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Comment by jrcii | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but for anyone unaware, NetBSD is a wonderful operating system (it happens to be my favorite). Rock-solid reliability, very organized file system, great package manager (pkgsrc), and compatible with virtually every platform imaginable, you can see the full list here: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/#ports-tier1

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NetBSD: The OS that can even run on a "toaster". :)

https://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php

I recently started testing NetBSD in a virtual machine on my PC. I really like it, although there are some things that annoy me with it.

I would like to use it as my primary OS but it won't boot on my hardware. I've considered installing and running it inside of a hypervisor but I don't know if that is wise.

Its fine in a hypervisor. It has excellent Xen support, but you can use others too; it has all the virtio drivers for KVM for example now.

What is the issue with your hardware?

I am not at home, but as I recall, the kernel freezes during boot for both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. The 32 bit version of OpenBSD also freezes during kernel boot but the 64 bit version does not. I know it is not an EFI issue as legacy booting is turned on.

Odd that it won't boot. What hardware are you running and which kernels have you tried? Any way for you to capture a trace?

This probably isn't the best forum to give you a hand. Can you hit one of the IRC channels or mailing lists?

It's an older Dell Dimension, one of the very last Core 2 Duos CPUs. I am not too worried about it at this point, as I am going to replace early next month. Hopefully, my next computer will fair better.

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