NetBSD Part 1
RAID Recovery - NetBSD
Introduction
NetBSD is an open-source version of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system. BSD is a derivative of UNIX operative system and is being developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley. NetBSD is freely distributed under a business friendly license. The software is best known for its portability and security features, and it is mostly used in embedded systems. Being an open-source software solution, NetBSD is being developed and supported by an open community. The current stable release of NetBSD is version 4.0.1, released in October 2008.
Important features
Stable Codebase
NetBSD codebase has been open to public scrutiny since the early 80s, so it has become one of the cleanest and most stable codebases available today. Because of this reason, NetBSD is used for building custom projects by several reputed organizations, including NASA. NASA used NetBSD in its SAMS-II project of measuring the microgravity environment on the International Space Station. Force10 Networks, which develops high-density Ethernet network infrastructure equipment, uses NetBSD as the underlying operating system for their high scalability switches/routers. Wasabi Systems, a provider of iSCSI SAN Products, offers a commercial Wasabi Certified BSD product based on NetBSD for embedded, server and storage applications.
Support for Multiple Platforms
The clean architecture of NetBSD enables it to support the latest hardware platforms available in Alpha, PowerPC, and PC systems, while still retaining support for older platforms. All this is done from a single source tree. This platform independence of NetBSD makes it the ideal platform to port to new machines and embedded platforms such as ARM, MIPS and Super-H based devices.
