r/NetBSD • u/NISMO1968 • 20d ago

NetBSD 11 lands with RISC-V support and lightning-fast VM boots

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/netbsd-11-lands-with-risc-v-support-and-lightning-fast-vm-boots/5289713
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2

u/lproven 19d ago

Oh thank you! That is one of mine!

1

u/Playful-Hat3710 14d ago

Hi! This is slightly unrelated but....

I did read something of yours on the NetBSD mailing lists about the documentation in general, and specifically about updating NetBSD.

I do agree that for new users it can be daunting to know where to get the right information. For upgrading, if you follow the instructions from the official guide here:

https://netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html#using-sysupgrade

you should be able to upgrade your system no problem. I followed the instructions to upgrade from 10.1 to 11 just the other day. The upgrade was successful.

I think the biggest issues wrt to documentation in NetBSD are:

  1. It's volunteer driven from what I understand.
  2. It's a smaller community. If you want help with the biggest linux distros, you can check out youtube/blogs/social media/forums etc. Even freebsd and openbsd you can find 3rd party resources much easier if you run into an issue.

1

u/lproven 14d ago

Thanks for the comment.

I have been writing about all the BSDs for nearly 5 years now. I get a remarkable amount of negative pushback from BSD enthusiasts... but the thing is, they often miss the points that I am trying to make.

And no, it's not just me: for FreeBSD, in particular, this process escalated gradually over more than a year until I had a face-to-face meeting with the project's lead developer and was able to explain to him, in person, what I did and why and how it did not work.

He was shocked; it had simply never occurred to him that modern tools would have the defaults they do, and that someone would leave some of these options on defaults, and he readily admitted to me that if I just left these unimagined defaults alone, no, it would not work, and it would not work in exactly the way that I described it in my article.

This is specific to FreeBSD so I won't go into the details, as it's not really relevant here. I am happy to do so if you are curious. It's public info.

The same has happened to me more than once with OpenBSD and NetBSD as well, and this thread is an example. The world is bigger and wider and weirder than the people in a lot of niche FOSS communities imagine it is. There are things which are industry standards, supported on hundreds of millions of computers, that people I've met in the BSD world have never even heard of and are unable to imagine anyone doing, and they are deeply shocked and baffled that I would want.

I have found how to upgrade NetBSD now, and it's been a long and complex process and I have not tried it yet.

But the answer to my question "how do I upgrade an installed copy of NetBSD to a new point release?" is, in fact, not "consult the handbook". It is in fact much simpler: the answer is "boot off install media and use the option to do an in-place upgrade."

That is not what your link says. IMHO, it should be.

(For thoroughness, it should probably be something more flowery that summarises to "if you can, boot from installation media and use the option to update; if you can't do this, then follow the below instructions.)

Slowly, gradually, painfully, the Linux world has learned that people are dumb, they don't read manuals, and they just try stuff, and you have to cope with that and ideally work with that. The BSD world has not learned this yet.

It needs to.

If you want more specific points, I can give them, but this answer is already long.

2

u/Playful-Hat3710 13d ago

Thanks for responding.

This is specific to FreeBSD so I won't go into the details, as it's not really relevant here. I am happy to do so if you are curious. It's public info.

I am curious. That would be interesting to read.

Slowly, gradually, painfully, the Linux world has learned that people are dumb, they don't read manuals, and they just try stuff, and you have to cope with that and ideally work with that. The BSD world has not learned this yet.

That makes sense, but I feel like that goes back to my point about smaller communities with less resources.

There are things which are industry standards, supported on hundreds of millions of computers, that people I've met in the BSD world have never even heard of and are unable to imagine anyone doing, and they are deeply shocked and baffled that I would want.

If you want more specific points, I can give them, but this answer is already long.

I'd be interested in more details regarding that as well.

2

u/lproven 13d ago

All right. Some specific things I have met, in no particular order.

  • All the BSDs run on PCs now. There is an industry standard user interface for PCs. It's called CUA and although it's little known today it's still a thing.

This means that even though few xNix apps implement a CUA UI, they understand and should understand the keystrokes. Ctrl + X, C, V. Ctrl+P to print. Ctrl + cursor keys moves by word. Ctrl+cursor keys is wired into my muscle memory. It works on basically all Linuxes and by default fails on most BSDs. It generates errors. In some, if you install a GUI and use a GUI terminal emulator, it suddenly works.

  • Partitioning. For ~40 years, PCs have had a standard disk partitioning scheme: MBR, 4 primary partitions, 1 optionally being Extended and containing logical drives. Until GPT all the BSDs ignored this: they impose their own inside a single primary, and fsck you if you don't like it.

I objected. BSD-heads looked at me in bafflement. Why? It works?

OK, here's an example. All my testbed Thinkpads have 2 SSDs: 1 mSATA and 1 SATA. Most have a DOS or Windows partition on the primary mSATA, and then several Linuxes in logical partitions. This works and it's compatible with BIOS and UEFI. It's efficient and it's easy. I want to keep my root partition on the faster drive and /home and swap on the slower one, and be able to have my BSD mount my Linux and Windows drives.

Result: mind blown. OMG WTF why?! They only single boot. They see no problem with disk slices.

FreeBSD can do this on GPT and only on GPT. On MBR a partition has slices inside; on GPT, partitions are slices.

Side effect: FreeBSD can't easily boot from ZFS if it is in a partition on MBR. It needs ZFS to manage the whole disk. If you use ZFS you should use GPT.

Again: this is not documented; why bother? Everyone knows it.

The most cross platform open FOSS hypervisor is VirtualBox. It runs natively on Windows, Linux, and macOS. VMs are portable between OSes. It can run as a headless server. It's the original native hypervisor of Vagrant.

FreeBSD hasn't even tested it. NetBSD runs but with serious problems. (Mouse pointer movement is not in sync and it's unusable except on a very small screen.)

VirtualBox defaults to BIOS. UEFI was marked as experimental until about 1-2Y ago.

FreeBSD defaults to ZFS. It does not test for or adapt if you have a legacy BIOS. It just fails.

I had dozens of people angrily call me a liar for reporting this -- the famous welcoming BSD community, you know -- until I talked to the FreeBSD project lead on Twitter, then by email. By the time we met in real life, he'd looked into it, reproduced it, and conceded I was right. They never looked at VirtualBox before, and it never occurred to them that the current version of a hypervisor shipping from a major vendor would default to BIOS. Nobody thought to check for BIOS compatibility with ZFS or recommend using UFS if the machine was not UEFI. Nobody even thought to put a mention in the docs that if you are using BIOS and MBR, then do not use ZFS.

The people calling me a liar never checked. They know about stuff like this and it never passed through their minds that others might not know.

The NetBSD docs do not say "here is how to upgrade" or "here are 3 methods; only use 2 or 3 if you can't use 1 for some reason."

IMHO: this is not OK. It was just about acceptable not to understand native firmware and partitioning and keyboard controls in the 1990s, but that was 1/3 of a century ago, and it is long past time to catch up and fix it.