NetBSD 9.3 Released With Better Support For Newer Intel & AMD Chipsets

[kylew77]

Thanks for covering NetBSD Michael. I saw the announcement this morning and wondered if Phoronix would cover it and sure enough it did! When NetBSD 10 finallys rolls around later this year would be nice to get some benchmarks. It is gonna be BIG!

[Dharc]

Is it even possible that Linux now supports more hardware architectures than NetBSD? I think so...!

Yes, Linux supports more architecture than NetBSD because has more manpower and investments. Hardware manufacturers when designing new architecture spend much investments on linux being compatible with this new product. BUT, NetBSD code is designed to be more portable, it means port'able. Linux is of course the most ported kernel around the globe, but NetBSD is the most portable. Little, but important difference. Means it's easier to port NetBSD to a random new hardware than Linux. Linux started to be so ported during the last decade, NetBSD was designed for that since 90s.

[tildearrow]

Typos:

NetBSD 9.3 has been released as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system known for running on many diverse platforms thanks to its focus oncode portability.

With NetBSD 9.3 being a stable point release, it consists of various back-ports from NetBSD head that have been demed stable and suitable for merging to the NetBSD 9 series without breaking compatibility.

[roviq]

Back in the 2000s decade, I had several old 486 and 586 PCs from the 1990s running NetBSD as network appliances (router/gateway, a prehistoric NAS, etc), it ran way better than Slackware Linux in the same hardware. Recently and nostalgia-fueled from those memories I tried to set up a NetBSD web browsing machine on an old AMD Kabini (AM1 socket, 25w max) PC, as it is very outdated and slow hardware, and it was messy, particularly the X setup (Kabini was in the middle of old radeon and new amdgpu drivers or something like, neither here or there). If it were a headless network thingy, it would be great, but as a daily desktop driver, better to stick to Linux, I installed Arch on that machine and it runs acceptabl-ish for what it can do. Even Windows 11 with the noTPM hack ran fine, go figure! So, as much as I try to care and use the *BSDs, I pivot to Linux in the end due to hardware support. Recently had the same dilemma with a ZFS RAIDZ2 NAS, as FreeBSD drew way more power (at idle 25-30w, scrubbing or so, up to 50w more) than Linux.

Is it even possible that Linux now supports more hardware architectures than NetBSD? I think so...!

[rene]

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[phoronix]

Phoronix: NetBSD 9.3 Released With Better Support For Newer Intel & AMD Chipsets

NetBSD 9.3 has been released as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system known for running on many diverse platforms thanks to its focus oncode portability...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-9.3-Released