NetBSD is a free, fast, secure and highly portable open-source Unix-like operating system. Its clean design and advanced features make it well suited to production systems and research, and it runs on an unusually wide range of hardware — from modern 64-bit servers to embedded boards and vintage machines. It descends directly from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and the 386BSD project.

Key Features

• Extreme portability — a single codebase builds for dozens of CPU architectures, from VAX and m68k to amd64, ARM and RISC-V
• Clean, BSD-licensed codebase — well documented and free for any use, including commercial
• Advanced networking — IPv6, the NetBSD Packet Filter (NPF), ALTQ traffic shaping and strong routing
• pkgsrc — a portable, cross-platform package manager offering more than 20,000 packages
• Security features — address-space layout randomisation, W^X, verified exec and sandboxing
• rump kernels — run kernel drivers as ordinary userspace processes for testing and reuse
• Virtualisation — Xen dom0/domU support and the NVMM hypervisor

Why Use NetBSD?

NetBSD is the right choice when portability, clean engineering and long-term stability matter more than the largest ecosystem. No other operating system supports as many hardware platforms from one source tree, and its small, disciplined codebase is a favourite for teaching and research.

Use Cases

• Embedded, ARM and retro-computing platforms
• Firewall, router and network appliance (NPF)
• Operating-systems teaching and research
• Servers on less common architectures

Platform

Highly portable — amd64, i386, ARM, AArch64, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, RISC-V, m68k, VAX and more

Licence

Free and open source. The NetBSD kernel and userland are distributed under the 2-clause and 3-clause BSD-style NetBSD licence.

Website

netbsd.org