NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like open-source operating system. It is available for various platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.
Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license.
This operating system is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc – the Packages Collection.
NetBSD ships with an in-kernel packet filtering engine, allowing traffic filtering based on interface, protocol, port, tos, TTL, source, destination, and many other factors. Keeping this inside the kernel permits higher performance.
The NetBSD Project’s goals
A project has no point if it doesn’t have goals. Thankfully, this Project has enough goals to keep it busy for quite some time. Generally speaking:
- 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.
In summary: This Project provides a freely available and redistributable system that professionals, hobbyists, and researchers can use in whatever manner they wish.
NetBSD is designed to take advantage of the latest high-end hardware available in Alpha, PowerPC, and PC systems, while still retaining support for older architectures. This is all done from the same source tree and is only possible due to the emphasis on correct design and clean code. It also makes NetBSD an ideal codebase to port to new machines and embedded platforms, such as MIPS, ARM, and Super-H based handheld Windows CE devices.
Main features
Several security features are available in this Operating System, including IPsec – for IPv4 and IPv6. Also, there is: a file integrity system (Veriexec), a kernel thorization framework (kauth), exploit mitigation features (PaX), disk encryption (CGD), and a variety of other internal kernel bug detection features such as KMEM_REDZONE and KMEM_SIZE.
Other classic secure network services are available, such as SSH (OpenSSH) and Kerberos 5 (Heimdal). All services default to their most secure settings, and no services are enabled by default for new installations.
NetBSD was the first free OS to provide a leading edge standards conforming IPv6 implementation. And it continues to work with the KAME project to track changes to the specification. It was also the first free operating system to ship with NFS via IPv6, for both client and server parts.
NetBSD provides complete in-kernel NFS client and server support, interoperable with other systems, for both NFS2 and NFS3 protocols. This includes support for swapping over NFS and no arbitrary limits on the size of swap partitions. Client side file creation is correctly implemented as an atomic operation – on systems without this dot locking is not reliable.
NetBSD contains a variety of other free software and supports the following network types: ARCnet, ATM, Ethernet, FDDI, HIPPI, PPP – pppd(8), SLIP – slip(8), and Token Ring.
Also supports the following network protocols: Appletalk – atalk(4), ISO – iso(4), TCP/IP (IPv4) – ip(4), TCP/IP (IPv6) – ip6(4).
Supports many platforms, including the popular i386 and amd64, ARM, SPARC, Alpha, Amiga, Atari, and m68k and PowerPC based Apple Macintosh machines. Technical details for all of them can be found on the official site.
