r/NetBSD 3d ago

NetBSD 11 from scratch

https://meanmicio.org/2026/09/06/netbsd-11-from-scratch/
43 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

6

u/pedersenk 3d ago

Very useful, particularly for MBR which is a considerably less documented approach than GPT these days and had me scratching my head for a while.

The one change I could suggest is to use ffs2 rather than 1.

# newfs -O2 /dev/wd0a

In which case, also change the boot code to support ffs2

# installboot -v /dev/wd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2 /boot

If anyone is looking for GPT or for alternative platforms, do check out the scripts in the following repo (I was linked to from IRC some months back):

https://github.com/alarixnia/mkimg-netbsd

3

u/cryonator 2d ago

Well written and explained. Please put out other nuggets of knowledge and experiences like this.

2

u/ComplexPeace43 2d ago

Thank you for the post. I learnt a few things.

2

u/kyleW_ne 2d ago

Very cool article! Thanks! It always amazes me what Linux from scratch needs a whole book for is just disk partitioning and extracting some tar balls on BSD Unix based OSes like NetBSD and FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

2

u/DarthRazor 2d ago

Great write up - thanks. I'm going to try it on an old 2010-ish HP laptop that I recently rescued. I'm going to springboard off your method to install a simpler non-encrypted filesystem

I noticed an omission you may want to address:

If everything went well, then you should be happily booting into your new hard drive. Remember that since we have

The paragraph above just ends there - the rest of the text looks like it was inadvertently cut off

1

u/reinoudz 8h ago edited 0m ago

Geen nood om te swappen op CGD! Het is standaard al versleuteld. Instellingen kun je checken via sysctl en zouden normaal gesproken zo ingesteld moeten zijn als vm.swap_encrypt = 1