NetBSD 11.0 released with first stable 64-bit RISC-V port

NetBSD 11.0 released

The NetBSD Project has released NetBSD 11.0, the nineteenth major release of its free, portable Unix-like operating system. The release announcement was published on the project's website on July 30, 2026, and a blog post by developer Martin Husemann followed on August 1. The project says this cycle was heavily delayed because it waited for third-party components to make stable releases before freezing the tree.

RISC-V support and standards compliance

The headline item is a new port to 64-bit RISC-V — the first stable NetBSD release to support the architecture. It covers StarFive JH71XX-based devices such as the VisionFive 2 and the PINE64 STAR64, as well as QEMU. The release also improves compliance with the POSIX.1-2024 and C23 interfaces and widens Linux system call emulation in compat_linux(8) with epoll (built around kqueue), POSIX message queues, statx, close_range, waitid, clone3, inotify and others.

A microVM kernel and new hardware

On x86, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel for i386 and amd64 that uses PVH boot and VirtIO MMIO; the project says it boots in roughly ten milliseconds on 2020-era x86 CPUs. Other additions include initial support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite platform, a virt68k port for running the Motorola 68000 port under QEMU, layer 2 and user/group filtering in the npf firewall, and a long list of Arm, x86 and vintage-hardware improvements — among them Nintendo Wii hardware acceleration and PaX MPROTECT plus ASLR enabled by default on macppc.

Release process and upgrades

Installation images are now split into sub-700 MB CD-ROM images and full-sized DVD images, and the project recommends the "-dvd.iso" variants unless CD size limits apply. NetBSD 11.0 shipped with several open security pullup requests, which the developers say will be committed to the stable branch shortly after the release and become part of NetBSD 11.1, currently targeted within two months. When upgrading from an earlier release, update the kernel and modules first, then userspace.