NetBSD/amd64

About NetBSD/amd64

NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors and supports all other CPUs that implement the 64bit AMD64 architecture. These currently include AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64, and Intel CPUs with the EM64T extension.

NetBSD/amd64 is a true 64bit operating system. Running 32bit NetBSD/i386 binaries is supported as well, see compat_netbsd32(8). Running 32bit Linux emulations will be available in the future, the setup will be similar to the one described in compat_svr4_32(8).

The port was first committed to the NetBSD source tree as NetBSD/x86_64 on June 19th, 2001 and renamed to NetBSD/amd64 on April 26th, 2003.

The original work to do this port was done by Frank van der Linden at Wasabi Systems, assisted by AMD, who provided the simulator (Simics VirtuHammer), pre-release hardware and access to a range of Opteron hardware through the AMD Developer Center.

The port is fully functional. It has been tested on single-CPU and multiprocessor (SMP) Opteron configurations. Since the release of NetBSD 2.0, it is a completely supported platform.

Frank van der Linden is the maintainer of NetBSD/amd64.

NetBSD/amd64 News

2005-12-23:   NetBSD 3.0 released

NetBSD 3.0 has been released with support for 57 architectures. More information is available in the 3.0 release announcement.

2005-11-02:   NetBSD 2.1 released

NetBSD 2.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.1 release announcement.

2005-04-09:   Binary packages for pkgsrc-2005Q1 available

Jan Schaumann has uploaded binary packages for NetBSD-2.0/amd64 from the pkgsrc-2005Q1 branch into ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc-2005Q1/NetBSD-2.0/amd64/.

2004-12-09:   NetBSD 2.0 released

NetBSD 2.0 released with support for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.0 release announcement.

2003-05-10:   amd64 completely crossbuildable

Frank van der Linden announced that the NetBSD/amd64 Port is now completely crossbuildable. Please see his message to the port-amd64 Mailing List for details.

2003-05-10:   New -current snapshot available

The most recent snapshot, based on 2003-05-10 sources is now available as a bootable ISO install image, located at the NetBSD/amd64 snapshot area of the ftp server. This snapshot has some important improvements in it. For details, look at the README file.

2003-04-28:   New -current snapshot available

A new -current snapshot based on 2003-04-28 sources is now available as a bootable ISO install image, located at the NetBSD/amd64 snapshot area of the ftp server.

2003-04-26:   Mailing list renamed

The mailing list, port-x86_64, has been renamed to port-amd64. Users who were subscribed to the old list do not need to resubscribe.