The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes.
Support for the ARM architecture seems to be a major pillar of this new release.
The support for all the aarch64 boards via generic kernels is huge, and may make NetBSD an attractive proposition for embedded work. The absolute worst part of embedded Linux on ARM is every board needing its own special snowflake kernel and the OEMs charging out the nose for updated kernel packages.
*facepalm”
Coincidentally I am playing again with my old Apple PowerPC computers, this time with some of the *BSD, which still support this architecture (macppc) in contrast to most of the Linux distributions, that have dropped some years ago the architecture (which, on the other hand, is understandable). Last night I managed to install NetBSD 9 on my iMac G4 (the iLamp).
I found in NetBSD the best documentation to deal with the kind of arcane (for me) Open Firmware systems, specially because my unit does not have a functional CD/DVD drive and I am relying on USB boot, possible but a bit more obscure, specially if you do not have by default the Open Firmware aliases that other documents assumed (most documentation is about iBooks and PowerBooks).
Unfortunatelly, macppc in NetBSD is Tier II, which means it is not a priority for the project, but nonetheless they still provide a quite decent support for the platform. As a side note, OpenBSD does provide a quite a good support for all these PowerPC machines and the installation is even more straightforward.