NetBSD was the first of the freely redistributable, open source versions of the BSD Unix-like operating systems to produce a formal release, with NetBSD 0.8 in May 1993.

NetBSD and FreeBSD are derived from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Networking/2 release and 386BSD. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD around the end of 1995. The current release of NetBSD is version 2.0.2 (April 2005).

NetBSD has been ported to a vast number of architectures; the NetBSD motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD." The binaries for the 58+ architectures are built from a single source code tree, so feature additions (which are not hardware specific) benefit all platforms immediately, with no re-porting required. Driver development is also machine independent, with the driver for a specific card serving whether that card is in a PCI slot on an i386, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, or other architecture with PCI buses. This platform independence helps greatly in developing embedded systems, especially starting in NetBSD 1.6, with the whole toolchain of compilers, assemblers, linkers, and other tools fully supporting cross-compiling.

Pkgsrc

NetBSD features its own port system, a collection of 3rd party software that will install almost automagically ; the NetBSD Packages Collection or pkgsrc, which consists of more than 5,000 packages as of November 2004. Installing things like KDE, GNOME, the Apache server or Perl is just a matter of changing into the right directory and typing make install. This will fetch sources, unpack, configure, build and install the package such that it can be removed again later. An alternative to compiling everything is to use a precompiled binary package. Either way, any prerequisites/dependencies will be installed automatically by the packages system, with no need for manual intervention.

Following its mantra of portability, the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) has been made portable not only across all the hardware platforms that run NetBSD, but also — with the help of an autoconf-based bootstrap system—on many other operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Darwin/Mac OS X, IRIX and others.

"NETBSD" is a registered trademark of The NetBSD Foundation as of April 20, 2004.[1]

See also

• DragonFly BSD
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• Comparison of operating systems

External links

• NetBSD project homepage
• NetBSD release engineering status
• NetBSD in action
• NetBSD CVS Digest
• Debian GNU/NetBSD

• The UVM Virtual Memory System
• UBC: An Efficient Unified I/O and Memory Caching Subsystem for NetBSD
• An Implementation of Scheduler Activations on the NetBSD Operating System
• The Evolution of NetBSD

• NetBSD Packages Collection
• pkgsrc-work in progress repository
• WWW interface for pkgsrc repository
• pkgsrc status
• Binary packages from pkgsrc bulk builds at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages, [2] and ftp://ftp.gw.com/pub/packages/NetBSD/

• fdgw - NetBSD router software contained in a floppy.
• livecd image made of NetBSD 2.0
• NetBSD Shell account at Super Dimensional Fortress and polarhome

• International Space Station message 1 and ISS message 2
• Internet2 SUNET Internet2 Land Speed Record
• Portability versus brute-force ported
  • bus_space(9) architecture independent bus
  • [http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi/man?9+bus_dma+NetBSD-current bus_dma(9) architecture independent ]
  • uvm(9) architecture independent virtual memory management
  • Multi-platform package system
  • Cross-compiling

• BSD family tree