NetBSD 8.0 has been released with major security enhancements. Lovers of open source alternatives should know that the operating system of the BSD family is already available and among these security improvements are the expected security patches that mitigate the vulnerabilities that were detected in some modern CPU architectures, as are Specter v2 and v4, Meltdown and Lazy FPU that was found recently.
This week NetBSD was updated to version 8.0, which apart from those security improvements also brings many others that will improve stability and will remove some bugs from previous versions. It comes 7 months after the main release of NetBSD 7.0, that is, more than half a year of intense development that has ended with these results. By the way, the mitigations of SPectre v2 are based on the Retpoline technique used in the GNU GCC compiler, which together with the microcode updates for the Intel and AMD chips do the rest ...
Sincerely in GNU / Linux we have enjoyed these security updates and patches long before, I wonder that NetBSD has come so late. I also understand that the NetBSD development community is much smaller and more closed, and it is somewhat more complicated for them ... I do not want to detract from it, far from it. So if you want to try it, you can go to the official website of the project and discover NetBSD for the first time or upgrade to this new version if you are already using it.
By the way, apart from the security improvements include many other improvements on NetBSD 8.0. An example of this is the support for SMAP (Supervisor Mode Access Prever) for both 32 and 64-bit, new features for the UEFI bootloader, support for USB 3.0, new features in the kernel audio mixer, a new socket layer for communication with CAN bus devices, some news in the network stack with ipsecif, improved performance and stability in the FS, and a long etc.