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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.
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.
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.
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.