In Development Since 2019, NetBSD 10-RC1 Released As A Huge Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: In Development Since 2019, NetBSD 10-RC1 Released As A Huge Update

NetBSD 10 has been in development since late 2019 and the beta release is already a year old while now it's up to the release candidate phase with the availability of NetBSD 10-RC1...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-10-RC1

[kylew77]

YAY! This has been coming for a long time! NetBSD sits in a unique position combining many of the good features of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It is not perfect but really what OS is. I had an old Lenovo tower PC that was amd64 but still had pci expansion and not pcie that ran NetBSD perfectly. With NetBSD 10 coming out soon it maybe possible to run it on laptops that are only a few years old instead of nearly a decade old.

[stormcrow]

NetBSD continues to be unique for supporting many different CPU architectures.

That's the mythos. The reality is that OpenBSD actively supports just as many disparate hardware architectures. OpenBSD also usually has newer official equally well written hardware support far faster than NetBSD. At one time Linux supported more architectures than NetBSD due to it being the darling of the embedded systems world, though I'm no longer sure that's the case from code rot and many projects being one-off embedded systems that never went anywhere.

Edit to add: NetBSD's niche in the world is having a predictable path forward and long release cycles along with the OS being mostly permissively licensed. The former are things enterprise developers like. The latter is something business oriented management and lawyers like. The 'supports many different architectures' is by no means unique among OSes that can be chosen for the kinds of projects NetBSD can be used for. Naturally the drawback is long release cycles means adding official support for (new) hardware is quite slow.

[jacob]

NetBSD supports all sorts of exotic hardware but interestingly, it didn't work well at all as a KVM guest. Maybe this release will fix that.

[ayumu]

That's the mythos. The reality is that OpenBSD actively supports just as many disparate hardware architectures.

Not "mythos".

e.g. OpenBSD doesn't support the Amiga at all, whereas Netbsd 10 improved its Amiga support.

[Rallos Zek]

Not "mythos".

e.g. OpenBSD doesn't support the Amiga at all, whereas Netbsd 10 improved its Amiga support.

Is the Amiga port native or cross-compiled?

[ayumu]

Is the Amiga port native or cross-compiled?

Native. NetBSD's policy is to build everything natively.

[stormcrow]

Not "mythos".

e.g. OpenBSD doesn't support the Amiga at all, whereas Netbsd 10 improved its Amiga support.

So? That doesn't negate that it's still a myth that NetBSD is unique in its support for many different architectures. It's not unique.

[JustRob]

OpenBSD runs on the most popular platforms: https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html and has the fewest open bugs: https://www.openbsd.org/errata74.html compared to NetBSD: https://wiki.netbsd.org/releng/netbsd-10/

OpenBSD was released and supported for years after Amiga computers were discontinued, due to a lack of users and interest in supporting the platform: https://www.openbsd.org/amiga.html - the lack of interest extends to projects designed to help the diehards, who quit too quickly when it comes to helping themselves, example: FS-UAE.

[darcagn]

Already got NetBSD 10 beta up and running on my Sega Dreamcast. Even got it to recognize the 32MB double memory mod I installed.