The NetBSD Project has released NetBSD 10.2, the second point release in the NetBSD 10 stable branch, bringing security fixes, hardware support improvements, and updates across the base system.
Keep in mind that NetBSD 10.x is no longer the project’s newest major series, as NetBSD 11.0 arrived earlier this year. However, the 10.x branch remains supported, with 10.2 serving as its latest maintenance update.
On the hardware side, NetBSD 10.2 adds support for Realtek RTL8126 5Gbps Ethernet adapters, along with the RTL8125D revision 0x6890000. The rge driver also gains IPv4, TCP, and UDP checksum offloading.
Support has also been added for ASIX AX88179A USB Ethernet adapters and the Asus USB-N10 Nano B1 Wi-Fi adapter, while Intel igc networking now supports TCP Segmentation Offload. The iwm wireless driver receives stability improvements, and WireGuard gets several reliability fixes and enhancements.
Virtualization adds VMware PV SCSI controller support on amd64 and aarch64 systems, targeting hardware exposed by VMware ESXi. Plus, the amd64 port can now boot PVH-style non-Xen guests using QEMU’s -kernel option.
ARM systems receive several fixes, including restoration of HDMI output on 64-bit Allwinner SoCs via the DRM/KMS atomic interface. Ethernet support for the Olimex A64 has been fixed, and additional support added for several Amlogic and i.MX6-based devices.
Interestingly, NetBSD’s Nintendo Wii port also gets some attention, gaining WLAN support, DVD drive support, USB Gecko serial console functionality, hardware AES acceleration, and accelerated RGB-to-YUY2 conversion.
On the security side, the kernel fixes a remotely triggerable null pointer dereference in IPFilter and a four-byte kernel stack information leak through TCP timestamps. NetBSD’s NFS and Telnet implementations also receive multiple security fixes.
Several bundled third-party components have been refreshed. OpenSSL has been updated to version 3.0.21 and Xorg to 21.1.24, with both updates addressing security issues. NetBSD 10.2 also ships with tmux 3.6a, xkbcomp 1.5, and tzdata 2026b.
Additionally, libXpm includes upstream fixes for CVE-2026-4367, while Unbound receives a patch addressing CVE-2025-11411.
Moreover, the release improves SD/MMC performance, fixes syslogd reliability problems, improves FTP buffer handling, and allows fsck_ffs to check file systems with more than 2^32 blocks. The build system gains better compatibility with newer GCC releases and several reproducible-build fixes.
Existing NetBSD 10 installations can be upgraded by booting a NetBSD 10.2 installation image and choosing the Upgrade option. Users using other upgrade methods should update the kernel and modules first, reboot, then update userspace and third-party packages.
Finally, the project also notes that NetBSD 10.2 introduces a new gpufw set containing GPU firmware, which may need to be installed separately when upgrading an existing system.
For additional details, see the announcement.
NetBSD 10.2 is available now for amd64, i386, sparc64, macppc, ARM, MIPS, and numerous other architectures from the project’s official download infrastructure.
