NetBSD 11.0 RC1

netbsd.org

53 points·unleaded··7 comments

> New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machines boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs.

Exciting

great callout

This sounds pretty cool. I have a couple of old DELL 630s that were automotive diagnostic computers, due to them being the last model with a real hardware serial port. Now I am thinking of reviving them with Linux, but just to host old windows VMs (all the auto diag software is windows only). Maybe I should give netbsd a try here.

Why would that be? Do you expect this to make your Windows VMs start up faster?

It won't. This applies only to NetBSD guest VMs.

Fun fact: NetBSD supports VAX 70/380 system from 1978/79!

That's the oldest known architecture that can run modern Unix. 32 bit, MMU, multi cpu: ahead of it's time.

So if you travel back in time: that's a safe platform if you would like to do some system programming with modern knowledge.

The website is ideal on phones without JS: there is a small, CSS based hamburger button at the bottom. I've long suspected that this is the only structure that makes sense, but I don't think I've ever seen in it the wild before.

> New port to the RISC-V processor architecture. NetBSD 11.0 is the first stable release to include support for 64-bit RISC-V

This is very exciting!

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