The NetBSD Project has announced NetBSD 11.0, the nineteenth major release of the highly portable Unix-like operating system.
One of the release’s headline changes is the introduction of the first stable NetBSD port for 64-bit RISC-V systems. The initial implementation supports QEMU virtual machines and StarFive JH7110-based devices, including the StarFive VisionFive 2 and PINE64 STAR64 boards.
The RISC-V port includes support for PCI and PCIe devices, VirtIO networking and storage, virtualized audio, hardware random-number generation, temperature sensors, and the NetBSD crash kernel debugging utility. Basic support is also available for the Allwinner D1 system-on-chip used in devices such as the MangoPi MQ Pro and Allwinner Nezha.
On the Arm support side, NetBSD 11.0 introduces initial support for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite platform and its Oryon CPU cores, together with drivers for battery and charger sensors, GPIO, and I2C controllers.
Other Arm-related changes include NUMA awareness for ACPI-based systems, support for the Arm SCMI performance protocol, a new Rockchip USB-C PHY driver, improved NanoPi R4S compatibility, and better Raspberry Pi 5 peripheral support when the board is booted through UEFI.
For virtualization workloads, the release features a dedicated MICROVM kernel for amd64 and i386 systems. Designed for fast virtual-machine startup, it uses PVH booting, VirtIO MMIO devices, and several kernel optimizations. According to the project, the kernel can boot in about 10 milliseconds on x86 processors from around 2020.
NetBSD 11.0 also adds support for non-Xen PVH booting, including QEMU’s -kernel option, along with VirtIO device discovery through kernel command-line parameters. A new viogpu driver provides support for virtual graphics devices exposed by QEMU, while the new pvscsi driver handles VMware paravirtualized SCSI controllers.
Another important area of development is NetBSD’s Linux compatibility layer. The release implements additional Linux system calls and interfaces, including epoll, clone3, statx, inotify, renameat2, close_range, waitid, syncfs, readahead, POSIX message queues, and sync_file_range.
NetBSD 11.0 also adds the Linux-compatible memfd_create system call and extends procfs with support for sysvipc and self/limits. These changes allow a wider range of software originally designed for Linux to run through NetBSD’s compatibility subsystem without modification.
Standards compliance has advanced with enhancements related to POSIX.1-2024 and the C23 programming language standard. The system’s lint utility can now check C23 code and detect more integer-overflow cases, while a new c17 wrapper provides the ISO C17 compiler command required by POSIX.1-2024.
At the kernel level, NetBSD 11.0 brings multiple performance improvements, including reduced lock contention for pipes, improved byte-swap performance on SPARC, PowerPC, and MIPS, faster ZFS file removal, and improved multi-CPU scalability in the DRM graphics subsystem.
VirtIO drivers are now marked multiprocessor safe, allowing operation without holding the kernel’s global lock. The initial TCP retransmission timeout has been reduced from three seconds to one second, as permitted by RFC 6298.
Moreover, the NetBSD Packet Filter firewall gains Layer 2 filtering and rules dependent on users and groups. The release also features a new kernel heartbeat mechanism to detect stalled kernel activity by allowing processors and interrupt levels to monitor each other’s progress.
Hardware support has been expanded with a large collection of new and updated drivers. Notable additions include Realtek RTL8126 5GbE networking, NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 virtual functions, ASIX AX88179A USB Ethernet adapters, USB Audio Class 2.0 devices, I2C HID keyboards, newer Android USB tethering through the Network Control Model, and additional fan, sensor, serial, storage, and industrial-device controllers.
The release also improves support for modern AMD processors, adding temperature monitoring for Siena, Turin Classic, Turin Dense, Strix Point, and Zen 5 CPUs. Intel Meteor Lake and Emerald Rapids processors are now recognized by cpuctl, while newer Intel TCO watchdog timers are supported.
The base system includes refreshed third-party components such as GCC 12.5, GDB 15.1, Binutils 2.42, OpenSSL 3.5.7, OpenSSH 10.3, Postfix 3.11.2, X.Org Server 21.1.24, tmux 3.6b, Unbound 1.25.1, BIND 9.20.24, and wpa_supplicant 2.11.
Users upgrading from an earlier release should note several compatibility changes. The 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility libraries have moved into separate base32, base64, debug32, and debug64 installation sets. HTML manual pages now reside in a dedicated manhtml set.
OpenSSH no longer supports DSA keys. Systems with custom SSH configurations that explicitly enable them may therefore require changes before the SSH daemon can start successfully. The aarch64 CPU-frequency control interface now uses MHz rather than abstract performance units, and the hdaudio driver has changed the ordering and names of mixer controls.
For additional details, see the announcement or refer to the release notes.
NetBSD 11.0 installation images and source code are available for download from the project’s CDN for the numerous processor architectures and system families supported by the operating system.
