Enlightenment's 0.28.0 release, authored by Carsten Haitzler, adds initial NetBSD support with power and signal handling, a new NetworkManager module covering Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth and VPNs, and native PipeWire mixer support alongside PulseAudio. The update also introduces a clipboard history module, restores the Pants module, adds per-battery charge limits, and brings ACPI CPU power profile and AMD GPU power handling.
enlightenment.org
· 2026-11-01
A new operating system called AlpineBSD has been introduced, pairing the NetBSD kernel and core utilities with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux's apk-tools package manager and busybox. The project explicitly aims to avoid AI-generated code in its base system and main package repository, and currently has no installer, offering only a high-level manual installation guide. It uses the s6 init system rather than Alpine's OpenRC, with OpenRC support planned as an alternative.
wiki.alpinebsd.org
· 2026-10-28
The writer recounts joining SDF as an ARPA member, a non-profit public-access UNIX system that traces back to a 1987 bulletin board system called SDF-1, started by Ted Uhlemann on an Apple IIe with a 300-baud modem. SDF has since grown into a member-funded 501(c)(7) nonprofit multi-user NetBSD system with tens of thousands of accounts, named after the anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
brennan.day
· 2026-10-24
The OpenBSD project has shipped version 8.0, its 61st release following a semiannual schedule dating to 1996. The update adds support for Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards, expands kernel virtual address space on AMD64 from 4 GB to 512 GB to allow mapping VRAM above 4 GB, and introduces ARM64 hibernation support, a new RPKI-to-router daemon, RISC-V vector extension support, and updates to LibreSSL and OpenSSH, while dropping Loongson architecture support.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-20
Google Summer of Code participant Artem Belan spent summer 2026 reworking racoon2, NetBSD's IKEv1/IKEv2 key exchange daemon, fixing RFC 7383 message fragmentation, adding NAT-OA payload handling for IKEv1 Quick Mode, improving IPv6 support, and building an automated test suite. The work was merged upstream via pull requests #13 through #39 on the project's gsoc2026 branch between June and September 2026.
blog.netbsd.org
· 2026-10-04
A developer blog post examines whether the cp command's -r and -R recursive-copy flags have ever behaved differently. It traces GNU coreutils source code back to 1992, finding the two flags originally set different internal variables, before being merged into identical behavior in 2002. The post also checks OpenBSD 7.9 and NetBSD 11, finding both still treat -r and -R as distinct, with manuals recommending -R.
movq.de
· 2026-09-30
A developer describes discovering pkgsrc, NetBSD's portable package manager, and using it to build software like Emacs from source outside of NetBSD itself. The post explains that pkgsrc, forked long ago from FreeBSD's Ports collection, runs on Linux, macOS, and Solaris while keeping packages cleanly separated from the operating system's base files.
wisellama.rocks
· 2026-09-14
NASA Lewis Research Center's Satellite Networks and Architectures Branch relies almost entirely on NetBSD to test proposed TCP protocol changes, including selective-acknowledgement retransmission and larger initial windows, for both satellite and terrestrial links. Separately, the KAME project used NetBSD as the base for implementing IPv6 and IPsec, with its stack merged into NetBSD-current in June 1999, while Germany's Institute for Media Communication built network access control tools on the OS.
netbsd.org
· 2026-09-06
The NetBSD Project has released NetBSD 9.5, the last update in the NetBSD 9 stable series, bundling security and stability fixes accumulated since NetBSD 9.4 shipped in April 2024. It remains compatible with NetBSD 9.0, but its release also formally ends support for the entire netbsd-9 branch.
blog.netbsd.org
· 2026-09-06
As part of Google Summer of Code 2026, contributor Emmanuel Nyarko has been enhancing NetBSD's RAIDframe disk management system. The work adds an N-way RAID 1 extension letting mirrors span more than two disks with one primary and multiple secondaries, and introduces scrubbing support to proactively detect read failures across disks.
blog.netbsd.org
· 2026-08-24
GoKawiil