NetBSD Jumpstart

Introduction to NetBSD OS

HISTORY

NetBSD took its roots from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Net/2 release and 386BSD. The NetBSD project was founded by Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles M. Hannum.

Frustration with the quality of patches in the wild and the inability to get patches included in 386BSD led to the founding of the NetBSD project in 1993. NetBSD's original focus was quality and architecture independence.

Why use NetBSD?

Thorough Documentation
Portable Unix like OS
NPF: packet filter with stateful inspection, NAT, IP sets, etc.
ZFS
KASLR
rump kernels
NVMM - NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor
HAXM

NetBSD goals

Provides a well designed, stable, and fast BSD system.
Avoids encumbering licenses.
Provides a portable system, which runs on many hardware platforms.
Interoperates well with other systems.
conforms to open systems standards as much as is practical.

In summary: The NetBSD Project provides a freely available and redistributable system that professionals, hobbyists, and researchers can use in whatever manner they wish.

NetBSD's Flavours

Formal Release:
Maintenance branches:
NetBSD-current:

Additionally, there is a graph showing an overview of release branches, depicting the 6.0 release and the following maintenance branches as an example.

NetBSD Repository

src: The main NetBSD system sources, that is, the contents of the system source tree excluding those pieces in other top-level directories in the CVS repository.
xsrc: The NetBSD X Window System source tree.
PKGSRC: The NetBSD packages collection.
htdocs: The NetBSD webpages, HTML and sources.

Mercurial Repository: https://anonhg.netbsd.org/

Obtaining the sources:https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-fetch.html