NetBSD

NetBSD is a Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2) and 4.4BSD-Lite -derived Operating System. It is a fully functional UN*X-like system which runs on many architectures and is being ported to more. NetBSD, as the name implies, is a creation of the members of the network community and without the net it's likely that this release wouldn't have come about.

NetBSD 1.1 is a evolutionary release which contains over a year of changes to the kernel, user-level utilities, and documentation.

Continuing the multi-platform tradition, NetBSD has added ports to atari and mvme68k based machines. Kernel interfaces have continued to be refined, and now several subsystems and device drivers are shared among the different ports. You can look for this trend to continue.

NetBSD 1.1 has significantly enhanced the binary emulation subsystem (which includes iBCS2, Linux, OSF/1, SunOS, SVR4, Solaris and Ultrix compatibility) and several kernel subsystems have been generalized to support this more readily. The binary emulation strategy is aimed at making the emulation as accurate as possible.

NetBSD 1.1 is also the first release to see machine-independent disk striping. The concatenated disk driver (ccd), which was previously supported only by the hp300 port, has been vastly improved. Many bugs were fixed, and explicit references to device-dependent routines removed and replaced by calls to the generic "vnode operation" routines. In addition, several features were added, including partition support, dynamic configuration and unconfiguration via a user space system utility program, and virtually unlimited number of component devices.

Many new user programs have been added in NetBSD 1.1, as well, bringing it closer to our goal of supplying a complete UN*X-like environment.

The Future of NetBSD

The NetBSD Foundation was recently incorporated as a non-profit organization. It's purpose is to encourage, foster and promote the free exchange of computer software, namely the NetBSD Operating System. The foundation will allow for many things to be handled more smoothly than could be done with our previous informal organization. In particular, it provides the framework to deal with other parties that wish to become involved in the NetBSD Project. (IN WHAT WAY? Money, donations, etc)

We believe that the NetBSD Foundation will help improve the quality of NetBSD by:

providing better organization to keep track of development efforts, including co-ordination with groups working in related fields.
providing a framework to receive donations of goods and services and to own the resources necessary to run the NetBSD Project.
providing a better position from which to undertake promotional activities.
periodically organizing workshops for developers and other interested people to discuss ongoing work.

We hope to have regular releases of the full binary and source trees, but these are difficult to coordinate, especially with all of the architectures which we now support! We hope to support even _more_ hardware in the future, and have a rather large number of other ideas about what can be done to improve NetBSD. We intend to continue our current practice of making the NetBSD-current development source available on a daily or nearly-daily basis.

We intend to integrate free, positive changes from whatever sources will provide them, providing that they are well thought-out and increase the usability of the system.

Above all, we hope to create a stable and accessible system, and to be responsive to the needs and desires of NetBSD users, because it is for and because of them that NetBSD exists.

(text above from the installation documentation)

comments and corrections?