I’d always been under the impression NetBSD runs on pretty much anything. That’s been the community’s marketing line for at least two decades, that it’ll even run on a toaster (provided your toaster runs ARM)
NetBSD was designed for a world where many CPU architectures were extant, and each one was associated with a relatively small complement of hardware accessories (and therefore drivers). This made a lot of sense in the 1990s and 2000s when minicomputers and workstations still roamed the earth. Now we have two relevant architectures and a neverending stream of hardware devices, and it’s a lot harder for a small volunteer project to keep up.
NetBSD “runs on pretty much anything” in the sense that it’s highly portable and if you write the drivers, you can probably get it booting on that random piece of hardware you’ve got. However, “booting” (or even “usable for headless use cases”) is quite far from the requirements most people have for desktop use (working audio, accelerated graphics, performant networking on the built-in network devices), never mind laptop (power management etc). It’s this kind of “polish” driver work that NetBSD is lacking.
Yeah, it’s easier to do a port with NetBSD than Linux since it’s better structured and simpler, but the 10% of supporting peripherals is much harder than the first 90% of architecture. Assuming it even supports your architecture - NetBSD doesn’t support modern Power at all.
Which is just bonkers since FreeBSD and OpenBSD (I think) does. When I finally turn my AIX POWER6 into a museum piece and replace it with the POWER9 Raptors, they’ll be running FreeBSD, maybe with an AIX VM as a bridge, even though I’d rather run NetBSD since most of my other boxes do.
NetBSD supports the CPU is different than it supporting all your hardware like WiFi and such. My understanding is that “it runs on a toaster” is the former and that it has low resource requirements.
I’d always been under the impression NetBSD runs on pretty much anything. That’s been the community’s marketing line for at least two decades, that it’ll even run on a toaster (provided your toaster runs ARM)
score 1 · canonical
NetBSD was designed for a world where many CPU architectures were extant, and each one was associated with a relatively small complement of hardware accessories (and therefore drivers). This made a lot of sense in the 1990s and 2000s when minicomputers and workstations still roamed the earth. Now we have two relevant architectures and a neverending stream of hardware devices, and it’s a lot harder for a small volunteer project to keep up.
score 1 · canonical
NetBSD “runs on pretty much anything” in the sense that it’s highly portable and if you write the drivers, you can probably get it booting on that random piece of hardware you’ve got. However, “booting” (or even “usable for headless use cases”) is quite far from the requirements most people have for desktop use (working audio, accelerated graphics, performant networking on the built-in network devices), never mind laptop (power management etc). It’s this kind of “polish” driver work that NetBSD is lacking.
score 3 · canonical
Yeah, it’s easier to do a port with NetBSD than Linux since it’s better structured and simpler, but the 10% of supporting peripherals is much harder than the first 90% of architecture. Assuming it even supports your architecture - NetBSD doesn’t support modern Power at all.
score 2 · canonical
Which is just bonkers since FreeBSD and OpenBSD (I think) does. When I finally turn my AIX POWER6 into a museum piece and replace it with the POWER9 Raptors, they’ll be running FreeBSD, maybe with an AIX VM as a bridge, even though I’d rather run NetBSD since most of my other boxes do.
score 1 · canonical
OpenBSD only supports Raptor’s systems from the looks of it.
I’ve also had bad luck with FreeBSD on IBM systems; none of my POWER8s want to boot it; I suspect some issue with the bootloader.
score 1 · canonical
NetBSD supports the CPU is different than it supporting all your hardware like WiFi and such. My understanding is that “it runs on a toaster” is the former and that it has low resource requirements.
score 1 · canonical
It’ll run on your toaster, but it might not support toasting.
score 1 · canonical