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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect to NetBSD (it's a fantastic system), I think this accurately highlights the difference with OpenBSD. The latter project builds every release of every architecture on actual physical hardware; if the build breaks, it's treated as a symptom of a more serious issue.

OpenBSD dropped the VAX port a few years ago, because the builder machine physically died, and it was decided it was impractical to source a new one.

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We were also pretty surprised that the regressions (keyboard/mouse/SCSI were not working and there was an incorrect frame buffer address for some of the NeXT slab models) were introduced that long ago - NetBSD 5.2.3 was released on November 15, 2014.

It took us quite some time to figure out that most of the bugs we observed when running NetBSD in the previous emulator were not bugs in the emulator but also showed up on real hardware...

I'm pretty much the NetBSD people focus on building to as many system architectures as possible (slogan: "of course it runs NetBSD!). OpenBSD is focused on system security. It's understandable why they take different approaches in this respect.

> of course it runs NetBSD!

That's my entire point - if the build has been broken for 9 years, does it actually run?

> That's my entire point - if the build has been broken for 9 years, does it actually run?

It does now. :)

How many platforms do they each support?

Supported is a relative term.

Current OpenBSD Platforms [0]:

alpha

amd64

arm64

armv7

hppa

i386

landisk

loongson

luna88k

macppc

octeon

powerpc64

riscv64

+ ~20 retired platforms

OpenBSD 7.4 pre-built packages for each architecture:

    aarch64: 11508
    amd64: 11845
    arm: 7705
    i386: 10603
    mips64: 8995
    powerpc: 9683
    powerpc64: 8351
    riscv64: 10170
    sparc64: 8469

Current NetBSD Tier 1 Platforms [1]:

aarch64

amd64

evbarm

evbmips

evbppc

hpcarm

i386

sparc64

xen

[ "Currently there are 49 NetBSD ports with Tier II status" ]

Don't know about NetBSD/pkgsrc software packages for each arch

[0] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

[1] http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/

For my RockPro64, I ran both OpenBSD 7.3 (haven't tried 7.4 yet) and both NetBSD 9.3 and 10_beta, and I found the NetBSD install process for both versions easier. In the end, I'm now on NetBSD 10 RC1 (just upgraded) and I'm happy. All of the important things work on NetBSD for this Aarch64 device.

I thought NetBSD's purpose was to run on everything ?

From https://netbsd.org/about/

"The NetBSD Project's goals

A project has no point if it doesn't have goals. Thankfully, the NetBSD Project has enough goals to keep it busy for quite some time. Generally speaking, the NetBSD Project:

    provides a well designed, stable, and fast BSD system,
    avoids encumbering licenses,
    provides a portable system, which runs on many hardware platforms,
    interoperates well with other systems,
    conforms to open systems standards as much as is practical.

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