NetBSD Formal Releases

The latest formal release is NetBSD 9.2.

Formal releases of NetBSD are intended to provide a stable, supported platform on which people can base their work. They provide a balance between features and stability.

Because they are well-tested and made relatively infrequently, formal releases are useful for people who don't want to be on the “bleeding edge” of development, or who just want to run applications. Since formal releases are effectively unchanging (there are typically very few official patches made to them), they are relatively easy to support, both by NetBSD's developers and the developers of applications. The biggest problem with running the latest formal release of NetBSD is that you don't have access to the latest features and bug fixes in the development tree.

If you're not the type of person who'd be willing to upgrade your operating system on a semi-daily basis, or if you want a system that is relatively easy to install and upgrade, a formal release of NetBSD is for you.

For those who do not wish to wait for the next release, we have daily updated snapshots of the release branches available via FTP.

The directories /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8 and /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9 contain the extracted sources plus weekly updated tar files of the 8 and 9 release branches respectively. These files are created in a similar manner to those in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current directory.

You can also use binaries of the stable branches created regularily (depending on age of the branch and available build time from about daily to once a week). Follow the link to latest daily netbsd-8 build or latest daily netbsd-9 build for the respectives branches latest stable binaries. Or if you want to try -current, check the latest daily HEAD build.

The NetBSD-8 and NetBSD-9 branches are currently being maintained.

The NetBSD-7 and older branches have reached End-Of-Life and are no longer supported.

A NetBSD major release, including all minor releases of the major release, generally becomes unspported one month after the release date of the second succeeding major release. Should the time between major releases become significantly shorter than they currently are, we will revisit our support policy and modify it as needed.

The latest release is NetBSD 9.2.