NetBSD 7.1 to be supported on over 50 architectures

Jan 11, 2017 01:58 GMT  ·  By

"Of course it runs NetBSD." This is the motto that welcomes users when visiting the official website of the NetBSD project, an open-source Unix-like operating system based on the latest BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) technologies and designed to be secure, fast, highly portable, and free.

NetBSD is on the market since April 1993, so after 24 years it is safe to say that it's one of the most reliable operating systems ever made for large-scale server systems, but it can be successfully used on desktops, as well as on embedded and handheld devices. The current stable version of the OS is NetBSD 7.0.2, released last year in October.

It's been quiet since then, but it looks like the development team was working hard on the next major release, namely NetBSD 7.1, which recently released its first Release Candidate unstable build, as announced by Soren Jacobsen on January 9, 2017, inviting users to help them with testing.

Therefore, we're invited to download NetBSD 7.1 RC1 for your favorite hardware architecture right now from the official channels, or, if you prefer building the operating system from source, don't hesitate to use the "netbsd-7-1-RC1" tag or follow the netbsd-7 branch. A full list of changes since NetBSD 7.0 is available here.

NetBSD 7.1 will be supported on over 50 architectures, including ARM, AMD64, x86, Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, 68k, SH3, RISC-V, and VAX. Before installing the Release Candidate, don't forget to check out the known issues because, after all, this is still a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments.