NetBSD Archive

The first point release for NetBSD 11 has been released. As the version number suggests, there’s no major changes here. This release includes security updates for mozilla-rootcerts, brotli, xorg-server, hdaudio(4), compat_linux(8), unbound(8), and ipfilter. Among the non-security related changes are improved USB device stability on Raspberry Pi, fixed hot-plugging bugs in various USB Wi-Fi drivers, support for battery monitoring on the Microsoft Surface Go 3, fixed thread-local storage on ARMv5, fixes for running the MIPS Malta and PA-RISC ports under QEMU, support for the Zhaoxin KX-7000 CPU, and support for sensors, i2c, real-time clocks, and fan control on Sun Ultra 25/45 and Sun Fire V215/V245 machines. ↫ Nia Alarie on the NetBSD blog The full release notes provide more details.

AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible. There is no LLM output included in the base system or main package repository (AlpineBSD AI policy). ↫ AlpineBSD’s website AlpineBSD uses the NetBSD kernel, libc, and essential tools, and combines them with Alpine’s apk-tools package manager, busybox, and generlaly preferring GNU tools over their BSD equivalents. It uses the s6 init system, but the project intends to add OpenRC as an alternative. The project is in its very early stages, so don’t expect things like an installer; you’re on your own, basically.

What if a regular, normal NetBSD installation is too plebeian for you? This is a quick overview which attempts to synthesize DW Armstrong’s tutorial on NetBSD encryption with the cgdroot page from the NetBSD wiki in a single MBR partition, divided into multiple disklabel slices to preserve MBR entries. ↫ indigoparadox Web Zone What if you need this?

Speaking of NetBSD, the fifth and final 9x release has been released. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.4 in April 2024. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. This also marks the end-of-support for all NetBSD-9.x releases and the netbsd-9 branch. All users still on this branch are urgently asked to update to a more recent release like NetBSD 11.0 (with 11.1 upcoming at the end of this month) or NetBSD 10.2 (to be released in a few days). ↫ Martin Husemann at the NetBSD blog The full release notes have more information.

Enlightenment desktop is a low on resources desktop environment without sacrificing on visuals. NetBSD support for this BSD-licensed desktop has been left a few years behind. The aim of this project is to port the newest version of the desktop to pkgsrc and commit upstream portability fixes when necessary to ease future versions updates for NetBSD. ↫ Dimitris Gounaridis on the NetBSD blog Enlightenment seems like a natural fit for NetBSD, so I’m glad they dedicated a GSoC project to getting the existing, outdated port up to snuff. The project is not complete as there’s a few issues to work out before it can be packaged for easy installation, but this is great progress already.

NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There’s a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet). NetBSD 11.0 also adds initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform, as well as a port to the virt68k platform, which means the Motorola 68000 port in QEMU using paravirtualized devices. Speaking of virtualisation, they’re also introducing a new MICROVM kernel for x86: New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs. ↫ NetBSD 11.0 release notes There’s also improved support for Linux system calls in compat_linux, the npf firewall, and much more. Of course, the list of other improvements, buigfixes, and smaller changes is long, including many changes for old, outdated, or otherwise odd architectures and platforms, as is the NetBSD way. Which other operating system proudly lists substantial improvements to their PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, and Alpha ports, among others?

FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native. Isolation and policy enforcement are integrated into the kernel’s security framework rather than implemented in a separate runtime layer. It does not aim to become a container platform. It does not aim to provide virtualization. ↫ Matthias Petermann It has all the usual features you have come to expect from jails, like resource quota, security profiles, logging, and so on. Processes inside jails have no clue they’re in a jail, and using supervisor mode, jails are descendent from a single process and remain visible in the host process table. Of course, there’s many more features listed in the linked article. It’s in development and not a default part of NetBSD at this time. The project, led by Matthias Petermann, is developed out of tree, with an unofficial NetBSD 10.1 ISO with the jails feature included available as well.

Rust is everywhere, and it’s no surprise it’s also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn’t be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it’s unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren’t compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers. Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn’t averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it’s even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn’t seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it’s not an impossibility either.

Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from flash memory. Since JavaOS is, of course, long gone, what can you do with JavaStation today? Well, you apparently can run NetBSD on it, but it’s quite an ordeal. The JavaStation needs to boot from the network using a combination of RARP, NFS, and more, and surprisingly, this entire setup, including the computer acting as the ‘server’ for the JavaStation, is well-documented and supported by NetBSD. Once you’ve gone through all the steps, you’ll end up with a JavaStation running the latest release of NetBSD, which is pretty cool. Obviously there is still a lot to do; as you can see postfix isn’t happy, and the swapfile security needs tightening up for a start. But we do now have a functional NetBSD system running on a vintage network computer! ↫ Old Fart’s Almanac NetBSD’s continued support for the most arcane of hardware will never cease to amaze me.

Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3″ TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM. I recently stumbled upon one in perfect condition on eBay, and immediately thought it’d be a cool vintage gadget to put on the desk. I only wondered if I could still use it for some slow-paced, distraction-free coding, using reasonably modern software. ↫ Luke’s web space You know where this is going, right? I evaluated a bunch of contemporary operating systems, including different variants of BSD and Linux. Usually, the experience was underwhelming in terms of performance, hardware support and stability. Well… except for NetBSD, which gave me such perfectly smooth ride, that I thought it was worth sharing. ↫ Luke’s web space Yeah, of course it was going to be NetBSD (again). This old laptop, too, can run X11 just fine, with the EMWM that we discussed quite recently – in fact, bringing up X required no configuration, and a simple startx was all it needed out of the box. For web browsing, Dillo works just great, and building it took only about 20 minutes. It can even play some low-fi music streams from the internet, only stuttering when doing other processor-intensive tasks. In other words, this little machine with NetBSD turns out to be a great machine for some distraction-free programming. Look, nobody is arguing that a machine like this is all you need. However, it can perform certain specific, basic tasks – anything being better than sending it to a toxic landfill, with all the transportation waste and child labour that entails. If you have old laptops lying around, you should think twice about just sending them to “recycling” (which is Western world speak for “send to toxic landfill manned by children in poor countries”), since it might be quite easy to turn it into something useful, still.

NetBSD 10.1 has been released. As the version number indicates, this isn’t supposed to be a major, groundbreaking release, but it still contains a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements. It’s got the usual set of new and improved drivers, kernel improvements – like the ability to hotplug spares and components in a RAID – and improvements for various specific architectures, and much more. If you’re using NetBSD you already know how to upgrade, and if you’re not yet using NetBSD, here’s the download page for the various supported architectures. There are a lot of them.

NetBSD is an open-source, Unix-like operating system known for its portability, lightweight design, and robustness across a wide array of hardware platforms. Initially released in 1993, NetBSD was one of the first open-source operating systems based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) lineage, alongside FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD’s development has been led by a collaborative community and is particularly recognized for its “clean” and well-documented codebase, a factor that has made it a popular choice among users interested in systems programming and cross-platform compatibility. ↫ André Machado I’m not really sure what to make of this article, since it mostly reads like an advertisement for NetBSD, but considering NetBSD is one of the lesser-talked about variants of an operating system family that already sadly plays second fiddle to the Linux behemoth, I don’t think giving it some additional attention is really hurting anybody. The article is still gives a solid overview of the history and strengths of NetBSD, which makes it a good introduction. I have personally never tried NetBSD, but it’s on my list of systems to try out on my PA-RISC workstation since from what I’ve heard it’s the only BSD which can possibly load up X11 on the Visualize FX10pro graphics card it has (OpenBSD can only boot to a console on this GPU). While I could probably coax some cobbled-together Linux installation into booting X11 on it, where’s the fun in that? Do any of you lovely readers use NetBSD for anything? FreeBSD and even OpenBSD are quite well represented as general purpose operating systems in the kinds of circles we all frequent, but I rarely hear about people using NetBSD other than explicitly because it supports some outdated, arcane architecture in 2024.

After covering setting up your own CDN with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it’s now time to learn how to set up your own CDN wit NetBSD. This article is a spin-off from a previous post on how to create a self-hosted CDN, but this time we’ll focus on using NetBSD. NetBSD is a lightweight, stable, and secure operating system that supports a wide range of hardware, making it an excellent choice for a caching reverse proxy. Devices that other operating systems may soon abandon, such as early Raspberry Pi models or i386 architecture, are still fully supported by NetBSD and will continue to be so. Additionally, NetBSD is an outstanding platform for virtualization (using Xen or qemu/nvmm) and deserves more attention than it currently receives. ↫ Stefano Marinelli All the same from my previous post still applies, and it’s a great thing that Marinelli covers all three of the major BSDs (so far). If you want to run your own CDN on BSD, you can now make a pretty informed decision on which BSD best suits your needs.

All that to say, I find that NetBSDs philosophy aligns with mine. The OS is small and cozy, and compared to many minimal Linux distributions, I found it faster to setup. Supported hardware is automatically picked up, for my Thinkpad T480s almost everything (except the trackpad issue I solved above) worked out of the box, and it comes with a minimal window manager and display manager to get you started. It is simple and minimal but with sane defaults. It is a hackable system that teaches you a ton. What more could you want? ↫ Marc Coquand I spent quite some time using OpenBSD earlier this year, and I absolutely, positively loved it. I can’t quite put into words just how nice OpenBSD felt, how graspable the configuration files and commands were, how good and detailed the documentation, and how welcoming and warm the community was over on Mastodon, with even well-known OpenBSD developers taking time out of their day to help me out with dumb newbie questions. The only reason I eventually went back to Fedora on my workstation was performance. OpenBSD as a desktop operating system has some performance issues, from a slow file system to user interface stutter to problematic Firefox performance, that really started to grind my gears while trying to get work done. Some of these issues stem from OpenBSD not being primarily focused on desktop use, and some of them simply stem from lack of manpower or popularity. Regardless, nobody in the OpenBSD community was at all surprised or offended by me going back to Fedora. NetBSD seems to share a lot of the same qualities as OpenBSD, but, as the linked article notes, with a focus on different things. Like I said yesterday, I’m looking to building and testing a system entirely focused on tiled terminal emulators and TUI applications, and I’ve been pondering if OpenBSD or NetBSD would be a perfect starting point for that experiment.