Information about NetBSD 1.2

NetBSD 1.2 was released on October 4, 1996. The current release has built upon the successful NetBSD 1.1 release by integrating many bug fixes, adding new and updated kernel subsystems, and adding various userland enhancements. The results of these improvements is a stable operating system fit for production use and ready for the next phase of development.

Significant changes include:

• Continuing the multi-platform tradition, the integration of the DEC Alpha port has been completed, and new ports to ARM and x68k have been added.
• NetBSD/sparc now supports 4m machines.
• NetBSD/amiga now supports the DraCo.
• Standard C Prototypes have been added to the Kernel.
• Kernel NTP (Network Time Protocol) phased lock loop support has been added. See http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ for more details.
• The PINT (PINT is not TWAIN) SCSI scanner driver interface has been integrated. See http://www.nicom.com/~dadbear/pint for more details.
• A new SCSI medium changer driver and the `chio' program used to operate it has been added.
• The NFS subsystem now supports NFSv3.
• Several performance enhancements have been made to the networking subsystem.
• GCC, Libg++, and many other third party programs have been upgraded to more recent versions.

Kernel interfaces have continued to be refined, and more subsystems and device drivers are shared among the different ports. You can look for this trend to continue.

NetBSD 1.2 also includes some refinement to the NetBSD binary emulation system (which includes FreeBSD, HP-UX, iBCS2, Linux, OSF/1, SunOS, SVR4, Solaris and Ultrix compatibility), bringing NetBSD closer to the goal of making the emulation as accurate as possible.

Architectures supported by NetBSD 1.2

NetBSD 1.2 included binaries for the following architectures:

DEC Alpha (NetBSD/alpha)

Amiga (NetBSD/amiga)

Atari (NetBSD/atari)

HP 9000/300 series (NetBSD/hp300)

i386-family PC (NetBSD/i386)

m68k-based Macintosh (NetBSD/mac68k)

m68k-based MVME systems (NetBSD/mvme68k)

PC532 (NetBSD/pc532)

DEC MIPS-based workstations (NetBSD/pmax)

Sun SPARC systems - sun4/sun4c/sun4m (NetBSD/sparc)

Sun 3 series (NetBSD/sun3)

Sharp X680x0 (NetBSD/x68k)

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