NetBSD 11.0 Released: RISC-V Support and Improved Linux Compatibility

The NetBSD project has released version 11.0 — the nineteenth major release of this BSD system. The headline addition is the project's first-ever support for the 64-bit RISC-V architecture.

RISC-V and New Hardware

Initial RISC-V hardware support covers platforms based on the StarFive JH71XX — in particular, the VisionFive 2 and STAR64 single-board computers. Running NetBSD on RISC-V is also supported in the QEMU emulator. This adds to the already supported architectures, which include AMD64, ARM, SPARC64, MIPS and many others.

On the ARM side, initial support has arrived for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite, including the Oryon CPU cores and accompanying work to enable the hardware components.

Compatibility and Standards

NetBSD 11.0 conforms more closely to the POSIX.1-2024 and C23 standards. Compatibility with Linux system calls has been expanded — this is handled by the “compat_linux” subsystem, which makes it possible to run Linux applications.

For those who need speed, a new MICROVM kernel has been added for x86/amd64: it is geared toward extremely fast booting of virtual machines. Another curious addition is the virt68k port, which makes it possible to run the Motorola 68000 variant inside QEMU using paravirtualized devices. In other words, the venerable 68k family has also gotten its own virtual playground.

Drivers and Optimizations

The release brings new drivers for Intel and AMD hardware, X.Org Server optimizations with SIMD acceleration on AArch64, as well as a number of kernel improvements and general work to expand hardware support.

Details and download files are available on the official NetBSD.org project website.

Source: Phoronix