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NetBSD

Project home page: http://www.netbsd.org/

Project motto: Of course it runs NetBSD.

First release: NetBSD 0.8 / April, 1993


About the NetBSD project

NetBSD's history reaches all the way back as one of the foremost derivatives of UCB's 4.3BSD Net/2 release. Founded by an original core team of four individuals (including OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt), NetBSD from the beginning has held a strong focus on a portable, clean, correct codebase and an open development model. NetBSD benefits from constant development and improvements for over 11 years. NetBSD is maintained by over 300 developers with management by an elected team. It provides a lightweight installation with various standard Unix tools, libraries, manual pages, and networking services.

Oustanding hardware portability

NetBSD is known for its hardware portability and is considered the leader with over 55 hardware platforms supported by a complete operating system (the kernel, libraries and userland). NetBSD runs on a large number of 32-bit and 64-bit computers. This support is made possible by NetBSD's excellent portability capabilities in their code base, enabling them to support new devices, platforms, and CPU archictures in much less time than other Unix-like operating systems. NetBSD's knack for wide multiplatform support also extends to support for many different foreign filesystems and binary compatibility for many other platforms' executable formats. The NetBSD project has also maintained GCC compiler and X11 server support for various esoteric or historical platforms.

Security and assurance

NetBSD also provides various security features, such as: in-kernel fingerprint table for validating executables; PF and IP Filter packet filtering systems; systrace for enforcing access policies for system calls; security curtain so users can't retrieve others' information via ps, netstat and w; and development of a fine-grained kernel authorization framework is in process.

Pkgsrc package system

Third-party software is easily installed using the pkgsrc build system or ready-to-use pkgsrc packages. NetBSD strives for coding portability and their packaging system is also used with other operating systems. Over 5000 packages are available.

Documentation/Resources

Useful links for NetBSD include: