NetBSD – fast, secure and highly portable Unix-like operating system

NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. NetBSD was originally released in 1993. It continues to be actively developed.

It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.

The NetBSD project concentrates on code clarity, careful design, and portability across many computer architectures. Its source code is publicly available and permissively licensed.

• Security and memory hardening features – including PaX MPROTECT (W^X) enforced globally by default with an option to exclude binaries, among others. File integrity protection is provided by veriexec, and the traditional BSD securelevels further restrict operations that can be performed by even the superuser. NetBSD includes its own native firewall, NPF, and has been used successfully on security-critical networking devices. NetBSD’s kernel and userspace have undergone extensive checks by code sanitizers and automated testing.
• Powerful package management – NetBSD’s pkgsrc has its own release schedule of quarterly stable branches and a “rolling release” branch, which can be combined in any way with the NetBSD base system. pkgin is a user-friendly binary package manager for pkgsrc, but on its own pkgsrc itself allows power users a great deal of flexibility. pkgsrc has been widely adopted in the high-performance scientific computing community, including at NASA, and supports other platforms, but NetBSD is prioritized.
• Modern storage capabilities – including the ZFS file system, RAIDframe software RAID system, and cgd disk encryption. There is support for the Logical Volume Manager, as well as the traditional BSD filesystem (with logging extension) and disklabel system.
• ARM hardware support for a wide range of open, low-cost, and high-end devices, including powerful SBBA/SBBR servers, open hardware laptops, and pocket-sized development boards. Entirely in the mainline kernel, supported by a single image, and maintained by NetBSD developers with long-term support in mind.
• Virtualization support – including the well-established enterprise solution in Xen, and the native NetBSD kernel module and library making up the NVMM hypervisor, which provides hardware acceleration for QEMU in a clean and secure way.
• Support for modern x86 hardware including NVMe, UEFI, accelerated graphics, and a range of laptops.
• Continuing stable support for a wide range of “legacy” hardware and ABIs. There’s long-term backwards compatibility to even the earliest NetBSD releases without compromising on feature like 64-bit time.