NetBSD 10 –�30 Years, Still Going Strong!
Topics
50 Years of BSD?
1BSD was released in 1978, but work started in 1974.
2BSD (for the PDP-11) is still maintained!
2.11BSD patch#481 came out in 2023.
You can run it in simh, or a PiDP-11.
3BSD and 4BSD were only for VAX.
4.3BSD-Tahoe brought multi-arch support.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.tahoe
From: bostic@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Date: 15 Jun 88 23:56:31 GMT
Subject: 4.3BSD-tahoe release
[...]
The primary purpose of this release is to provide sup-
port for the ``tahoe'' processor, the CPU used by Computer
Consoles, Inc. (CCI Power 6/32, 6/32SX), and high end lines
of Harris (HCX-7 and HCX-9), Unisys (7000/40), and ICL (Clan
7).
30 years of NetBSD
From cgd@agate.berkeley.edu Wed Apr 21 21:11:32 1993
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: So you say you want an interim release of 386bsd?
Keywords: 386BSD, NetBSD, free, BSD, sleep
Some of you have undoubtedly been wondering what i've been up
to lately... I've told some, i've randomly babbled to more,
and now everybody gets to know.
[...]
NetBSD is a new system, based heavily on 386BSD 0.1, with
many improvements over 386BSD 0.1, and with different goals
than those which are espoused by the principal developers
of 386BSD. NetBSD, as the name implies, is a creation of
the members of the network community and without the net,
it's likely that this release wouldn't have come about.
Some could look at NetBSD as simply an interim release of
386BSD. We look it as more, and therefore have named it
differently. The new name and version number reflect two
of our goals for NetBSD: an escape from the political wars
surrounding what we consider a wonderful operating system,
and the rapid development of a stable release which we
would consider of "production quality."
The Future of NetBSD:
--- ------ -- ------
[...]
We intend to integrate free, positive changes from
whatever sources will provide them, providing
that they are well thought-out and increase the
usability of the system.
[...]
Above all, we hope to create a stable and accessible system,
and to be responsive to the needs and desires of NetBSD
users, because it is for and because of them that NetBSD exists.
The Toaster
The year is 2005.
Technologic Systems Design�presents a toaster running NetBSD on arm.
“Of course it runs NetBSD!”
Photo Credit: Scott Beale
How relevant is this today?
A lot of the supported (Tier 2) architectures are kinda “retro”.
Real talk:�There is no modern hardware that runs NetBSD but not Linux.
Tier 1 Ports
Why use�NetBSD today?
A simple but powerful OS
A system that is understandable from top to bottom
A simple but powerful OS
Good compromise between old-school Unix and modern features
A welcoming community
Photo: pkgsrcCon 2019, Cambridge, UK
NetBSD 10
Release timeline
Jul 2019
NetBSD 9 branched
Feb 2020
NetBSD 9.0 released
HEAD
Dec 2022
NetBSD 10 branched
Jan 2024
NetBSD 10.0 RC3
What's New: Desktop
Big performance improvements in general
Graphics drivers now on par with Linux 5.6
WireGuard support – wg(4)
Improved ZFS
What's New: Xen Improvements
Support for PVH (the highest performance mode).
Support for HVM with PV drivers (PVHVM).
What's New: ARM
What's New: Caveats
What are you going to run it on?
Raspberry Pi
little or big-endian
RPi5 in -current only
Raspberry Pi 4
ODROID-N2+
Quartz64
ASUS Tinker Board
HummingBoard Pulse
Orange Pi 5
PineBook Pro
$199 ARM laptop
In the Cloud
What are you going to run on it?
Packages: pkgsrc
NetBSD’s package collection (pkgsrc) is great!
Packages: pkgsrc
No binary packages? No problem!
$ cd /usr/pkgsrc/www/firefox; make package-install
Packages: pkgsrc
It's easy to create your own package.
pkgsrc-wip (“work in progress”)
Packages: pkgsrc
You can install a tree in an arbitrary directory,�without root privileges.
Thank you!
Questions?