So, after finally going into a NetBSD irc channel with the express purpose of removing all compiler warnings from dhcpcd and making it add routes correctly on that platform, I got convinced into giving NetBSD a spin.
So I wanged it on my amd64 and as promised, the default cd worked fine with my trusty RT2500 pci wireless card, and the installed default kernel did too. This was an improvement from NetBSD 3.x which I tried a long while ago as the installed kernel didn’t work with my wireless much is a must have for me these days. To be fair, I started off on the bad foot with NetBSD back then as it was my first BSD experience and it wasn’t good.
Thankfully, my experience with FreeBSD means I now know a lot more, so with NetBSD-4.0 I was very quickly up and running. After getting the network fully working, I pull down the OpenRC repo and tried a compile. Surprise, surprise, loads of warnings and errors.
Now, the gcc that NetBSD ships with has a lot of warnings you just don’t see with the one in Gentoo, or FreeBSD. Luckily, most of the warnings were trivial to fix - and should help matters on archs where the default char is unsigned. The errors were purely on the getmntinfo function and structure being different in NetBSD. Then there is the matter of the init scripts - whilst most work, some won’t or need a slight tweak. The important thing is though that OpenRC now boots NetBSD!
I’m also working on making the misc init scripts work by default through a make install on your arch as well, so moving an existing BSD rc.d system to OpenRC shouldn’t be hard at all. But is NetBSD any better or worse than FreeBSD? Too early to say really…