 3.0 release branches respectively. These files are created in a similar manner to those in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current directory.

Thus far, there have been 25 formal releases of NetBSD. Eleven releases were major releases, which introduced new features in the operating system; and 14 were patch releases, which fix bugs in a major release and improve its stablility.

The NetBSD 3.0, 2.0 and 1.6 branches are currently being maintained. The NetBSD 1.5 and older branches have reached End Of Life and are no longer supported.

The latest release is NetBSD 3.0.