NetBSD/amd64

About NetBSD/amd64

NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors; it supports CPUs that implement the 64-bit x86 architecture. This covers all recent AMD and Intel models.

NetBSD/amd64 is a 64bit operating system. Running 32-bit NetBSD/i386 binaries is supported as well; see compat_netbsd32(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.

NetBSD/amd64 News

2017-10-12:   KASLR

An alternate bootloader capable of randomizing kernel memory locations at boot has been added. See a blog post for more information.

2016-07-27:   W^X kernel

With the last RWX page removed, the amd64 kernel now uses exclusively read-write or read-execute pages, a significant security improvement.

2013-11-11:   Extended precision

amd64 now defaults to 80-bit long double. Older binaries will continue to run without extended precision, and will compute the same results.